Sunday, May 20 is recognized as the International Day for the Unreached. There will be a live 90 minute broadcast related to the day at 8:00PM Eastern Standard Time. You can find out about the speakers HERE. If you are unable to attend in person, you may tune in HERE. Jon Hirst will be tweeting during the event if you would rather follow him.
We still live in a world of 5 billion people who have no relationship with Jesus, including 2 billion who have never heard the gospel. Of the nearly 12,000 people groups on earth, 7,000 are less than 2% evangelical (i.e., unreached people groups). Even more troubling is the fact that approximately 3,200 of these groups (i.e., unengaged-unreached people groups) have no believers working among them with a church planting strategy.
While the above numbers are fairly common knowledge in evangelical circles, fewer people are aware of the estimated numbers of unreached and unengaged-unreached people groups living in the United States and Canada. Following India and China, the United States is home to the third largest number of unreached people groups in the world (282 as of October 2017) and Canada comes in sixth place (167 as of October 2017). Again, even more troubling is there are an estimated 207 unengaged-unreached people groups in the United States and 141 in Canada.
The International Day for the Unreached is this Sunday, but what difference will it make come Monday? This is a question you have to answer. This is a question I have to answer.
The Apostle Paul wrote,
I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, “Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand” (Rom 15:20-21, ESV).
If you want to follow in the apostolic work and labor where a foundation does not exist, you do not have to look very hard to find such an opportunity.