An explanation of the charts in this issue
ALTHOUGH THE WORLD IS LARGE AND COMPLEX there exist helpful methods of quantifying progress toward closure of the essential mission task. Modern researchers are now able to collect, manage and summarize vast amounts of data with the use of computers. We owe a great deal to those who have attempted to trace the hand of God as He continues His pursuit of all peoples.1 All of our global charts and graphs to date have been dependent on the research of others as well as our own estimates where additional estimates have been needed. However, no database can ever do more than approximate the dynamic reality of the world.
When looking at the charts in this article(Finishing the Task), you need to understand how we are using the predominant religion within a group as a cultural feature to tag the group as a whole. This does not mean that every person in the group is a member of that religion. Thus you can have a Muslim group that is “reached” if there is a church movement within it even though the group is still predominantly Muslim.
Looking at “The Globe at a Glance”, you can readily see that the bulk of the individuals who live within unreached groups (brown) are within the Muslim, Tribal, Hindu, and Buddhist blocs. We need to continue to send well-trained and insightful missionaries to these challenging peoples. There have been some very encouraging people movements within a limited number of Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim groups. These three blocs are often seen as the most resistant, but we are learning that when a people seems “resistant” it may only mean our approach has been defective. Half of those living within unreached peoples are in the Muslim bloc, which is a bloc that has very favorable attitudes toward Jesus Christ.
Only an estimated 10,000 of the global foreign mission force2 are working within the 10,000 unreached groups, while 41 times that number of foreign missionaries continue to work within people groups already reached.
Patrick Johnstone analyzed the data in Operation World ’93 to approximate distribution of the Protestant Mission Force.3 While his is a more positive picture than we have ever seen before, it still shows a great imbalance in that only 26 percent of the “Protestant” mission effort is going to the two-thirds of the world that is predominantly non-Christian. It will take the best efforts of the best the Church has to offer if we are to complete the task of frontier mission any time soon.
After nearly 2000 years, 10,000 unimax peoples encompassing 2 billion people still live beyond the reach of any local church.
1. In the past, we have relied on a variety of expert sources for our figures and estimates for our “Globe at a Glance” chart. We are now using information supplied by Todd M. Johnson of the World Evangelization Research Center. Todd is familiar with the unimax principle and is a caretaker of the data underlying the World Christian Encyclopedia (David B. Barrett, ed.) His table reflects Todd’s interpretation of missiologically significant groups within larger ethnolinguistic peoples and gives estimates of the numbers based upon analyzing statistical clues and making adjustments where necessary. No attempt has been made to adjust the estimates to make them more in line with previous estimates. If you were to compare with previous charts, you would notice that some of the numbers for unimax groups within a bloc have gone up instead of down. In fact, the overall number of estimated unimax groups has increased back to our earlier published estimate of 10,000 from several years ago. This can be attributed to a change in sources and methodology.
Other changes from previous versions of this chart: 1) the Jews and non-Religious/Atheist categories have been added; 2) because of the inclusion of the Non-Religious/Atheist category, the Chinese bloc was split between the between that category and the Chinese Folk bloc.
2. The global foreign mission force includes all kinds of Christians (Protestants, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, etc).
3. The graphs for the Protestant Mission Force were generated from data derived from Appendix 3, Protestant Missionary Force, found in the 1993 edition of Operation World. The country figures were analyzed based on Patrick Johnstone’s extensive knowledge of mission work around the world. The separation of the cross-cultural work force into the different religious blocs was a preliminary analysis done specifically for the Perspectives Reader. Missionaries in church development ministries within non-Christian peoples are not included in the pioneer categories. Our thanks to Patrick Johnstone and his assistant Jason Mandryk for their willing hearts and expedient labor.
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