At the first Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization held in Switzerland in 1974, Dr. Ralph Winter introduced the concept of “unreached peoples,” people groups with little to no access to the gospel. Being unreached does not mean that people are lost or can hear or have heard the gospel and choose not to believe it; they cannot hear or accept the gospel because no one around them knows it. Over three billion people have yet to hear the name of Jesus.
Over three billion people worldwide cannot hear or accept the gospel because no one around them knows it.
According to the latest data, a staggering 5.7 billion of the world’s population are oral learners. These are individuals who are either completely illiterate, functionally illiterate, visually or hearing impaired, or part of an oral culture. Half of this population are children, and the majority of the remaining unreached people groups are oral societies. This is a significant challenge, considering we are still working to translate and give the Bible to literate societies who do not yet have Scripture in their language.
Out of the 7,396 living languages in the world, only 744 have a complete Bible, and just half of all living languages have some Scripture available to them. So, what does this mean for oral learners and the next generation of oral societies regarding their access to the gospel and having God’s Word made available to them in their heart language and their preferred mode of learning?
We Look to Jesus
After considering what is affectionately called the Hall of Faith in Hebrews 11, the author encourages us to not only lay aside every hindrance and sin that easily entangles us but to run with endurance the race that is set before us while keeping our eyes on Jesus (Hebrews 12:1–2).
With the data before us regarding the difficulty of getting the gospel and Bibles to unreached oral learners, we can be discouraged, hopeless, and tempted to give up. But when we look to Jesus and consider the character of our omniscient, omnipresent, and sovereign God, we should be all the more invigorated to keep our collective hands on the plow.
While both literate and oral peoples may be currently unreached by the gospel and without the Bible in their heart language by our efforts, they have not been forgotten by God. For the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross. In this generation, we too can endure our missional cross of exhausting our lives for the sake of the gospel with joy because we know that we serve a living God who is mighty to save (Isaiah 63:1b). He has been seeking and saving the lost peoples of all modalities (Luke 19:10; John 9:1–38), and he will continue to do so as all of human history points toward his final return.
As a global worker in Bible translation in alliance with other translation organizations, we are reminded by God’s Word that it is not by our might, our power, or our strategies but by the wisdom and leading of the Spirit, who will equip us to reach these least reached peoples with his truth in the modes they best learn and understand. The Lord knows that his global multimodal bride needs his Word to mature and attain the whole measure of the fullness of Christ (Ephesians 4:13). Therefore, we seek Jesus until all have heard.
We Pray to The Lord of The Harvest
Jesus saw the crowds and had compassion for them, then he told his disciples to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers (Matthew 9:36–38). We, too, are encouraged to boldly bend our dependent knees in active faith before his throne of grace to find grace and help in this time of great need (Hebrews 4:16).
Through prayer, we surrender our will, lay down our pride and independence in this work, and seek the power of God to do what we cannot do in our strength. Through prayer, we intercede on behalf of those who have yet to hear God’s word in their heart language. We know that faith comes by hearing the word of God (Romans 10:17), so we pray that the Lord will specifically burden and set apart workers to serve in oral contexts.
We Join in His Mission
Considering the plentiful harvest of the unreached, there is no shortage of ways to get involved in God’s Great Commission, which means including contexts very different from ours. By praying, sending, and going to these oral contexts, we declare to Jesus that he is, in fact, worth every discomfort and trial we may face (2 Timothy 2:10) and that his image bearers who learn and understand in modes different than us need access to him and his Word in the way they best can understand. We embrace the totality of Acts 1:8 and bear witness by his power to the farthest reaches of the earth to ensure that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord for salvation can grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ (2 Peter 3:18) by his Word.
We labor to the day when people whom Jesus purchased by his blood from every tribe, language, people, and nation will gather and worship him in glory. In Matthew 28, Jesus is recorded telling His disciples to “go into all nations,” so we seek the Lord, pray, and go into all contexts of varied modalities to make his name, gospel, and Word accessible until all have heard.
Morgan Davis is a field staff missionary with unfoldingWord, a church-centric Bible Translation organization working among the unreached. Additionally, Morgan joyfully serves as the Director of Missions for Northwest Baptist Church in Maryland, is a Biblical Studies major at Lancaster Bible College, and serves on the Sex Abuse Reform Task Force for the Baptist Convention of Maryland and Delaware. She is married to the love of her life, Chris, and together, they have three remarkable children: Isaac, Kenneth, and Hannah.
