The church has made great strides in presenting the message to every creature as Jesus commanded us in Mark 16:15. Statistically, the church has been growing phenomenally. In the year AD 100, there was one believer for every three hundred sixty unbelievers. By the year 1000, the ratio had been reduced to one believer for every two hundred twenty unbelievers. By 1500, the number was one to sixty-nine. In 1900, it was one to twenty-seven; one to twenty-one in 1950; one to eleven in 1980; one to seven in 1990; and one to five in 1995. In fact, seventy percent of all the people who have been born again since the time of Jesus received Christ in the twentieth century. Seventy percent of those conversions occurred in the last half of that century, and seventy percent of that group were saved in the final decade of the century. In fact, more people were born again in the last decade of the last century than in the entire history of the church up until that point.
The unevangelized portion of the world’s population is constantly dropping: in 1900, it was fifty percent; in 1970, forty-four percent; in 1990, thirty percent; and in 2000, twenty-five percent. With numbers like that on the charts, it isn’t difficult to understand why many evangelicals in the last generation believed that the Great Commission was just about to be completed. In fact, in some circles within the evangelical community there arose a teaching that the Great Commission would be completed and Jesus would return by the end of the twentieth century. Those who held this idea based it on the concept that God created the universe in six days and then rested on the seventh. They paralleled His creative work with His redemptive work and said that if He created the world in six days, He would also complete His redemptive work in six days. Since II Peter 3:8 equates one day as a thousand years, they then calculated that it would take six thousand years of human history to do so. By counting the genealogies of the Bible, the creation of Adam occurred about 4000 BC, naming AD 2000 the six thousandth year. Since God rested on the seventh day and the thousand years following human history on earth is to be the Millennium, another period of divine rest, the analogy seemed quite proper in many people’s minds. Out of this sort of thinking came a great thrust toward the end of the last century to finish the job. Well, obviously we all know that the magical Y2K year has come and gone and we are all still here on Planet Earth with the job of world evangelism still unfinished. Let’s take a look at where we actually stand as the human race has stepped into the twenty-first century and the third millennium.
A majority of Christians today fail to have a vision for the nations because they simply do not have the theological perspective to compel them to evangelize either at home or abroad. One out of three evangelical college and seminary students believes that those who have not heard the gospel can still be saved. Fifty-two percent of Americans believe that good people go to heaven, and forty-five percent of those who say that they are born-again also believe this. If the theology of the Reformers hampered the Protestants from launching missionary work, this sort of theology will soon bring our present mission thrust to a screeching halt.
Most Christian leaders really lack a vision for reaching the world. An example can be seen in our Bible schools and seminaries where ninety-five of the ministers in training plan to minister in the United States — home of only five percent of the world’s population. Though one third of the world’s population claims to be Christian, only six hundred eighty million can be described as “Great Commission Christians.” The number of missionaries around the world today is one hundred thirty eight thousand four hundred ninety-two, of whom sixty-four thousand three hundred seventy-eight are from North America. Worldwide, there are twenty-four missionaries for every million people. In Asia, that number is nine; in the Middle East, it is seven — figures that are not all that promising. Of this already insufficient number of missionaries, an average of one out of every twenty (five point seven percent) leave the field annually, and of those leaving seventy-one percent leave due to preventable causes — personal deficiencies or lack of support. This is an attrition of twenty-one thousand seven hundred twenty-six long-term missionaries over a four-year period. The number of missionaries who have served at least one year on field plunged from over fifty thousand in 1988 to just over forty thousand in 1996 before rebounding to forty-three thousand in 1999. In Brazil in 1993, it was reported that the vast majority of the fifty-four hundred missionaries who had gone out in the past five years had returned within a year and that ninety percent of these did not go back. Forty percent of all Latin American missionaries leave their assignments early because of discouragement and lack of funding.
In addition to problems in going, there are also great deficits in the area of sending. Even though annual missions giving stands at about three billion dollars, this is only a small percentage of the total seventy-six billion dollars in annual religious giving, and it pales in comparison to the total personal income of over eight trillion dollars. The average American gives one penny per day to global missions. One one-hundredth of one percent of the average Christian family’s income goes to reaching the 10/40 Window, the least evangelized nations of the world which have only three percent of the world’s mission force. The typical American church spends two percent of its budget on local evangelism. In traditional mainline churches, giving declined from just over three percent of the members’ after-tax income in 1968 to just over two and a half percent in 1990.
There are six thousand five hundred twenty-eight languages in the world, four thousand two hundred ninety-five of which have no translation of the Bible. Eighty-five percent of all the Bibles in the world are in English while only nine percent of world’s population can read English. Of the two thousand two hundred thirty-three languages in which at least portions of the scripture are available, only three hundred seventy-one have the complete Bible and sixty others have the full New Testament. Thirty percent of the languages in Africa have no scripture; five percent of the languages in the Americas are without translations; twenty percent of the tongues in the Pacific do not have any part of the Bible; five percent of the Eurasian tongues are still waiting for the scripture; and forty percent of the Asian languages have yet to convey the message. Even when the scriptures are made available, the problem of world evangelism will not be solved since there are over two billion people who can’t read the language they speak. To this end, mission strategists have identified two hundred seventy-nine megalanguages which are spoken by at least one million people. An effort has been initiated to target these languages with Christian radio programming with broadcasts in ten to fifteen of these languages being added each year. The Jesus Film Project has been very aggressive in presenting the gospel movie to almost three billion people in nearly six hundred languages. Yet in spite of such goliath attempts, there are still one and a half billion people alive today who have never heard the gospel — and that number is expected to increase to more than one and two-thirds billion by 2025. There are at least four thousand people groups with no viable Christian witness.
There has also been a significant shift in the demographics of the Christian world. In 1960, about fifty-eight percent of all professing Christians lived in the West. By 1990, this number had fallen to thirty-eight percent, and by 2000 it was about thirty-one percent. Today, seventy percent of the evangelicals in the world live in what we call “traditional mission fields,” but we still invest ninety percent of our mission resources into these same areas. Today one third of earth’s six billion people are Christian in name at least. Most of the current growth is in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. From 1960 to 1990, the number of evangelicals in the West grew from fifty-eight million to ninety-six million, while outside the West the number multiplied from twenty-nine million to two hundred eight million. Pentecostals, who multiplied from zero in 1900 to over half a billion in 2000, are growing at a rate of eight percent per year — that’s fifty percent higher than the growth rate of evangelicals in general. In 1900, there were one thousand eight hundred eighty denominational bodies in the world; that number grew to thirty thousand in 2000, but the remarkable fact is that most of this growth was outside the West and the majority were Pentecostal or charismatic. In 1900, Seoul, Korea, had no Christian churches and was considered the hardest place in the world to evangelize; by 2000, it had the largest church in the world and several of the other twenty-five largest congregations on the planet. Presently, many mission nations are becoming sending nations with South Korea and India each having sent out four thousand missionaries and Nigeria’s Evangelical Missionary Society having sent out a thousand.
Unfortunately, this numerical growth is not coupled with solid biblical training. Only about five percent of the two million pastors around the world have any formal training, and there are only one hundred programs of higher education for evangelical leaders outside the West. The result is a movement that many have called “a mile wide but only a few inches deep.” Evidence of this lack of substance can be readily seen in the six thousand independent churches in Africa of which approximately one third are messianic, meaning that they have a person in leadership who is recognized as divine. Yet, as we are tracking the growth among the mission nations, many mission strategists have begun to label Europe as the new “Dark Continent” because of the low interest in Christianity and the rising Muslim population. One tragic symbol of the backsliding characteristic of Europe is the Baptist Church in Leicester, England, from which William Carey left in 1793 to carry the gospel to Hindus saying, “Yonder in India is a gold mine. I will descend and dig, but you at home must hold the ropes.” These “ropes” were released, and today the building is a Hindu temple.
Today the world is still filled with unreached people groups in which less than two percent of the population are evangelical Christians. Although these unreached people groups are scattered among various world cultures, the majority of them are primarily in five major cultural blocks which are located geographically in what some scholars call “The 10/40 Window.” This window stretches from West Africa across to Asia between 10 and 40 degrees latitude north of the equator. There are three thousand two hundred seventy-six unreached Muslim groups which constitute over one billion three hundred thousand individuals (roughly one sixth of the world’s population), two thousand five hundred fifty unreached tribal groups representing one hundred forty million individuals, two thousand four hundred twenty-five unreached Hindu groups consisting of nine hundred million individuals, four hundred fifty unreached Mandarin Chinese groups comprised of almost eight hundred million souls, and five hundred fifty-two unreached Buddhist groups totaling three hundred seventy-five million people. Over two billion people live in these unreached people groups, and every day some fifty thousand of them perish without having heard the gospel — about twenty-six million every year!
American Christians spend ninety-five percent of our church offerings on home-based ministry and about four and a half percent on cross-cultural efforts in already-reached people groups, while less than one percent goes toward blessing these unreached peoples. Even though these statistics may seem staggering, in actuality American evangelicals could provide all of the funds needed to plant a church in each of the sixty-four hundred people groups by using only two tenths of a percent of our income. In terms of manpower, even if all the missionaries needed were to come from the USA, less than one half of one percent of evangelicals between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five would be needed to form the teams necessary to complete the task. The truth is that the church of Christ has over one hundred times the resources needed to plant native churches in these people groups; we just simply need to re-prioritize and re-allocate.
Robertson McQuilkin, the chancellor of Colombia International University and a former missionary to Japan, wrote, “Angle the statistics in an optimistic way and speak theoretically in percentages, and we are winning the war. Look at the task remaining in terms of the sheer numbers of people who will live somewhere forever, and who now have no chance to hear, and the cause seems hopeless.” Yes, I agree with Mr. McQuilkin; the future is very promising, although the picture does seem bleak in some ways. However, there is one factor that we must not overlook — the prophetic Word of God. If He said it, He will see that it comes to pass. (Psalm 119:89, 106; Ezekiel 12:25) And He has said that all the nations of the earth will receive His message — repeatedly! If you skip all the way to the back of the book (Revelation) where the final punch line of the story is told, you’ll find clear statements declaring that we win! To quote William Carey, “The future is as bright as the promises of God.”
If we were to look carefully at the scripture, I believe that we might see a principle of progression concerning the promises of God; they become prayers and then prophetic proclamations. Let’s take just a minute to trace this development concerning one specific promise. In Numbers 14:21, the Lord declared, “But as truly as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the LORD.” This promise became a prayer — in fact, King David’s final prayer in Psalm 72:19-20 was, “Let the whole earth be filled with his glory; Amen, and Amen. The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.” The prophets established it as a proclamation when Daniel affirmed that a stone cut without hands would smite the image of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and then become a great mountain that would fill the whole earth. (verse 2:35) Isaiah and Habakkuk more specifically echoed the original promise when they said that knowledge of the Lord (or knowledge of the glory of the Lord) would fill the earth as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9, Habakkuk 2:14) With the confirmation of two or three witnesses, this promise is unequivocally established. (Deuteronomy 19:15, Matthew 18:16, II Corinthians 13:1)
By this point, it seems certain that we should not doubt that there will come a time when the whole earth will be inundated with the gospel message. The Lord will certainly ensure that His promise comes to fulfillment (I Samuel 3:19, Romans 3:4) because He is not negligent concerning His promises (II Peter 3:9), but rather faithful in fulfilling all of them (Deuteronomy 7:9; I Corinthians 1:9, 10:13; I Peter 4:19; Revelation 3:14).
Many of His promises specifically state that the job of global evangelism will eventually be completed:
All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the LORD: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee. (Psalm 22:27)
Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him. (Psalm 72:11)
His name shall endure for ever: his name shall be continued as long as the sun: and men shall be blessed in him: all nations shall call him blessed. (Psalm 72:17)
Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations. (Psalm 82:8)
All nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before thee, O Lord; and shall glorify thy name. (Psalm 86:9)
And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD’S house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. (Isaiah 2:2)
The LORD hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God. (Isaiah 52:10)
For I know their works and their thoughts: it shall come, that I will gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come, and see my glory. (Isaiah 66:18)
At that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of the LORD; and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the name of the LORD, to Jerusalem: neither shall they walk any more after the imagination of their evil heart. (Jeremiah 3:17)
And it shall be to me a name of joy, a praise and an honour before all the nations of the earth, which shall hear all the good that I do unto them: and they shall fear and tremble for all the goodness and for all the prosperity that I procure unto it. (Jeremiah 33:9)
And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed. (Daniel 7:14)
And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the LORD of hosts. (Haggai 2:7)
And many nations shall be joined to the LORD in that day, and shall be my people: and I will dwell in the midst of thee, and thou shalt know that the LORD of hosts hath sent me unto thee. (Zechariah 2:11)
Yea, many people and strong nations shall come to seek the LORD of hosts in Jerusalem, and to pray before the LORD. Thus saith the LORD of hosts; In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you. (Zechariah 8:22-23)
After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands. (Revelation 7:9)
And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. (Revelation 11:15)
Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy: for all nations shall come and worship before thee; for thy judgments are made manifest. (Revelation 15:4)
Perhaps we should all brace ourselves for a “suddenly” from God — one of those moments when He appears and instantly changes everything, like when He showed up at the camp of the Syrian army outside the city of Samaria. Their siege of the city had left everyone inside starving to death to the point that some even resorted to cannibalism; yet the prophet promised that within twenty-four hours food would be available in almost unimaginable abundance — an unthinkable promise that suddenly came true when four leprous men decided to throw themselves on the mercy of the invaders and discovered that the camp was abandoned but that unspeakable riches and provision were left simply for the taking. (II Kings chapter seven)
When Hezekiah cleansed the temple and reinstituted proper worship, II Chronicles 29:36 records that he and the people all rejoiced because everything happened so suddenly. The Old Testament ends with a promise that the Lord will suddenly come into his temple to confirm His covenant with His people. (Malachi 3:1) On the first Christmas night, Luke 2:13 reports that suddenly an angelic choir appeared to the shepherds, praising God and declaring the birth of the Messiah. Mark 9:8 records how that the Old Testament characters who had been conversing with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration suddenly disappeared from sight. Acts 2:2 confirms that it was suddenly that the sound of a rushing mighty wind from heaven filled the Upper Room as the disciples were all filled with the Holy Spirit. Paul repeatedly confirmed that the encounter he had with Jesus on the road to Damascus came suddenly. (Acts 9:3, 22:6) He also reported that the earthquake which released him from the Philippian jail came suddenly. (Acts 16:26) As the Lord of everything, including time, God can — and often does — supernaturally make things happen overnight that we might have expected would never happen or at least would have taken years. Perhaps one of these “suddenlies” could be seen in a recent anonymous gift of $50 million to Wycliffe USA, a Bible translating organization, which will allow them to use cutting-edge translation techniques to accelerate the pace of language development and Bible translation for the world’s remaining language groups. The previous estimate that it would take between one hundred and one hundred fifty years to complete the task was suddenly cut overnight to a mere seventeen years! The president of Wycliffe has said that their organization is on target to have Bible translation projects underway in every known language that does not yet have the Bible in their native tongue by the year 2025. That means approximately two thousand two hundred fifty projects to go — but it is doable by God‘s sudden provision!