Chapter 2

Very Few Church Personnel and Resources Devoted to Reaching the Unreached

The number of unreached is also increasing because most of the church personnel and resources are devoted to work among populations which already have access to the gospel. Some 70% of Evangelicals are unaware that there are still many millions of unevangelized people in the world. The graph below shows that only about three percent of church workers serve the least reached.

In addition, only about one tenth of one percent of global Christian giving goes to support missions to the unreached. It is shocking to consider that only about $1.4 billion is given to reach the unreached yearly compared to $1,304 billion in total Christian giving. This compares to the approximately $86 billion lost to church-related financial fraud. The amount given to reach the unreached yearly is only .002% of Christians’ yearly income of $70 trillion as of 2024. The yearly amount given to reach the unreached constitutes only .000869% of the $161.751 trillion owned by Christians.

To be clear, it is not as though simply increasing the amount of money given to missions would in itself advance God’s kingdom; it would not. The lack of giving to missions is more of a symptom of the deeper problem rather than a cause. As Richard Halverson put it, “Jesus Christ said more about money than about any other single thing because, when it comes to a man’s real nature, money is of first importance. Money is an exact index to a man’s character.” The real problem in relation to the relative lack of strategic giving to Christ’s mission is in what it may reveal about our hearts, or at least our lack of knowledge.

The “Principal-Agency Problem” in the Church’s Stewardship

Do you remember Jesus’ parable of the talents? The master entrusted his property to his servants: one received five, one received two and another received only one. The first two servants multiplied the talents entrusted to them, and when the master returned he commended them and the master set them over much.

But the third servant was afraid and buried his talent. When confronted, this servant said “Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground” (Matthew 25:24,25). But the master condemned that servant as wicked and slothful and gave his talent to the one who had ten.

Here we can see the disastrous result not only of bad theology (“I knew you to be a hard man…”) but also of acting on the basis of fear and perceived self-interest rather than on the basis of really knowing and trusting the all-sufficient God of love. A similar kind of problem occurs in the Parable of the Tenants (Matt. 21:33-41).

Economists speak of the “principal-agency problem,” which is the conflict of interest inherent whenever a principal entrusts the management of his affairs to an agent, who is supposed to act on behalf of the principal and to maximize results for the benefit of that principal.

God has entrusted the Church with his mission and the responsibility of bringing the Good News of his redemption to all nations during the Church Age. God is the “principal” and the Church is the “agent.” However, much like Jonah, we are often more aware of and concerned about our own needs rather than the need to extend God’s Kingdom to all nations.

This kind of conflict of interest would come into play when, for example, someone (the principal) hires a money manager (the agent) to manage his retirement account. Even though the highest returns will result from buying and holding stocks in high quality companies over the long term, his broker might engage in frequent trading in the short term in order to generate commissions for himself at the expense of long-term gains for his principal. The broker’s self-serving his impairs his ability to serve the interests of his client.

The Church is not immune to the temptation of this kind of common conflict of interest. For example, a church board (the agent) may face a similar situation when it is called upon to decide whether to spend the Lord’s funds to benefit the local congregation or to serve the needs of a mission to the unreached. I am grateful that God is stirring a deep level of engagement in his mission at the church we are privileged to be part of. It is reflected in an emerging giving pattern: in 2024 the giving to missions was just under 70% of the general fund giving. It’s not the giving itself that encourages me so much. It’s the recovery of radical generosity and an lively engagement in the Lord’s mission. We are seeing a recovery of mission engagement as part our identify as Christians. This giving pattern is a reflection of the congregation’s love for Christ and desire to give themselves to the task he has entrusted to us. It reflects the very heart of God for his lost sheep. This was also the Apostle Paul’s heart: “It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known” (Romans 15:20, NIV).

The principle-agency problem may not necessarily be the result of malicious intent. It may simply result from the fact that we naturally think about our own needs or the needs of those we are aware of before we consider the needs of those who live 10,000 miles away. We may not even know they exist, much less be aware of the distant need. It may result from being part of a church in which the Great Commission has not been preached, taught or practiced. Missions just might not be part of the church’s culture. That can change. See Appendix G, Ten Ways to Become a More Missional Church, for a helpful resource to assist local churches in becoming more missional.

Regardless of the cause, this conflict of interest is one of the reasons that the mission of the church is often marginalized.

The Politicization of the Church

The advance of the gospel in the Roman Empire slowed after the Christian faith became the religion of the establishment with the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 312. This example of church-state entanglement is not unique. Other examples include that of Vladimir the Great of the early Russian state, who in 986 sent envoys throughout the world to consider the various options for religion: Latin Christianity, Judaism and Byzantine Christianity. They were most impressed by their visit to Constantinople:

We know not whether we were in Heaven or on Earth…We only know that God dwells there among the people, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.

Initially Vladimir rejected the various options except the Eastern rite, yet stopped short of converting. But he eventually agreed to convert and Christianize his people as part of an agreement to wed Anna, sister of Byzantine Emperor Basil II.

This close relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state has continued over time. According to Soviet archives, its billionaire patriarch was a KGB officer; he continues to be a close ally of Vladimir Putin, former director of the FSB (successor agency of the KGB). This relationship may help explain why in 2022, he reportedly promised Russian soldiers that if they died in the war against Ukraine, “this sacrifice washes away all their sins.”

If such reports are correct, it suggests a political influence over that church which is antithetical to the mission of the Church. Along with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there have been over thirty cases of non-Orthodox clergy being kidnapped or murdered, over a hundred cases of interrogations, expulsions and imprisonments by Russian state actors. In addition, some 600 houses of worship have been destroyed in what some are calling “Russia’s war against evangelicals.” Needless to say, such a church-state partnership does not advance God’s Kingdom; it does the exact opposite.

The situation is Russia is not unique. This example of church-state entanglements is not merely an interesting case study. It is a serious cautionary tale for the Church in every nation. Rather than assuming “it can’t happen here,” we should heed the scriptural warnings and calls to discernment and endurance during the Church Age.

There are a number of political pitfalls which deflect the Church from her mission, especially during the “last days,” the troubled period which began at Pentecost ( Acts 2:17, 2 Tim. 3:1-5). One is partnering with unbelievers, as in the case of Russia. A related pitfall is thinking that political action can replace evangelism. And a third is allowing a political philosophy or party to give us our sense of identity, values and purpose. These are things God alone can give the believer.

Clearly Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Therefore, his Church must not be subsumed under any political authority and must avoid all compromising political entanglements. This is especially critical in troubled times. This fallen world is enemy territory, if we take the Bible seriously. The spirit, principles, belief systems, methods and ends of worldly politics and those of the Christian faith are ultimately incompatible. For example, the world often operates on the principles of self-interest, deception, force and fear but the Kingdom of God operates on the principles of love, revelation, attraction and faith. Compromising entanglements of the Church in politics serve as sad reminders that adding the imperfect to the perfect produces the imperfect. God is not redeeming the world; he is redeeming a people for himself out of the world into his Kingdom.

Rather than partnering and compromising with the world, Patrick Johnstone points to the way of the cross over the way of the world. He says, “The solution is not a Christian political take-over of nations – which has had a very negative history and a discredit to the Gospel.”

When the chief priests and Pharisees came with torches and weapons to arrest Jesus, he resigned himself to the Father’s will. But Peter jumped to his defense, striking the high priest’s servant and severing his ear. To Peter, this seemed like the obvious thing to do. But Jesus corrected him and told him to sheath his sword. Peter did not yet comprehend that the mission of God is far above the petty power plays of this world.

He said “Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?” (Matthew 18:11). Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world, and Peter’s action didn’t advance the mission of God; it could have short-circuited it. As James said, “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (James 4:4). For this reason the political arena can be just as lethal to the modern Christian as the Roman arena was to the early Christian. It can be even more dangerous because often the danger isn’t perceived. Every “ism” is an idol. Politics can divert believers from God’s eternal purposes into merely temporal purposes with no eternal value.

There is a larger context for the politicization of the Church. The Church can become vulnerable to selling her sacred birthright for a mess of political pottage when she is unsure of the solid rock foundation of the knowledge of God. John Piper puts it this way:

The strong timber of the tree of evangelicalism has historically been the great doctrines of the Bible:

• • • God’s glorious perfections
    • man’s fallen nature
    • the wonders of redemptive history
    • the magnificent work of redemption in Christ
    • the saving and sanctifying work of grace in the soul
    • the great mission of the church in conflict with the world, the flesh, and the devil
    • the greatness of our hope of everlasting joy at God’s right hand

These unspeakably magnificent things once defined us and were the strong timber and root supporting the fragile leaves and fruit of our religious affections and moral actions. But this is not the case for many churches and denominations and ministries and movements in Evangelicalism today. And that is why the waving leaves of present evangelical success and the sweet fruit of prosperity are not as promising as we may think. There is a hollowness to this triumph, and the tree is weak even while the leafy branches are waving in the sun.

What is missing is the mind-shaping knowledge and the all-transforming enjoyment of the weight of the glory of God. The glory of God—holy, righteous, all-sovereign, all-wise, all-good—is missing. God rests lightly on the church in America. He is not felt as a weighty concern. Wells puts it starkly: “It is this God, majestic and holy in his being, this God whose love knows no bounds because his holiness knows no limits, who has disappeared from the modern evangelical world.” It is an overstatement. But not without warrant.

When the vision of Christ’s matchless glory, and the understanding that infinite, eternal, heart-satisfying joy is available exclusively through him is diminished, Christians become more vulnerable to the power and false promise of lesser lights.

How are we to understand and deal with the turmoil of the Church Age? How are we to understand the purposes of God when we see the political turmoil, natural disasters, wars, famines and earthquakes Jesus foretold? These things can shake us from our comfortable places.

I once heard about a lumberjack who was sent to clear an entire forest. While felling some trees, he noticed a robin building her next in one of the trees. Not wanting to destroy her home, the lumberjack pounded on the tree until the robin flew away to another tree. Again he pounded and shook the tree until she fled. He did the same every time she tried to build her nest in a tree. Finally, she gave up and fled to a rock, where she safely built her nest.

God uses the disasters and turmoil of this world in a similar way. He doesn’t want us to build our lives upon the sinking sand of a fallen world that is passing away; he wants us to find our home on the rock that never fails. We naturally seek a comfortable home in the world, but God is committed to seeing us securely settled on the rock.

Using such symbols as “Babylon” (Revelation 17:5), the book of Revelation reveals that there is something much more sinister behind the world’s seductions, persecutions and “men of lawlessness,” which can deflect Christians from Christ and the gospel: the spiritual powers of darkness (2 Thess. 2:3, 1 John 2:18).

The Invisible Insidious Operation of the World, the Flesh and the Devil

The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Darkness are locked in a cosmic death struggle. The fallen, fallible, limited and doomed powers of darkness know they can never win against the Almighty, all-knowing, sovereign Lord. They know their doom is sure. Their only hope is to try to prolong the period before they face the inevitable final judgment, the fierce wrath of God and their eternal punishment. They also know that the gospel of the Kingdom must be preached in all nations before the final judgment comes (Matthew 24:14). Therefore the highest priority strategic focus of their efforts is against the gospel and against the propagation of the gospel to all nations. Only by trying to “run out the clock” and delay the evangelization of the world can they have any hope of delaying the inevitable fierce and just wrath of the Holy Almighty God they have defied.

It therefore stands to reason that the Kingdom of Darkness would seek these strategic goals:

• • Undermine confidence in the authority of the Bible since it is God’s unique written revelation
  • Divide the Church since a unified Church is necessary for world evangelization and a house divided cannot stand
  • Obscure the gospel of grace since it entails the conquest of evil
  • Marginalize the mission of the Church since world evangelization signals the end of the Kingdom of Darkness
  • Obscure the fact that mission engagement is a part of following Christ because that greatly impedes world evangelization

The powers of darkness deceive the mind, seduce the heart and enslave the will through false narratives and idols. In the modern world, the popular idols are more apt to be abstract ideas and ideologies than the statues of antiquity. But they still falsely promise happiness if we will only worship money, power, pleasure, fame, demagogues, or the gods of false religions. We are worshippers by design and nature, and if we don’t worship the living God who alone can satisfy our hearts, we must inevitably worship some worthless and enslaving substitute. This is how most spiritual warfare is conducted.

We see this hidden spiritual dynamic of spiritual warfare in church history. It is part of the underlying reason the gospel itself was almost lost for a time prior to the Reformation. It is also a significant reason the mission of the Church has been marginalized and neglected through much of Church history, and most obviously prior to the modern Protestant Missions movement of the eighteenth century. It is also one of the underlying reasons that the mission is not part of the identity of most Christians.

If you doubt the relentless virulent spiritual opposition of the powers that be to the advance of the gospel in this world, consider the opposition of the Holy Roman Empire to the life and work of William Tyndale, who first translated the Bible into English in 1526. He was strangled and burned at the stake for his offenses. His heinous “crimes”? He was charged as follows in 1536:

First, he had maintained that faith alone justifies.

Second, he maintained that to believe in the forgiveness of sins, and to embrace the mercy offered in the gospel, was enough for salvation.

Third, he averred that human traditions cannot bind the conscience, except where their neglect might occasion scandal…

Our shared secular modern western world view has no place for the supernatural. For that reason we are often unaware of the invisible spiritual battle between good and evil that rages below the surface in the world. But if the biblical world view is correct, we would expect that over time, absent God’s gracious intervention, spiritual decline would occur in institutions. This pattern occurs over and over in the Old Testament. Israel continued to fall back into unbelief, rebellion and idolatry. The human condition is not morally neutral. Apart from God’s redeeming, sustaining and renewing grace, the devil, the world and the flesh will exert an inexorable gravitational pull downward and backward. This is why revival, renewal and reformation are desperately needed and have been graciously granted throughout history.

This gravitational pull draws people away from the purposes of God. They may be subtly diverted from the best purposes to merely good purposes, rather than to purposes obviously  evil. But the effect in relation to forsaking the purposes of God is the same.

Given that Satan is the god and ruler of this world who has the power to blind the minds of people (2 Corinthians 4:4, I John 5:19, John 14:30), the invisible work of the Kingdom of Darkness is a major underlying cause of the neglect of the church’s mission. The fact that so many people would be quick to ignore or dismiss this cause without considering it simply illustrates how great this problem is and proves the point.

There is one final reason reason we have not yet brought the gospel to all nations two thousand years after the Great Commission: Jesus’ vision for carrying out his has often been overlooked.

Few Christians Are Carrying Out Jesus’ Mission According to His Vision and Plan

The question of strategy in missions is essentially a theological problem. In other words, the question is not “What is the best idea we can come up with?” Rather it is “What is Jesus’ vision and plan for the fulfillment of his mission?” It is God’s mission. Simply doing more of the same will not reverse a long-standing structural problem; only a new paradigm can do that.

Jesus sets out his vision and plan for the Church to carry out the Great Commission and to continue his mission in the Last Discourse as recorded in John chapters 13 to 17. He concludes with a prayer:

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me (John 17: 20-21)

Essentially Jesus prays that his Church might be one so that the world may believe the Father has sent him. This unity implies two things. First, that God intends to bring the gospel to the nations through the Body of Christ, not just through the relatively small number of professional missionaries alone. Second, the request “that they may all be one”[italics added] implies that every Christian can be and ought to be part of this effort. Jesus’ vision as set out in the Last Discourse will be examined more fully in Section 2, but for the moment, it is clear that few are carrying out the Commission according to Jesus’ vision, i.e. as part of an interdenominational coalition with virtually “all hands on deck.”

There are a number of reasons that Christians have not been working together in God’s mission. First, prior to the Joint Declaration on Justification of 1999, the divided Church could not work together in unity because it could not agree on the essential gospel message.  But in the twenty-first century, such a united witness seems more feasible for the first time since the Reformation now that there is historic agreement that the gospel is a gift of grace. In this historic Declaration, the Catholic Church joined the Lutheran World Federation in affirming that Luther’s understanding of justification was correct:

Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.

Second, a united witness has been impossible since most modern Christians don’t see engagement in the mission as an essential part of their identity. More about this as well in Part 2.

To understand the present predicament of the Church in relation to her mission, it’s helpful to consider how the Church came lose her way in relation to the mission Christ entrusted to her.