9 The Need for Frontier Missions

The Need for Frontier Missions

My assumption is that people without the gospel are without hope, because only the gospel can free them from their sin. Therefore missions is utterly essential in the life of a loving church, though not all Christians believe this.

Walbert Buhlmann, a Catholic missions secretary in Rome, spoke for many mainline denominational leaders when he said,

In the past we had the so-called motive of saving souls. We were convinced that if not baptized, people in the masses would go to hell. Now, thanks be to God, we believe that all people and all religions are already living in the grace and love of God and will be saved by God's mercy.3

Sister Emmanuelle of Cairo, Egypt, said, "Today we don't talk about conversion any more. We talk about being friends. My job is to prove that God is love and to bring courage to these people."4

It is natural to want to believe in a God who saves all men no matter what they believe or do. But it is not biblical.5 Essential teachings of Scripture must be rejected to believe in such a God. Listen to the words of the Son of God when he called the apostle Paul into missionary service:

I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and bear witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles-to whom I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me. (Acts 26:16-18)

This is an empty commission if in fact the eyes of the nations don't need to be opened, and they don't need to turn from darkness to light, and don't need to escape the power of Satan to come to God, and don't need the forgiveness of sins that comes only by faith in Christ who is preached by the Lord's ambassadors. Paul did not give his life as a missionary to Asia and Macedonia and Greece and Rome and Spain to inform people they were already saved. He gave himself that "by any means [he] might save some" ( 1 Corinthians 9:22).

So when Paul's message about Christ was rejected (for example, at Antioch by the Jews), he said, "Since you thrust the word of God from you and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles" (Acts 13 :46). At stake in missionary outreach to unreached peoples is eternal life! Conversion to Christ from any and every other allegiance is precisely the aim. "For there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).

The Justice of God in Judgment and Salvation

God is not unjust. No one will be condemned for not believing a message they have never heard. Those who have never heard the gospel will be judged by their failure to own up to the light of God's grace and power in nature and in their own conscience. This is the point of Romans 1:20-21.

Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse: for although they knew God they did not glorify him as God or give thanks to him.

Apart from the special, saving grace of God, people are dead in sin, darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God and hardened in heart (Ephesians 2:1, 4:18). And the means God has ordained to administer that special saving grace is the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I am a debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish; so I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel: It is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. (Romans 1:14-16)

The Effects of Universalism on Missions

The notion that people are saved without hearing the gospel has wreaked havoc in the missions effort of denominations and churches that minimize the biblical teaching of human lostness without Christ. Between 1953 and 1980, the overseas missionary force of mainline Protestant churches of North America decreased from 9,844 to 2,813, while the missionary force of evangelical Protestants, who take this biblical teaching more seriously, increased by more than 200 percent. The Christian and Missionary Alliance, for example, with its 200,000 members, supports forty percent more missionaries than the United Methodist Church with its 9.5 million members. There is amazing missionary power in taking seriously all the Word of God.6

Many Christians thought the end of the colonial era after the Second World War was also the end of foreign missions. The gospel had more or less penetrated every country in the world. But what we have become keenly aware of in the last generation is that the command of Jesus to make disciples of "every nation" does not refer to political nations as we know them today. Nor does it mean every individual, as though the great commission could not be completed until every individual were made a disciple.

What Are People Groups?

We are increasingly aware that the intention of God is for every "people group" to be evangelized-that a thriving church be planted in every group. No one can exactly define what a people group is. But we get a rough idea from passages like Revelation 7:9.

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb ....

It is almost impossible to draw precise distinctions between "nations," "tribes," "peoples" and "tongues." But what is clear is that God's redemptive purpose is not complete just because there are disciples of Jesus in all twentieth-century "nations," i.e., political states. Within those countries are thousands of tribes and castes and subcultures and languages.

So the remaining task of Frontier Missions no longer is conceived mainly in geographic terms. The question now is, "Where are the unreached people groups?"7

Since the first edition of Desiring God appeared in 1986 there has been tremendous progress in the cooperation of mission agencies, denominations and churches in the tasks of researching and evangelizing the unreached peoples of the world. There is now basic agreement that "of the 12,000 known ethno-linguistic peoples in the world, 10,000 already have a church-planting movement in their midst. . . . [At the end of 1994, of the 2,000 groups remaining ] only 1,000 have virtually no penetration. . . . Today we have a target list of least-evangelized peoples that is being revised each year to reflect greater accuracy. The 100 largest of these peoples . . . represent almost two billion people."8 They are found mainly in the Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Animist peoples of the so-called 10/40 Window.9 It seems to me that Rick Wood is not overstating things when he says, "Never before in Christian history has there been such a large movement with so many sincere believers, churches denominations and agencies working together toward the common goal of a church for every people. This level of global cooperation is unprecedented."10

Missionsis Finishable, But Not Evangelism

To keep us sober in our estimates of the remaining task of reaching the unreached people groups of the world, Ralph Winter reminds us of two facts.

First, evangelism can never be finished, but missions can be finished. The reason is this: missions has the unique task of crossing language and culture barriers to penetrate a people group and establish a church movement; but evangelism is the ongoing task of sharing the gospel among people within the same culture. This fact allows us to talk realistically about "closure" -- the completion of the missionary task, even if there may be millions of people yet to be won to Christ in all the people groups of the world where the church has been planted.

The second fact Winter reminds us of is that there are probably more people groups than the ones listed among the 12,000 ethno-linguistic groups mentioned above. He illustrates by pointing out that tribal divisions along the lines of mutually unintelligible dialects may vary depending on whether the dialect is spoken or written. So, for example, Wycliffe Bible translators may detect that a translation of the Bible is readable in a dialect covering a wide area, while Gospel Recordings may determine that seven or more different audio recordings are needed because of the audible distinctions in the larger dialect.

Thus Winter asks, which level of people group did Jesus have in mind when he said, "This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the peoples, and then the end will come" (Matthew 24:14)? His answer: "We'll find out . . . the closer we get to the situation. In the meantime we need to live with guesses. . . . We can only learn more as we go! And at this hour greater human resources are looming into view than have ever been available to the unfinished task!"11

The point of these observations is that the job of Frontier Missions is not complete. In fact the vast majority of missionaries are working on "fields" where the church has been planted for decades. The need for frontier missionaries is great. The Lord's command to disciple the remaining unreached groups is still in force. And my burden in this chapter is to kindle a desire in your heart to be part of the last chapter of the greatest story in the world.

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