This is the third in a series of eight short posts. They are direct quotes from the last few pages of John Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life and I have found them to be informative, stirring, challenging, and/or motivating and so wanted to share them with you.
The remaining posts will appear each Friday for the next 5 weeks. If you enjoy reading them as much as I did you can download a free copy of this book here (link sourced from this page).
One way to describe the situation is to say that about 1.2-1.4 billion people have never had a chance to hear the Gospel;1 that is, they live in cultures where the preaching of the Gospel in understandable ways is not accessible. Other analysts estimate the number of unevangelized somewhat higher. For example, the “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission 2002″ by David Barrett and Todd Johnson reports that there are 1,645,685,000 unevangelized people in the world. That means 26.5 percent of the world’s population live in people groups that do not have indigenous evangelizing churches.2” 3
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1 – Patrick Johnstone, The Church Is Bigger Than You Think (Ross-shire, England: Christian Focus, 1998), 215. Johnstone is more optimistic than Barrett in his numbers: About 20% of the world’s population are unevangelized; 47% are non-Christians living where they are likely to be evangelized; and 33% are professing Christians.
2 – David B. Barrett and Todd M. Johnson, “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission 2002,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 26 (January 2002): 22-23.
3 – John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life, (Wheaton, Illinois: 2003), 173.
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Tags: Unreached peoples
