Unreached is About Access: A Response to Recent Conversations on Global Missions

A few years ago, I spoke at a faith-and-work event here in Indianapolis. It was a day-long gathering filled with popular speakers talking about God’s work through the business world—tech CEOs, entrepreneurs, sports personalities…and me. 

I had 13 minutes to talk about my book Missional Marketplace, which had been released just a few months earlier. Thirteen minutes isn’t much time, so I asked the conference leaders if I could focus on one aspect of the book’s framework that I thought would stand out in a room full of business leaders: 

Global missions. 

I talked about a recent overseas trip where I met a woman who had literally never heard the name of Jesus. I showed a baptism photo of the first known believer from a completely unreached people group. I told them that roughly 42 percent of the world could be born, live, and die without ever hearing the good news of the gospel. And I talked about how business and entrepreneurship can be powerful tools for making Jesus known around the world. 

When my 13 minutes were up, you could hear crickets. It felt like I had thrown a wet blanket over a crowd eager to be inspired about their work. I left wondering if I was just an outlier, or if God’s people were losing God’s heart for the nations. 

Global Missions is Our Passion 

The marketplace is our platform at The Stone Table, but global missions is our purpose. We run a business, but the Great Commission has been our core passion for more than three decades, with a particular burden for unreached places with little to no gospel access. 

That’s why I’m especially attentive when I see articles like one recently published by Christianity Today titled, “The ‘Unreached’ Aren’t Over There.” I’ve been chewing on this piece for the past week. It challenged me in good ways and forced me to clarify my thinking. It also led me to articulate a few disagreements—which I still believe is healthy within the body of Christ. 

Dr. Samuel Law, a missiologist from Singapore Bible College, offers a gracious critique of modern missionary efforts and calls for new language and strategy. There’s much in his article that deeply resonates with me. It’s always good to challenge paradigms and assumptions to ensure they still fit our current reality.  

But in a Western culture already becoming more nationalistic and inward facing, we should be careful not to hand the Church an easy permission slip to pull back from Jesus’ call to go and make disciples of all nations. 

With that in mind, Dr. Law makes several claims that, in my view, need additional nuance. I’ll take them one by one. 

Where We Agree

Missions Must Be Church-Centric 

Dr. Law writes, “Churches, not individuals, have always been the prime movers in missions.” I couldn’t agree more. 

That conviction is why, even as an independent Great Commission organization, The Stone Table has chosen to come under and serve the local church and the mission field. The Church is the hope of the world—not passionate individuals or parachurch organizations acting independently of it. 

This is also why we primarily partner with ecclesial sending bodies like Assemblies of God World Missions and their pioneering church-planting arm, Live Dead. At the heart of AGWM’s missiology is a simple vision: “establishing the church among all peoples everywhere.” 

This is not about rogue heroes or isolated organizations. It’s the Church following the Acts 13 model—sending out workers, proclaiming the gospel, and planting the church where the church does not yet exist. It’sthe Church sending the Church to plant the Church! Good missiology is always church-centric. 

Missions Must Be From All to All 

Dr. Law also rightly critiques the old colonial imagery of Western-centric missions, noting that Christianity’s center of gravity has clearly shifted south and east. Missions can no longer be framed as “from the West to the rest.” It must reflect the “from all to all” reality of 21st-century Christianity. 

Our friends at LiveDead have fostered a multi-agency and multi-national pioneering missions movement. Last year, I spent time in North Africa with missionary teams made up of American, Venezuelan, and Arab church planters. We also worked alongside a team serving among a 99.99% Muslim people group that included missionaries from Ecuador, Tanzania, Sweden, and the United States. 

Our friends are actively partnering with indigenous sending churches in more than 130 countries, embodying a truly global vision of the Great Commission. 

Where We Disagree

The Word Unreached Still Matters 

Dr. Law argues that “the term unreached people groups has lost its meaning today.” That conclusion only holds if the missiological concept of unreached people groups is flattened or redefined. 

According to the Joshua Project, an unreached people group (UPG) is an identifiable ethnolinguistic group sharing a common culture and language that lacks a sufficient indigenous community of Christians to evangelize the rest of their people without outside help. In practical terms, this is often defined as fewer than 2% evangelical believers and fewer than 5% professing Christians. 

No movement—spiritual or otherwise—can sustainably reproduce itself at less than 2 percent. 

Here’s the key issue: “unreached” is about access. The term was developed to describe cultures and regions with little or no meaningful access to the gospel. It is not a label for places where there are peoplewho need Jesus. That is everywhere! It refers to places where people have little or no opportunity to ever hear about him at all. 

In my home city of Indianapolis, there are more than 1,000 evangelical churches. Are there people who haven’t heard the good news of Jesus? Absolutely. Are there unreached people? No. Not by missiological definitions. And that distinction is vital. 

There is, of course, a legitimate conversation to be had about the unreached diaspora communities among us. Many people from truly unreached regions of the world have moved to the West as students, employees, refugees, or immigrants. These realities expand the church’s opportunity for faithful witness to the unreached in our own back yards, but they do not erase the access injustice that originally gave rise to the unreached category.

From a Great Commission perspective, we must guard the term unreached. It refers to specific people groups around the world with little to no gospel access. Dr. Law’s concern about “us versus them” binaries is understandable, but when it comes to defining unreached people groups, the statistics and reasoning remain clear: more than 40 percent of the world still lacks meaningful access to the gospel—and those places are located in a pretty specific geography. The global church must continue to send out cross-cultural workers to reach them. 

Does the Indigenous Church No Longer Need Outside Partnership? 

To be clear, this is not a defense of Western saviorism, nor a dismissal of indigenous agency. But neither can the Western church simply abdicate and say, “They’ve got it—we’ll step back.” That is not humblepartnership, that’s withdrawal. It also short-changes the biblical command to “go and make disciples of all ethne.” 

The call of the Great Commission is certainly not for one part of the global church to replace another, but for the whole church to labor together. The Western church should not disengage but work alongside the growing global church to help mobilize, train, and send workers—especially into the hardest and least-reached places. Most of the good missions agencies and global workers I know are functioning with this posture. 

Over the years, I’ve gotten to know many brilliant church leaders across the Global South. Many of them put me to shame in character, leadership, and faithfulness. Time spent with fellow image-bearers from the global church humbles me and gives me tremendous hope for the future. 

Dr. Law asserts that “21st-century Majority World churches now possess the means, methods, and motivation to reach their neighbors.” I hope—and believe—that this is the direction we are heading. But numerical growth does not automatically translate into cross-cultural willingness or sending capacity. History shows that vibrant movements often require intentional pathways, training, and partnership before they mature into sustained sending movements. 

In other contexts, churches may exist near unreached people groups, but they are often expatriate congregations that do not engage or reach their local neighbors. Presence alone does not equal access. The question is not whether some form of the church exists nearby, but whether the gospel is actually being proclaimed, embodied, and received within a particular people group. 

Yes, near-culture missionaries may be more cost-effective and strategic at times. But shared geography does not automatically translate into shared trust. In many regions, centuries-old ethnic, tribal, or political conflicts create significant relational barriers to gospel witness, even between neighboring peoples. In some cases, these barriers are far greater than those faced by outsiders. Reducing missions to a simple geographic or economic equation isn’t as clear-cut as it may seem.  

How we work with these indigenous churches is incredibly important. Our own missiology requires us to be very careful here. We must be committed to supporting the growing indigenous church without doing it for them. Putting local believers on Western payrolls not only undermines indigenous church principles, it also endangers the integrity of the local body. We believe churches in Ecuador should send and support Ecuadorian missionaries. Churches in Ethiopia should send and support Ethiopian missionaries. External partners can help catalyze and strengthen those systems, but they should not replace them. 

This kind of partnership is slower. It is less efficient. And it requires patience. But it honors the agency of the local church while refusing to disengage from the global task Christ has given to us all. 

It’s Always Been a Both/And 

Finally, while I disagree with Dr. Law’s language—the West may be increasingly un-churched, but it is not becoming unreached in missiological terms—I fully agree that gospel witness must not be reduced to something that only happens “over there.” Of course, we are called to our own cities and neighborhoods. And of course, we should encourage near-culture churches to reach their geographic neighbors. 

However, my friend Dick Brogden once corrected my reading of Acts 1:8. “Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” is not a linear order of priority. Acts 1:8 is not a geography lesson prioritizing proximity before moving outward. It is a missionary vision given to the whole church to go wherever the gospel is not.  

None of the disciples Jesus spoke these words to were from Jerusalem. They were from Galilee. Jerusalem wasn’t their home. The Great Commission was a universal call to go out and to send out. We cannot forsake that calling in the name of efficiency.  

We are not asked to choose. As John Stott declared at the first Lausanne Congress in 1974, “The whole church must take the whole gospel to the whole world.” 

Our methods will continue to adapt as the global church grows and cultures shift. Western missionaries are not the Savior of the world, Jesus is. But Jesus’ command to “go and make disciples of all nations” has not changed in 2,000 years. If we’re not careful, in our efforts to avoid falling into one ditch, we can fall into the other. We are called to steward our strategies, but in our desire to engage global missions more efficiently, we risk unintentionally encouraging disengagement from global missions altogether  

Dr. Law closes with the powerful image of the global church as syrup filling the grid of a waffle. It’s a beautiful word-picture. But before the syrup can flow freely, someone still has to go out and tap the maple trees.  

And if you belong to Jesus, this Great Commission belongs to you.