Monday, March 18, 2013

From: Steve Hill To: the Least and the Last

Hello Friends,

A short google search about evangelism among unreached people groups will yield several different variations of the reality that  only 10% of mission effort is directed towards unreached people groups and only 0.1% of mission funding goes to reach these groups.  If you have been following my musings for any length of time you will know that I think that  most of the christian world has its priorities totally messed up.  If the money we spend on buildings was invested in the poor,  we could provide clean water, food and education for the portion of the world that lives on less than $2.00 per day.  We have the means and the resources but we spend them on ourselves and the tragedy is that much of the majority world is copying our foolishness and building their own monuments to themselves.

To send a westerner to most of the unreached people groups is a very expensive and time consuming exercise and in many cases a futile one.  Even if they are allowed to live in the area, even if they become fluent in the language, and even if they chose to actually live among the people, they will always be outsiders and looked upon with suspicion if not hostility.  Jesus may ask certain individuals to do this but the difficulty of doing so is why the vast majority of cross cultural missionaries go to places with comparatively easy access, that are English speaking and have a nice climate.  (A close friend just returned from a vacation destination African nation and was surprised by the number of western NGOs working there!)

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(Steve's email goes on to describe a truly extraordinary eastern missionary reaching unreached people)

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