I wish they had used a word other than ‘unreached.’ The term has caused so many communication challenges. ‘Reached’ and ‘unreached' immediately conveys the idea of a destination arrived at (or not). Couple that with ‘the Gospel’ and we get the image of missionaries or a Bible arriving at the door of an individual. It has arrived. The Good News has reached the houses, the families, the people.
This is not what the missiological definition of ‘reached/unreached’ means. When a group of mission leaders gathered in Chicago in 1982, sponsored by the Lausanne Strategy Working Group and the then-Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies (EFMA, now MissioNexus), they defined an unreached people group as ‘a people or people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize the rest of its members without outside (cross-cultural) assistance.’
This really means the Gospel has “arrived at the shores” of the group. It has put on flesh and moved into the neighborhood--but hasn't necessarily met all the people on the block, yet. It does not mean the task has been completed. It does not mean every individual within the group is a believer, or that every individual has heard the Gospel even once. Worse for us in our age of quantification, the definition leaves a lot of things painfully undefined.
What is ‘an indigenous community of believing Christians’? Indigenous is clear: Kazakhs to reach Kazakhs, Tajiks to reach Tajiks, Russians to reach Russians. (Although this leaves out questions of former religious identity: former Muslims to reach current Muslims, or will former Hindus be okay if they share the same language?) What does ‘believing Christians’ mean? Do Catholic and Orthodox communities count? Your unspoken reaction to that question suggests what you think about it.
Just to stir the pot a bit more: what is ‘adequate numbers and resources’? Whenever you hear ‘this group is less than 2% evangelical, and therefore unreached’—that’s an idea that came much later, to make it easier to code our spreadsheets.
There are good reasons for why the definition was left deliberately vague. People want a “number” to measure, but the task is complex, full of nuance, and not easily defined, and how we do it changes. When the definition was written, the general understanding of ‘adequate numbers’ was significantly different. More manpower was required, for people had to largely be evangelized person to person (which was why movement thinking was more prevalent). Remember, when the definition was written, it wasn’t published on Facebook. The TCP/IP protocol for the Interent was only itself invented later that same year; the Web wasn’t created until 1995. The definition predated Christian satellite television, the JESUS Film, and even compact discs. Today, these tools and others have made it possible for very small groups to do very large things.
A small church today can have a larger capacity for accomplishing things among a people group than a church then. For example, I have estimated a strategy team of 3 to 6 people can adequately engage 100,000 people by using a Church Planting Movement or Disciple Making Movement strategy. 5 people represents 0.005% of 100,000. The group may be unreached when the strategy starts—but 2% may be far too high a number for ‘unreached.’
That the job is complicated and nuanced, the original architects of the definition knew. Dr. Winter used to say you couldn’t judge whether a people group was reached or unreached until you got in among them, lived among them, understood them, knew them. I think he might very well be right, although I still love spreadsheets.
‘Without outside (cross-cultural) assistance’ gets to the heart of the definition. If a group is reached, it means near-neighbor evangelism could finish the task. That is not the reality among many peoples—
Or is it? There is one element of the definition left out which to me makes understanding ‘unreached’ especially difficult. Consider three special cases: the Pashto, the Turks, and the Chinese. Are they unreached? You’d be tempted to say an easy ‘yes’ to the Pashto of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Turks are a little more problematic, since there are some Turkish churches, but you’d probably come down on the ‘yes’ side. The Chinese, with over 100 million believers, might give you a little more pause. Yes, or no? Or, ‘No, but...’ because while there are a lot of believers, there are a lot of nonbelievers too. A half-billion non-believers or more is enough to make most anyone think twice about their definitions.
The Chinese and Turks give us pause because given enough time and the right strategy, the current believers probably could reach the whole group. You can see it more readily with the Chinese; the Turks would have to multiply the believers they have (“the workers are in the harvest”). But it’s possible.
The element the definition completely leaves out is time. “To evangelize the rest of its members without cross-cultural assistance”—but in what span of time? When the definition was being contemplated, I’d guess most ‘unreached’ groups had very small communities which really couldn’t reach the whole ethne on their own in their lifetimes. When they wrote the definition, the idea of this timeframe might have been in their minds, and it may be a valuable timeframe for us to use ourselves. A group is unreached if a majority of the nonbelievers in the group won’t reasonably hear the Gospel in their lifetime, as a result of the efforts of the indigenous community.
You see, I just did it too: I fiddled with the definition. I interpreted it. I applied it. That doesn’t mean I disagree with the original definition (sometimes, people present an ‘alternate’ definition they find more palatable, but present it as if it was the original). It simply means that I, like everyone else, have to struggle with how to apply the definition to come up with one of those lists that we like so much—and no list will be perfect.
But that’s okay. The Commission isn’t to make lists or judge peoples. The Commission is to go to all the places, and make disciples of all the nations in those places. The only reason why we talk about the unreached is so few people go to them, and we want to see that changed.
