By Manik Corea, C4SO Global Consultant
Did you know that a mind-boggling 81% of all Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus in the world today do not personally know a Christian?[1]
I hope you were duly startled. Here’s a few more sobering figures:
1) A staggering 3.3 billion people live in 7,414 people groups with very few, if any, believers among them.[2]
2) Of the estimated $51,000 billion that all Christians globally will have earned in 2021, only $848 billion will have been given away towards Christian causes (a meagre 1.66%), from which even a lesser $49 billion (a pitiful 0.1%) was in support of mission work outside one’s own country.[3]
3) It has been estimated that there are 460,000 villages (out of a total of 650,000 villages) in India with no known Christian presence.[4]
But you don’t necessarily have to cross the oceans and trek through remote mountains to find people without the Gospel and far from God. They are around us as a nation:
4) Although the United States remains the country with the most Christians globally in 2020 (263 million), it is also home to over 53 million agnostics and atheists—the second-largest population in the world, after China.[5]
5) The US is one of the most ethnically diverse nations on earth. It is estimated that people from at least 282 unreached people-groups now live as immigrants in America.[6]
6) Approximately 1 million international students study in the U.S each year. 80% of them will return home never having been invited to an American home. Only an estimated 10% are reached by Christian ministries while in the US.[7]
How do you feel when you read statistics and statements like these? If you are like me, they can be overwhelming.
There may also be a temptation to glaze over them as lifeless numbers and statements on a screen, too big to truly comprehend and practically irrelevant in the face of the concrete challenges, decisions and demands that assail us daily.
But they ought to stop us dead in our tracks. Lost people matter to God and heaven, and they should therefore matter greatly to us as His people.[8]
Three weeks ago, I was speaking to the clergy of a NAMS-partner Diocese within the Province of Myanmar. As you may remember from the news, this violence-torn nation continues to suffer under the crushing rule of a merciless military dictatorship. I was humbled as I spoke to pastors and leaders who were dealing on a day-to-day basis with difficulties and deprivations beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.
Yet, I felt convicted to teach and exhort them to be fervent and faithful in the mission of God’s church to make disciples and reach the unreached. Even in the struggle against a military dictatorship, the Gospel alone trumps every political solution on offer and has power to turn hearts of stone to flesh—raising the dead in sin to new life in Christ. And so, they must continue their witness as God’s church—both as a worshipping community and a missional people.
After all, our Lord Jesus modeled, taught and commissioned us to the holy task of proclaiming the Gospel in order to make disciples, gathering them into new church communities on mission—counter-cultural outposts of the Kingdom for the sake of others.
As we’ve established in previous post (here and here), this remains the consummate task of all God’s people. The Gospel comes to us on its way to someone else.
But what can you and I, ordinary Christians in the pew, do in the face of such great needs and numbers?
Over this and the next blog, I will present three concrete steps that can help us begin to engage with the lost in the world with, and for the sake of, Christ. Today, we’ll cover the first one.
Step 1) Bring Your Eyes to See.
There is a Somali proverb that calls us to “bring our eyes to see, and then we will believe.”
Eyes are for seeing, but they truly only see when we look with faith. And Jesus calls us to lift up our eyes to see the crowds around us as part of the harvest of souls he intends for us to gather into the kingdom.
Specifically, in John 4:35, having reached out to and revealed himself to the Samaritan woman at the well, he responded to the quizzical looks from his disciples. Ignoring their calls for him to eat, he spoke of something far more important than physical food. There was a harvest of people to be wrought:
“Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.’”
Using a farming analogy, Jesus referenced the four-month wait after seeds are sown from when the fields can be harvested. However, in Kingdom terms, there is a harvest to be seen immediately all around us, and the Samaritans were ready to receive the good news of Jesus.
It is possible, as some scholars point out, that the regular garments or turbans worn by the Samaritans were white in color, and so here was a ‘harvest of white’—throngs of people coming toward them from the witness of the woman at the well.
Before we do anything, we need to lift up our eyes and see the lost around us, and beyond. We need, like the disciples, to have eyes to see the throngs of lost and to be ready to do something about it.
First step then: Look and see where they are with eyes of compassion, as Jesus did (Matthew 9:36). In the next blog we will look at two further steps.
Read Steps to Finding the Lost: Part 2 here.
Footnotes
[1] Source: https://www.gordonconwell.edu/center-for-global-christianity/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2020/12/Status-of-Global-Christianity-2021.pdf
[2] Source: https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/statistics
[3] See Table 5 in “World Christianity and Mission 2021: Questions about the Future” in International Bulletin of Mission Research, Vol. 45(1): 24.
[4] Source: https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/statistics
[5] Gina A. Bellofatto and Todd M. Johnson, “Key Findings of Christianity in Its Global Context, 1970–2020” in International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol 37(3): 161
[6] An ‘unreached people-group’ has less than 2% evangelical Christians present as a total population. Source: https://www.jdpayne.org/2017/10/348-unengaged-unreached-people-groups-in-north-america/
[7] Source: http://www.thetravelingteam.org/stats Note, though, that these are pre-COVID-19 statistics.
[8] Jonah 4:11; Luke 15, 19:10.
The Revd Manik Corea is the Global Executive of an Anglican Missionary Order of church planters, called NAMS. He is passionate about seeing and reaching the lost of all nations and peoples, and intends to bring this passion and experience into his role as Global Consultant for the Diocese of C4SO. You can contact him at manikcorea@namsnetwork.org.