The Great Imbalance

As you can see from the above statistics, not only are there very few funds being given to reach unreached people groups (UPGs), there are very few missionaries living and working among these UPGs as well. Thankfully, there is an ample amount of mission work happening around the world today, but unfortunately, there is a great imbalance when it comes to reaching the unreached.

Staggering Statistics¹

Christian Giving

$42 Trillion – Annual Income of all church members
$7 Trillion – Money given to Christian causes
$45 Billion – (6.4%) given to missions
$450 Million – (0.1%) given to reach the unreached

Christian Missionaries

400,000 – Total number of missionaries in the world
309,315 – Number working among reached people groups
77, 610 – Number working among unevangelized
13,315 – Number working among unreached (3.3%)

The Pie Doesn’t Lie

To bring this point home just a bit more the below pie chart is quite revealing.

Yep, that thin white line represents the number of missionaries working among the unreached compared to those working among reached people groups. Much of this has happened out of ignorance; for years we’ve had good-hearted Christians going out doing good works in the nations not realizing what the true role of a missionary should be. In my opinion, the MAWL method should be a core model for missionaries to follow: Model, Assist, Watch, Leave.

We Are Not the Hero

Too often, the missionary has been caught in the trap of modeling and doing the work of the ministry while not sufficiently equipping the indigenous worker to do fulfill his role in the ministry. Why is this? Partially because the indigenous worker looks to the foreign missionary as the one who has all the answers, the one who is better educated, better funded, and the list can go on and on. And often in many cases, the foreign worker can think that he/she does have all the answers and does know the better or right way to do things, and does have access to the resources needed to run the ministry.

In this model, the foreign worker ends up creating top-heavy ministries that can’t operate without them and their funding and leadership. This model causes the worker to become stuck in a country for way too many years while also attracting other foreign missionaries to come and help them be a part of the ministry as well. In all honesty, this model makes us feel like the hero when in all actuality, Jesus is the only Hero we need to be directing others to look to and not to us.

“The day has come when all of us who influence or practice missions need to intentionally guide others to look to God and to their own communities for resources, solutions, creativity, ingenuity, hard work, and interdependence, instead of making them perpetual recipients of all the good things we can do for them.”

We Are Not the Hero by Jean Johnson

What Can We Do To Bring Change?

I don’t want to raise these issues without sharing a few ways I believe we can see effective and lasting change. I think we can do a few things to see a shift in these unbalanced statistics.

Speak up!
Speaking up when it comes to sending workers into green-dot-people-groups (see below) is critical. We need more people advocating on behalf of the red-dot-people-groups making people aware of this imbalance. Speak up not only on behalf of workers who aren’t going to work among UPGs but also on behalf of the lack of funds not being sent to help works being done among UPGs as well.

Pray!
I would say that prayer is one of the most important and powerful things we can do concerning this great imbalance. Thankfully, Jesus taught us a lot about prayer (asking, seeking, knocking) but He only told us what to pray for very few times. The most famous of course is the Lord’s prayer – for His kingdom to come and His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven… But in Luke 10:2 He teaches us saying, “And he said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

I’m grateful for Lou Engle who introduced the ekballo principle several years ago. Lou had been impacted by Andrew Murray’s comments on these similar words of our Savior in Matthew 9:37-38. Murray related how “the number of missionaries on the field depends entirely on the extent to which someone obeys that command and prays out the laborers.”² I personally have an alert that goes off on my phone every morning at 10:02 AM reminding me to pray Luke 10:2.

Ekballo

When I discovered the significance of this Greek word that is used for “send out” or “thrust forth” laborers it changed the way I pray. Engle states, “It is the same word that Jesus uses when he says, “If I cast out (Gr. ekballo) demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Luke 11:20, NASB) The authority and the force of Jesus casting out demons is the same spiritual force and authority by which he thrust forth laborers.”³

“When Jesus ekballos demons, demons must leave. When Jesus ekballos laborers, evangelists and missionaries must go out. Suddenly Matthew 9:38 became a fire in my bones and an end-time war cry from heaven itself.”⁴

The need for laborers to take the gospel message to UPGs is great and so are the finances needed to send them out! And to make it clear, the laborers just aren’t going. Why is that? Because the unreached are unreached for a reason. They are in difficult-to-reach areas (closed or creative access nations), their languages are hard to learn, and their religions are hard to penetrate. But when the Lord grips someone’s heart for the unreached, when He ekballos them, they must obey. When The Lord of the Harvest puts the command in someone’s heart to go, they can’t say no!

It’s with this type of fervency that you and I need to pray. It’s with this type of fervency that we will see laborers sent forth into the harvest. And in the words of Lou Engle, may the Lord place “a fire in my [and your] bones and an end-time war cry from heaven itself”⁵ in our hearts!

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1. https://www.thetravelingteam.org/stats ↩︎
2. https://www.missionfrontiers.org/pdfs/36-4-Ekballo.pdf ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎