Introduction

M

y first mission trip to Khorastan many years ago left an indelible impression on me. I went with a team to do relief work with the many refugees living in camps there.

One day I went down to the English language bookstore in the bazaar and asked the clerk to see a Bible. To my astonishment, he had never even heard of the Bible! And yet there was a huge Pepsi Cola sign in the middle of town; everyone knew what Pepsi was, and probably many if not most drank it. As a fairly new believer I wondered how, two thousand years after God in the flesh had commanded his Church to do this one thing: bring the gospel to all nations, there were still so many places on earth where almost no one had even heard of the Bible. This question has haunted me ever since, and it is only now, some 40 years later, that I have come to understand how and why this could happen, and more importantly, how the situation can be rectified.

There is a massive urgent unresolved problem facing the Church today. In the past century, the number of “unreached peoples”—those with no opportunity to hear of the only way of salvation—has increased by a billion people. And their number will have increased by yet another 900 million between 2000 and 2050 unless there is change in the trend.

The Bible is all about how God redeems a people for himself from all nations through Jesus Christ —the mission of God. And after the resurrection, Jesus entrusts the continuation of his mission to his Church by giving her the Great Commission to bring his gospel to the nations. But somehow, this one task which Christ entrusted to his Church is mostly marginalized or even ignored in the Church today. And strangely, being part of God’s mission is no longer an essential part of the identity of most Christians.

God has done great things in the past two thousand years since Christ ascended back into heaven. God the Holy Spirit has brought about great advances of the gospel in countries such as Iran, Korea and China.

But in spite of these great advances, the number of unreached continues to rise. This book examines why the number of unreached has been rising, how it happened and what the solution to this great problem is. That solution is “hidden in plain sight” in Jesus’ Last Discourse, which reveals the key to realizing Christ’s last command. Recovering that key is what this book is all about.