Tuesday, March 2, 2010

The "In-Grown Church" & Missions

According to the Center For The Study of Global Christianity based out of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary there are approximately 30,700 full-time Christian workers serving in ministry capacities within the unevangelized world made up of 38 countries where less than half the population has heard of Jesus. The total number of people in these countries who have not been engaged with the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a tangible way number almost 2 billion people (1,629,375,000 people). But, of the 30,700 full-time Christian workers serving in these countries only 10,200 are church planting missionaries involved in trying to engage and reach the 6,600 unreached people groups that make us this almost 2 billion people with the Gospel so as to make disciples and start indigenous reproducing fellowships of believers who can evangelize their own people groups.

In other words, the other 20,500 Christian workers are involved in medical work, education, orphanages, community development, business development, and crisis intervention and rebuilding projects. Whereas, all of these works are valuable, necessary, and often provide viable means for church planting frontier missionaries to share the Gospel the disparity between the number of support workers and those workers directly involved in making disciples and planting churches is incredible.

But, as wide a gap as these statistics present consider this. The number of full-time Christian workers serving throughout the world is 419 million. Of these 419 million full-time Christian workers throughout the world only 10,200 are presently involved in working among the 6,600 unreached people groups of the world as disciple makers and church planters. This means that 0.02% of the total number of full-time Christian workers in the world are working among the unreached people groups of the world as frontier disciple making and church planting missionaries.

More incredulous than this is the fact that of these 419 million full-time Christian workers in the world--418,693,000 are serving in what is known as the Reached Christian World. In other words, 99.98% of all the full-time Christian workers in the world are serving in nations and people groups that have already heard and are hearing the Gospel of Jesus Christ and who already have churches and other organizations in place which are capable of evangelizing the lost.

And thus, as incredibly unbelievable as it sounds, less than 1% of all the full-time Christian workers in the world are engaged in taking the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the unengaged and unreached peoples of the world.

In case you are wondering how well the Church in the United States is doing--there are about 1 million full-time Christian workers serving throughout the world and in the United States that hail from the Untied States. Out of this number only 9000 are involved in direct disciple making and church planting work among unengaged and unreached people groups. Thus, again slightly less than 1% of all the full-time Christian workers in the world that are from the United States are directly involved in the work of fulfilling our Lord's Great Commission to "make disciples of all the nations".

Perhaps, the more direct application of Matthew 9:37-38 to the church of the 21st century is not so much that the need is for more workers as much as for more workers to leave the comforts of the farmhouse and get out into the fields. Missionary leaders have estimated that if they had a minimum of 90,000 more workers to go as pioneer disciple making church planters to the unengaged and unreached people groups of the world that they would have the means of sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, making disciples and planting enough churches that then would be able to reach their own people for Jesus Christ.

Perhaps, instead of praying for more workers, the Church needs to rethink Missions and what "Great Commission Missions" is all about and begin to encourage and send its workers out of the farmhouse and barnyard and into the fields that are already white unto harvest.

By the way, over 163 billion dollars per year is spent on Christian ministries to Christians throughout the world. 13 billion is spent on missions. Thus, only about 8% of all the money collected by churches and other Christian ministries per year is used to fulfill Christ's Great Commission.

Does anyone else see a problem here?

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