There are two main expectations binding on every believer; that we love God and that we love man.[1] To put it another way, we are to be disciples and make disciples. After all, what’s more loving to another person than leading them to the Lord?
Whether foreign or domestic, those who follow Jesus are lovingly required to participate in the Great Commission; the Christian commission.[2] Full participation from individual believers is necessary for the Church as a whole to remain obedient to the Great Commission. Because we are a body, it’s not possible for our little finger to minister alone. We must work together with the rest of the body. In other words, the Great Commission is for every believer, not just for full-time ministers or missionaries.
Now there is a particular element of the Great Commission that demands prioritized attention: the population of people on earth who do not currently have access to the good news. To our chagrin and shame, more than two-thousand years after the greatest event in human history—God in the flesh sacrificing Himself for sin-stained humanity—there are still entire people groups on earth who have not been told. We refer to these groups of people as “unreached.”[3]
The souls of men in nations that have access to the gospel are valuable to God and should be to us. But we must make a distinction between the those who live in regions of the world that have had access to the Gospel for centuries and those who haven't. Put simply, we should prioritize unreached people because the reached have already been.
When William Carey first set his sights on India, then one of the largest altogether unreached nations on the earth (which still demands our attention), he didn’t set out to blaze a trail on his own. That would have been foolish. He knew frontier ministry was no game, and not for the faint of heart. He knew he couldn’t do it alone. His friends within his believing community—his “small group,” if you will—rallied around him. They likened the work he was taking on like that of the men in their neighborhood who worked in the coal mines. It was a necessary, dirty, life-threatening task. Some went down into the mines, and others held the rope to facilitate the work below. Their commitment to the man who became the “father of modern missions” was this: You go down, and we’ll hold the rope.
Carey’s work wasn’t supported by rich men with large inheritances and Fortune 500 companies. Farmers and rural blue-collar types made something beautiful possible: Carey didn’t simply “build foundations where there were none.”[4] He provoked a generation to give a display of Jesus’ preeminence and worth that catalyzed a new era of frontier missions. The margins gaping between “unreached” and “reached” closed significantly because of men and women who followed William Carey to the field. Fruit borne from their labors means this: we will meet people on the sea of glass[5] who met Jesus because Carey and his buddies who held the rope.
“Alliance” is in our name as an organization because we so value these kinds of partnerships. Carey couldn’t do his work alone, and we certainly wouldn’t presume to either. No one can go into the mine without a team of beloved friends willing to hold the rope. Below is a list of ministries working amongst the unreached in the Middle East we’d like to recommend to you. Prayerfully consider including frontier missions in your giving budget. Consider sowing into our friends. We’re grateful for their work, and for your support and solidarity.
THE REFUGE INITIATIVE: Money that you give will go directly to ministry among those displaced by the Syrian Civil War and the Islamic State. You can learn more about The Refuge Initiative in our film Better Friends Than Mountains. They are a ministry of World Orphans, another organization we love and heartily commend.
Click here to read more and donate
GLOBAL CATALYTIC MINISTRIES INTERNATIONAL (GCMI): Money that you give will go directly to supporting disciple-making movements of predominantly Muslim background believers working in restrictive nations in the Islamic world. You can learn more about GCMI in our new film Sheep Among Wolves.
Click here to read more and donate
ANTIOCH CENTER FOR TRAINING AND SENDING (ACTS): Money that you give will go directly to training, sending and supporting foreign and national laborers pouring their lives out in the hardest and darkest places on earth.
Click here to read more and donate
FRONTIER ALLIANCE INTERNATIONAL (FAI): Money that you give will go to pioneer initiatives in the Middle East. We are focusing considerable energy and resources into Iraq and Syria in 2018. In fact, most of our resources in 2018 will go toward pioneer initiatives in and around Iraq. To learn more about FAI, we suggest watching our films in our free film library, and browsing our FAI Relief dispatches here.
Jordan Scott lives in the Muslim world with his wife and children. He is the host of THE WAY podcast and author of A Call to Compel: The Simplicity, Urgency, and Joy of Making Disciples, available now from FAI Publishing. Jordan can be reached by email at jordan@faimission.org.
[1] Matthew 22:36-40
[2] Matthew 28:18
[3] An unreached or least-reached people is a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group without outside assistance. (https://joshuaproject.net/help/definitions)
[4] Romans 15:20
[5] Revelation 15:2
