June-October 1990

What Does It Mean to Adopt A People?
The concept of "adopting" unreached peoples was born within North American evangelical circles in the early 1980s, gaining increasing popularity throughout the worldwide evangelical community as the decade progressed. The basic idea: get a church or other fellowship group, working in partnership with a mission agency, to "adopt" one or more unreached peoples for long-term prayer, financial support, and/or personnel recruitment.

It has been envisioned that in this way mission agencies and churches can whittle away at the estimated 12,000 unreached peoples until eventually all are the beneficiaries of pioneer church-planting efforts. In many circles, the hope is that, as a result, a viable, indigenous, evangelizing church community--a "beachhead"--will emerge among each unreached people by AD 2000.

The Adopt-A-People movement has become a game of three-dimensional chess, and it will be fascinating to see the extent to which, for example, American churches are willing to adopt North African peoples in partnership with Argentine mission agencies, or how it will work for Korean churches to adopt peoples in Nigeria via Filipino agencies. Or who will rally behind the Bolivian missionaries with a burden for Mongolians? What an exciting day to be alive!

For the latest list of Adopt-A-People sending agencies click here.

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