“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you … and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:2-3).
“… and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
Forty percent of the people alive today, four in ten, have no meaningful access to the gospel. They are not unchurched. They are not nominally religious. They live in places where the message of Jesus has never arrived in a form they could understand, receive and pass on to someone else. If they wanted to follow Christ tomorrow, they would not know where to begin because no one near them does.
That is not a statistic. It is a moral emergency.
I know how easy it is to read a line like that, feel a flicker of concern and move on to the next thing on the calendar. For most of my ministry, the nations were an idea I believed in and rarely thought about. My wife, Marietta, and I were focused, almost entirely, on our own local church. Then some close friends challenged us with a question we could not shake: was the scope of our ministry large enough? God was not only interested in using our church to reach our community they said. He wanted to use our church to reach people in the world who have no access to the gospel at all. That challenge only deepened through travel abroad, including trips to Zambia and to South Africa for the International Conference of The Wesleyan Church. And it was shaped most of all by the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course that Marietta and I worked through together. After exploring God’s global purpose through this course, something shifted that has not shifted back. You cannot see what God is doing across the world and keep a small map of his mission.
The scope of God’s mission was never narrow. The first time God called a person to follow him, in Genesis 12, the promise was global from the opening line: “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (v. 3). Abram was blessed in order to be a blessing, chosen not as a destination but as a doorway. The story that runs from that promise all the way to the throne room of Revelation, where John sees “persons from every tribe and language and people and nation” (5:9), is a single story. God has been pursuing the nations from the beginning and has invited the church into the pursuit.
When Jesus gave his disciples their assignment in Acts 1:8, he did not hand them a sequence to complete one stage at a time. He told them they would be his “witnesses in Jerusalem, and in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” all at once. Jerusalem did not have to be finished before Samaria could begin. The local and the global were never meant to compete for a church’s attention. They are two expressions of the same heartbeat. God loves the people down the street and the people on the other side of the world. A healthy church learns to hold both without choosing between them.
This is the insight that reframed missions in our lifetime. Ralph Winter, whose work shapes the Perspectives course, helped the church see that the Great Commission is not finished when the gospel reaches every country. It is finished when it reaches every people. There are nations on the map that have thriving churches in their capital cities and entire peoples within their borders who have never once heard the name of Jesus. The remaining task is not mostly geographic. It is cultural and relational. It is about peoples, not just places. That is why “reached” and “unreached” are the words that matter, and why four in ten is the number that should keep us awake.
I can hear the objection, because I have made it myself. We are a district of churches in central and northern Indiana. Some of our congregations are small, rural and stretched thin. How can a church that is fighting to keep its own lights on carry the weight of the nations? Here is the honest answer. A church that is so focused on its own community that it never lifts its eyes past the county line is not being a faithful steward of its community. It is missing the full scope of the God it claims to serve. Global responsibility is not a reward for churches that have already arrived. It belongs to the discipleship of every church, the small ones included.
We have plenty to do right here. Three million Hoosiers claim no religious affiliation at all. Indiana is a mission field, and we will keep saying so. But Indiana (North America) is not the end of our mission field. It is the beginning of it.
So let me put a concrete step in front of you and let me frame it honestly. Adopting an unreached people group as a church is not a budget line item you debate in November. It is a discipleship decision. When a congregation chooses a specific people, learns their name, prays for them by name, gives toward them and asks who among us might be sent, that decision quietly reshapes everything. It changes how you pray on Sunday. It changes what your children grow up believing is normal. It changes the kind of leaders you raise up, because you are raising them for a world and not merely for a building. A church that prays for the nations slowly becomes a church that thinks like the God who made them.
The Crossroads District is committed to Indiana and to the ends of the earth, and we will not settle for a vision that stops at our borders. The mission was global before we arrived. It will be global long after we are gone. The only question worth asking is whether we will join it.
For reflection this week:
- If your church’s mission stops at your county line, what does that say about the God you believe in?
- What one step could your church take in the next six months to move from awareness of the global need to active participation in meeting it?
- Who in your congregation might be called to global mission, and are you creating the kind of environment where that calling can surface?
Click here to read this and other Crossroads’ team updates.
Rev. Dr. Chris Williams is the Crossroads’ interim district superintendent.
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