What is the status of missions today?
There are still unreached nations/peoples to be reached, that need the gospel in their own language communicated, so that some may be saved, churches planted and worship of the true God can take place.
The Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course and Operation World are books with excellent articles and materials of what is going on in the world today.
There are five major blocks of unreached people groups.
There are many people groups/nations within each of the blocks, based on other issues that make a nation a nation – common culture and language. Not trying to leave out some smaller groups, but this is just an easy way to see the major “blocks” of humanity to give you a big picture of the status of missions.
1. The Muslim World – from Morocco to Indonesia and Mindanao in the Philippines, other parts of Sub-Sahara Africa, and growing because of immigration into Europe and the western nations.
2. The Hindu World – mostly India and Nepal
3. The Buddhists
4. The Chinese
5. The Tribal peoples
Those are where the most totally unreached people groups exist. However, there are other blocks of humanity that exist -- cultures that were once Christian, but now are either nominally “Christian” or totally atheistic-secularistic- materialistic-Darwinian-Evolutionary and humanistic in world views.
6. The Western/secular world
7. The “de-Christianized” world – that overlaps with the western/secular world – consisting of Protestantism, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodoxy – in nominal cultural ways, but are atheistic, agnostic, and non-Christian in practice.
8. Latin America – Roman Catholic and nominal Roman Catholicism with secular- western tendencies. In recent years, Evangelicalism has been growing in Latin American countries and peoples who are disillusioned with Roman Catholicism.
Many missions emphasis in recent years is on those people groups that are totally without any gospel witness or churches and are in those blocks where it is politically and culturally difficult to even go and be a witness and preach the gospel to the people, because of government restrictions. Those are known as “pioneer” or “frontier” areas or peoples.
Romans 15:20 – I have as my ambition to preach the gospel not where Christ is already named and worshiped and known as Lord.
Missions also includes evangelism and teaching and training in other areas, where the gospel has gone and there has been more success for the gospel. (like Sub- Sahara Africa and South Korea, for example.)
One of the most exciting new trends in the last 30 years, is that other nations and countries that used to be the mission fields are now sending out missionaries to other unreached peoples.
This is especially true of South Koreans and Latin American missionaries from countries such as Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina. Many South Koreans and Latino missionaries can go into countries that do not allow US Citizens to go, especially in the Muslim World.
Another issue that relates to the status of missions today is that there are many challenges that are grievous, such as the exporting of false doctrines and heresies through some “missions” efforts of doctrinally heretical or cults
How much remains to be done?
See the website links below.
