March 01, 1998 by Steve Hawthorne

As we approach the dawn of a new millennium in world evangelization, we need a clear understanding of what God has asked us to do. The following article first appeared in World Christian Magazine in 1983, the March-April issue, and remains a classic expression of the basic concepts of fulfilling the Great Commission. We present a revised version to lay solid ground for advancing the Gospel toward completion in the next millennium. --EditorWhy do you spread Communism?” I once asked a Communist. She answered, “To see this country and the world transformed to a new order. To push history to its destiny.” Without agreeing with her aim or ideology, I felt the mainspring of her motivation: a guiding vision of ultimate purpose.

“Why do you evangelize?” I asked a Christian friend. He answered as many others had, “People need the Gospel. Be?sides, Christ commands us to witness.” I had to agree with my friend. To meet non-Christian need and to obey Christ’s command are both worthy, Biblical motives to spread the Gospel.

But I pondered the different answers of Communist and Christian, and it bothered me that I have heard so few Christians explain their motive for evangelism and missions according to the purpose of it all: that God would be glorified in every people by a movement of obedience and worship to Christ.

Perhaps God’s love for the lost is enough to stimulate us toward acts of outreach. But God has given us a greater mandate than merely responding to the need of the lost, or pressing on in blind duty. God has granted us the significant hope that world evangelization can and must be completed. Of course, our love can and should be linked with God’s love as we respond to the plight of the lost. But emotions can cool. People may not always seem so worthy of our compassions. We will never finish evangelizing the world by vague sentiments about lost people.

What will sustain our efforts to labor together for the Gospel? The hope of the Gospel. God has granted us clear revelation that He will bring about a following for His Son in every people. Nothing could be more certain. The great fact of God’s promise about what He will fulfill becomes the solid foundation for us to know what we are to finish. We can pursue the completion of world evangelization with a wise, patient passion. The Son of God is worth it. The Father Himself wills it.

I am reminded of the digging of the Panama Canal. Over a period of decades, several major attempts failed to finish the job. Finally, one effort carved through the isthmus. The workers dug away from both sides. They kept sight on the goal even when they could not see either ocean. And much work was done which didn’t exactly seem like digging a canal. Railroads were built. Rivers were dammed. Swamps were drained by digging over 1,700 miles of drainage ditches. Even so, the thousands of workers kept sight of the vision of an international passageway.

How sad the worker who shoveled away without seeing the big picture. How foolish the Yankee laborer who may have been tempted to settle in an improved Panama with railroads and drained swamps and forget about the canal he had been sent to build. This sort of short-sightedness was, in part, why previous efforts failed.

And how sad the Christian who lovingly spreads good news, but without a conviction that God’s global purposes are actually being accomplished.

And how foolish the Christian who makes himself comfortable in the midst of the greatest emergency rescue operation ever conceived! This sort of limited vision obedience is, in part, why world evangelization has not yet been completed.

What Has Our Lord Given Us to Accomplish? Matthew 28:19 commands Christians to an activity: making disciples. But with the all important phrase, “of all nations,” it really becomes a goal to guide all evangelistic work: to disciple the nations. Furthermore, it is a very feasible goal. It can be achieved.

Jesus expects it to be finished. From the vantage point of the end of time, Jesus singles out one thing which must happen: establish a Gospel witness in every nation (Matt. 24:14). From the vantage point of the Old Testament prophets, Jesus states that the proclamation of that Gospel in every nation is as much a fact of destiny as His own death and resurrection (Luke 24:45-47).

We are not finished until all nations are reached in such a way that God is praised because Christ is openly followed. The strong implication is that Jesus won’t close the age until this is done! “I am with you (in the accomplishment of this mission I am giving you) all the days until the end of the age.”

The key word in these passages is the word translated “nation.” We immediately think “country” when we see the word “nation.” But the Greek word is ethne from which we get our word “ethnic.” Although the term sometimes was used to refer to all non-Jews or to all non-Christians, when it is used with the Greek word meaning “all” or “every”, it should be given its most common meaning: an ethnic or cultural people group.

However, we tend to see nation states or countries. If Scriptural language is any indicator, God sees the world of people as coherent peoples—as nations, families, tribes, and languages. People groups are apparently God’s idea. He formed the first nations (Genesis 10) from the linguistic diversity he caused at Babel (Genesis 11). Apparently even this dividing of humankind was not without redemptive intent. Soon afterward, He promised Abraham that all these same families and nations would be blessed by Abraham’s descendants (Genesis 12).

Paul taught that God has directed the times and places of these people groups in such a way that they would seek and find Him (Acts 17:26-27). Psalmist and prophet alike continually referred to the world of humankind as “all nations which you have made.” God’s purpose is clear throughout the Old Testament: “All the nations you have made will come and worship before you ... and glorify your name” (Psalm 87:9). His kingdom reign is to extend over “all peoples, nations, and men of every language” (Daniel 7:14). It is not insignificant that while John could not number the great throng in heaven (Rev. 7:9), he could discern that there were indeed some from every nation, tribe, people and language.

People groups are God’s idea. We suffer from “monocultural myopia” (a disease of the eyes which affects the heart). The North American “melting pot” myth causes us to miss the marvelous diversity of humankind. There are many different ways that people band together in people groups. Common language is obvious; and of course common ethnic background glues people together. But cultural, social, economic, geographic, religious, and political factors all combine to give different groups a distinct corporate identity. From the viewpoint of evangelization, a “people group” is the largest possible group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.

What Is God’s Plan for Reaching The Entire World? God didn’t give the church such a huge job without any plan to accomplish it. The day of Pentecost highlighted to the church God’s concern that every people hear the good news in a way that they could understand. The rest of the book of Acts records how God made clear to His people that no one be barred from the church because of cultural non-essentials.

It was thought by some of the early Christians that God wanted all the Gentiles who were to be saved to join all the cultural and religious traditions of the people of Israel. This would mean that Gentiles would, in effect, leave their own people in order to become part of God’s special nation. But God made it clear during the events of the book of Acts that although Gentiles were to enjoy spiritual unity with Israel, a Gentile did not need to become a cultural Jew, leaving his family, culture, roots and name in order to become a disciple of Christ. Men and women were all to be saved and accepted in the church on the basis of faith alone. No works of the law (“law” meaning religious, cultural traditions) were required for salvation, nor were they required to be a gathering of believers to be a bonafide church (Acts 15). What does this reveal of God’s plan for reaching the entire world?

Our work is to minimize two barriers impeding the advance of the Gospel: First, the communication barrier, which separates people from an understanding of the truth of the Gospel; and second, the conversion barrier, which hinders groups of people from following Christ in ways that will truly express the redeemed value of the culture, and therefore bring about a wide acceptance of the Gospel. These two barriers are embedded in the very definition of a people group as something in which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.

We are to work to bring about an understanding of the Gospel amidst every people in their own language. The task of communication seems straightforward: tell the good news. At the very least this means conveying the message in local dialect. We must not be content to operate in a commonly recognized trade language if a local dialect will make the Gospel more inteligible. No mother tongue should be left untranslated if by learning it missionaries can bring about a “heart-hearing” of the Gospel.

We are coming to see that the larger endeavor is the second aspect, to see that people can follow Jesus in a way that is in accord with their cultural heritage. Never should mission efforts offer a “cheap grace” rendition of following Christ. True repentance is always costly, requiring a renunciation of false worship and evil practices. But on the other hand, no people should reject the Messiah because of a false impression that He is calling them to commit cultural suicide by abandoning and divorcing themselves from their own people.

Not only must the people of earth understand the message, they must be enabled to join God’s people in ways that honor Him. It does no good to travel oceans and learn foreign languages—and even bridge that final 18 inches between head and heart—if still that would-be disciple suffers the false impression that to be a Christian is to make some unnecessary radical cultural change.

The vegetarian Hindu must not fear becoming Christian because Christians supposedly must eat meat and drink blood. The Chinese may fear that conversion means complete repudiation of their ancestral past. The nomad ought not believe that all Christians must live in cities and speak English. Such misimpressions may seem trivial, but to men and women in unreached people groups, they present very real barriers of the magnitude of something like a sex change would be in America. Christ did not die for Muslims to eat pork or for aborigines to wear shoes.

It is not enough for someone to hear the Gospel. It is not enough to understand it. People must be able to see the Gospel lived out in all of its radical freshness and heavenly power. That kind of reality can only be seen in the fellowship and worship of a church in that culture. The word must be made flesh once again, as it were, in that culture. Churches must be planted in every people which glorify God by using as much of the local culture as the basic message of Scripture will allow.

How Are We Doing? It appears to some that the job of world evangelization is already finished. Yet others quietly believe that it will never get done. Neither is true. How one looks at the world makes all the difference. There are three basic ways of surveying the world.

1. If we look at the world as a burgeoning number of individuals—either Christian or non-Christian—the job can seem quite impossible because there are hundreds more every minute. Even though the growth rate of evangelical Christians surpasses the population growth rate in most countries today, there are still vast numbers of people who have not heard the good news. If Billy Graham were to speak to a million people each day for the next ten years, still not all the non-Christians would hear the good news.
2. By contrast, if we look at the world as a collection of countries, the job can appear very nearly done. Growing churches now thrive in most countries. There are certainly some Christians in all countries. If the “nations” of Matthew 28 were countries, then we would now be just “mopping up.”
3. However, if we look at the world as an enormous mosaic of people groups, we will see that although there are churches in every country, there are thousands of people groups with no church in those same countries. The people groups which do have a viable evangelizing church-planting movement, we would label “reached.” They are not labeled “reached” because the majority of the individuals confess Christ or have heard the Gospel. In fact, “reached” people groups may have only a tiny minority of Christians. They are considered “reached” because there is reason to believe that an existing, growing church movement can actually finish the job of spreading the Gospel to everyone in that group with God’s help and without outside cross-cultural missionaries.

But if every Christian were to be mobilized tomorrow and trained to win all of the people in his or her cultural sphere, still there would be 2.5 billion individuals who would not hear the Gospel. For these people, the Gospel seed has not been sown or, if it has, it has not yet sprouted. No church embodies and authenticates the claims and life of the Gospel for them. And for some of the people, there is not the faintest bit of witness despite amazing radio coverage. They are the “unreached peoples” of earth, the “Hidden” or “Frontier” peoples, for some reason bypassed by the church. These people groups may live in physical proximity to a dynamic fellowship, but find a crucial cultural barrier cutting them off from the Gospel. Of the world’s roughly 24,000 people groups, there remain approximately 8,000 people groups unreached. Many of these are tiny and virtually all of them are not at a huge cultural “distance” from other groups where there is already an indigenous church movement.

Most unreached peoples are part of five large blocs of humanity: Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese, and Tribal. Over 80% of the world’s non-Christians live in unreached people groups. They are without the Gospel, and will in all probability remain in abject darkness unless and until deliberate effort is made to bring the Gospel to them in culturally sensitive ways. Then clusters of growing churches must form which can themselves finish the task of proclaiming the Gospel to all of their people.

What Shall We Do Now? At this point in history we have never been so far from completing world evangelization and at the same time we have never been closer.

The bad news is that only about 13% of the world’s mission force is devoting its work time to pioneer church planting among unreached peoples. All the others do tremendously important work reviving and nurturing existing churches, or planting more churches in penetrated peoples. No missionaries necessarily need to abandon any worthwhile work they are doing. If they can promote vision for unreached peoples, they may do more by staying where they are. What is also needed is a new wave of informed and focused recruits to reinforce existing missions work and lead the advance into untouched peoples.

Furthermore, there are thousands of “bi-linguals” like Paul and Barnabas who today can bridge into vitually all of the remaining groups to be reached if we can claim them for Christ and harness their potential.

The good news is that never has world evangelization been more within our grasp in terms of resources, technology, knowledge, mission mechanisms, church structures, and international church relations. All these lead us to believe that we are on the verge of a great advance, not to mention the great indications of receptivity and opportunity in the hearts and cities of the unreached.

The “Hidden Peoples” are not hidden from God. They are only “hidden” from a busy and beleaguered church. They can be blocked from our view when immediate, pressing needs consume energies. That vast number of unreached peoples can almost always be eclipsed from sight by the ambitions of worldly comfort or the quest for career stability.

We could not have dreamt up a more difficult task. Borders are closed. People are resistant. Languages are difficult. But with God’s help the job can be finished. The only reason to doubt that this generation will see a church for every people is the lack of resolve to finish the task and a blindness to see clearly the variety of peoples of the earth. We are better at distinguishng 20,000 different kinds of butterflies than we are in detecting human communities.

May God give us sight and strength to say with Jesus, at the close of our generation, “We glorified You on earth having accomplished the work You gave us to do.” John 17:4

Steve Hawthorne compiled the Perspectives course with Ralph Winter and many others of the USCWM community. He launched a series of research expeditions called Joshua Project in 1984 designed to identify unreached peoples in urban settings. He now directs the ministry Waymakers, based in Austin, Texas, mobilizing Christians to work toward a prayed-for world, which will become an evangelized world, in which Christ is known by all and followed by many.