DISCLAMER: This Article was written by my amazing squad mate Shea Hendry & she has graciously allowed me to share it on my Blog. She does a great job of putting some perspective on the 10/40 and why our squad is heading there for a year! Thanks Shea!
Let’s talk facts for a minute. Five out of six non-Christians worldwide will die without ever hearing the gospel. Many will never hear the name Jesus spoken in their lifetime. That’s not an obscure conclusion based on the faulty data of a half-reliable survey, it’s reality.
The area between 10 and 40 degrees north of the Equator, crossing through North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, called the 10/40 Window, became a topic of discussion in response to the fact that 3.02 of the 4.89 billion people living within that region belong to what we call Unreached People Groups, meaning they have no access to the gospel. Unreached People Groups (or UPG’s) make up 42.2% of the world population.
There are around 6,900 languages spoken worldwide. At the end of 2016, there were only 636 languages with full bible translations. To put that into perspective, by some accounts, we have as many as 900 different English translations of the bible alone.
This isn’t a conversation of manpower or expense. There are roughly 6,700 Unreached People Groups total. If we want to reconcile that with the more than 6 million Christian churches worldwide, we have nearly 10,000 churches for every UPG. In truth, the international church has somewhere around 3,000 times the financial resources and 9,000 times the manpower needed to reach every nation on earth, but the disparity remains.
Of the roughly 2 billion Christians in the world, only 13,000 directly engage with UPGs. Somewhere around 10% of international Christian missionaries go to the 10/40 Window, and only a third of that total will work directly with Unreached People Groups. That means, “You have a better chance of being in a plane crash than being one of the few missionaries to the unreached out of the total 2 billion Christians in the world.”
The financial truth is possibly more sobering. If we talk money alone, Christians could plant a church in every single UPG with 0.03% of their income, but only about 1% of money given to missions goes towards the 10/40 Window. More money is embezzled by the church each year than is spent on missions.
In 2015, $700 billion was given towards Christian causes. That’s about equal to the amount of money spent on Christmas alone that year. Of that $700 billion, 6.4% was allocated towards missions, reaching a total that’s about equal to the amount Americans spend on dieting programs.
“Until recently, Americans gave less money to reach the unreached than they spent buying Halloween costumes…for their pets.”
We can talk about missions in regard to spiritual or physical needs. They’re not so separate. Over eighty-percent of the poorest of the world’s poor, most surviving on less than $500 per year, and, similarly, over eighty-percent of those considered to have the lowest quality of life based on measures of life expectancy, infant mortality, and literacy live within the 10/40 Window, and still, we’re not going.
In Matthew 28:19, we are commanded to go and make disciples of all nations, not just the easiest to reach ones. In Matthew 24:14, we’re told the gospel will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. We’re not there yet. And in Revelations 7:9, we’re given the image of heaven populated by people of every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.
How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? How are they to hear unless someone tells them? How will we tell them, if we never go?
If we honestly believe Jesus Christ died for the sake of every single person alive today, then he’s who we’re hurting when we fail to act. There was a very real cross, and a very real man, who made a real sacrifice for people we’re allowing to die without ever knowing his name.
We can do better. We have to do better because there are billions of people all over the world who deserve the opportunity to make the choice we all take for granted.
There are so many things you can do in response to the unreached, but I’d like to invite you to follow this blog. I’m no expert, and I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll be leaving in August to spend about 11 months in the 10/40 Window and this is just the beginning of a conversation I’d really like to start. Please click on the “Subscribe to Blog” link on the left hand side of your screen.
If you’d like to know more about anything mentioned in this blog, please visit: https://joshuaproject.net/ or http://www.thetravelingteam.org/stats/.
