What is WorldView Ministries? — Part 5
This is Part 5 in a series of 6 articles defining and explaining the heartbeat of WorldView Ministries. My burden is to clearly relate who we are, what our God-given vision is, and how we are taking the steps necessary to achieve our vision.
Core Value #4: The Uttermost
A focus on unreached people groups and a strategy to reach them is required if we are to be in complete obedience to the Great Commission.
Our theme verses (Romans 15:20-21) reflect Paul’s desire to take the Gospel where Christ had not been named. If we believe that the Great Commission was given for us to finish, then we must have a plan to reach the rest of the world. The church that is not focused on the unreached is not serious about obedience to the Great Commission.
The word “nations” in Matthew 28:19 means ethnic groups or people groups. Consider this. There are approximately 16,800 people groups in the world. You may find other mission agencies using different numbers. The differences are due to how people groups are counted. Some agencies that use higher numbers count an ethnic group in every place it is found on the globe. For a very general and simplistic example, there are Han Chinese people in China, Brazil, South Korea, London, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver and a host of other places. All of these would be included in the numbers of some groups. Those with lower numbers put some groups together in clusters determined by the nearness of their ethnicity.
WorldView holds to the middle number. This allows for a more strict definition of a people group while recognizing the distinctiveness of groups within certain ethnic families. For the example above, we would only count the Han Chinese as one group regardless of where they live, but would recognize them as distinct from other groups of Chinese origin. This approach leaves us with previously mentioned number of approximately 16,800 distinctly defined people groups in the world.
Of that number, approximately 9,500 are considered reached. This means they have a church, missionaries and the Gospel. Somewhere near where they live, they can find a church, a Bible and access to the Gospel.
Over 7,000 of these groups are considered unreached. Technically, this means that less than 2% of the population of the group is Christian. They do not have sufficient resources to start or maintain a church planting movement without some help from the outside. Practically, this means they have no access to the Gospel. Nowhere near them would they find a church, a Bible or the Gospel. Unless they leave their group or someone comes to them from outside their group, they will live their entire lives without ever hearing the name of Jesus Christ and without ever hearing the Gospel. They will live their lives without the knowledge of God, the Cross, Heaven or the place called Hell in which they will spend eternity.
Every three minutes, 85 people die who have never heard His name, and 210 babies are born into a world with no access to the gospel unless something changes.
The heart of every church should pulsate with the desire to reach those who have never been told. Our assignment is not to bring all of them Christ, but our assignment is to bring Christ to all of them.