Is a previously unreached people group reached after they have one convert?

What if a country or people has a few disciples, but they are scattered, persecuted, and don’t really have any churches yet?

What if an unreached people group has a few house churches, but cannot really do much yet by way of influencing their culture and society for the gospel?

Some mission organizations said that a people group is reached when they have the resources in their own local churches and leadership to reach out to their own people without foreign missionaries doing the work. That’s a good practical definition.

Another problem is that some missions statistics see the western world and countries that were previously “Christian” in culture, and so, they are considered “already reached”, but that is not accurate, either.

Every generation is responsible for the Great Commission.

We cannot say that Turkey has already been reached, just because in the past that land had the gospel.

The people of the days in the New Testament and the first 800 years A.D. that lived there were not Turks. They were Byzantine Greeks, Galatians, Phrygians, Armenians, Romans, Cappodiacians. The Turks started coming there in the 900s AD and defeated the Byzantine Empire.
The Arabs had converted the Turks to Islam in the 900s and they became the military force for the Muslim world soon after that. The Turks originally were from Central Asia, areas today known as Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhistan, and Kirgistan.

Some zealous evangelicals emphasized just evangelism into pioneer areas too much, as if they were saying, if one person gets saved in an unreached people group, then that group is “reached”. That doesn’t seem right.

The nations must be discipled and taught well. (Matthew 28:19) The Greek of Matthew 28:19 does not mean, “disciple a few people in each nation”, rather it means “disciple all the nations” – each nation is to be discipled with sound evangelism and teaching. Some groups and churches invoke Matthew 24:14 as if we can, by our missions efforts, actually bring about the second coming of Jesus. That is also only partially correct.

The bottom line is: we don't know for sure when the Great Commission will be completed. We know elements of it. We know that we must proclaim the Gospel to all nations. We believe the Bible teaches the importance of raising up indigenous local bodies of Christ worshippers, local churches, in every ethnic group of the world. We know that we have instructions and Biblical examples and truths that highly motivate us to a zealous pursuit of "all peoples" evangelism and church planting. We know that these things will be accomplished according to God's plan in the end.