Unreached People Groups and How We Should Be Pursuing Them

UPG's, or Unreached People Groups are a group of people that have been placed on my heart heavily this past school year. We always hear growing up that we as Western Christians are lucky because of our access to the gospel at such an enormous scale, but do we really understand the weight of that opportunity, when we still have thousands of people groups (people groups are a population of people who share a common history and culture) that don't have that type of access to the gospel. There are over 7,000 unreached people groups today, of those 7,000 UPG's there are 3,000 groups that are known as Unengaged, Unreached People Groups (UUPG). These are people groups that are not only unreached (meaning that less than 1% of the population are Christian) but do not currently have missionaries engaging them in ministry. 

Now when looking at the Western Hemisphere we don’t have a large grouping of UPG’s because of the way the west was colonized with larger historically Christian countries, such as England, Spain, and France. Today most of the unreached people groups fall in an area known as the 10/40 window, which lies between the 40 degree and 10-degree parallels. This area is made up of people prescribing to the T.H.U.M.B model (Tribal, Hindu, Unreligious, Muslim, Buddhist), in each of the populations there is less than a 1% Christian population, and most of these people groups are not being pursued by any missionaries. Think of it, all these resources that we as westerners have, but there are people that no one is pursuing the gospel as of this moment. Meaning that there are people dying every day that will never get the chance to hear the name of Jesus. 




In America alone, we have over 300 unreached people groups living amongst us. I have the opportunity to live near a major one in the Twin Cities, which is the Somali people. These people are refugees that have had to flee their country because of a terrible civil war that has lasted ten years. But when they are seen in the community they are shunned, shamed, and ridiculed for coming to the U.S. Instead of being welcomed in by the Christian community, they have been cast aside and called terrorists, which is simply not true. There are evil people in the world that call themselves Muslims, but not all people who call themselves Muslim are evil people. Instead, we should be welcoming the Somali people and people like them who come into our country. Throwing politics aside, we are called to, “make disciples of all nations,” (Matthew 20:19) so why do we continue to cast out the nations from our church? We have a responsibility as Christians to welcome and to minister to these people regardless of our political beliefs, regardless of whether they’re legal or not. It is not our job to enforce laws that are still being argued over, but it is our job to love our neighbor (Matthew 22:39), which Jesus sites as the second greatest commandment, second only to, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37).

So I encourage you to reach out to your local community, get to know your neighbors, and love them, no matter what. Because whether you like it or not, we are the face of Jesus to these people, whether you agree with them or not, love them, minister to them. In Matthew chapter 22 we see Jesus speaking to the Pharisees who are trying to make Jesus look foolish. They ask him whether it is right to pay Roman taxes, so Jesus asks them for a coin and holding up the coin he asks them “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?’ ‘Caesar’s,’ they replied. Then he said to them, ‘So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” (Matthew 22:20-21). Now that last comment I always assumed that what Jesus was saying was that we should pay our taxes and pay our tithes like we should, but one of my professor’s explained it differently that makes more sense to me. Jesus was explaining that the coin belongs to Caesar because it reflected Caesar’s image on it, it had his picture and it had his inscription on it. When Jesus says, “to God what is God’s.” he is speaking of our heart which should one have the word of God written on our heart, and which should also reflect God. Because the more that God is reflected through us the more others can see God in us, the more effective we can be at sharing the gospel. I don’t say all of this out of ridicule or a higher-than mentality, but as a reminder to all of us, that God places certain people in our life for a reason, and we should take the chance to reach them as soon as we get. Because you might be the last conversation a person has before they decide to follow Jesus.