In Christianity, an unreached people group refers to an ethnic group without an indigenous, self-propagating Christian church movement. [1] Any ethnic or ethnolinguistic nation without enough Christians to evangelize the rest of the nation is an "unreached people group". It is a missiological [2] term used by Evangelical Protestants. [3] [4] The Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization defines a people group as "the largest group within which the gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance." [5] [6] "Nation" is sometimes used interchangeably for "people group". The term is sometimes applied to ethnic groups in which less than 2% of the population is Evangelical Protestant Christian, [7] [8] Including nations where other forms of Christianity are prevalent such as Western Catholicism, Eastern Christianity or Lutheranism. [9] [10] [11]
In Christianity, evangelism or witnessing is the act of preaching the gospel with the intention of sharing the message and teachings of Jesus Christ. It is sometimes associated with Christian missions.
The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) is an interdenominational organization of evangelical Christian churches with 600 million adherents that was founded in 1846 in London, England, to unite evangelicals worldwide. WEA is the largest international organization of evangelical churches. It has offices at the United Nations in New York City, Geneva, and Bonn. It brings together nine regional and 143 national evangelical alliances of churches, and over one hundred member organizations. Moreover, a number of international evangelical denominations are members of the WEA. As of March 2021, the Secretary General of the WEA is German theologian Thomas Schirrmacher.
World Vision International is an ecumenical Christian humanitarian aid, development, and advocacy organization. It was founded in 1950 by Robert Pierce as a service organization to provide care for children in Korea. In 1975, emergency and advocacy work was added to World Vision's objectives. It is active in over 100 countries with a total revenue including grants, product and foreign donations of USD $3.14 billion.
A Christian mission is an organized effort to carry on evangelism or other activities, such as educational or hospital work, in the name of the Christian faith. Missions involve sending individuals and groups across boundaries, most commonly geographical boundaries. Sometimes individuals are sent and are called missionaries, and historically may have been based in mission stations. When groups are sent, they are often called mission teams and they undertake mission trips. There are a few different kinds of mission trips: short-term, long-term, relational and those that simply help people in need. Some people choose to dedicate their whole lives to mission.
The Lausanne Covenant is a July 1974 religious manifesto promoting active worldwide Christian evangelism. One of the most influential documents in modern evangelicalism, it was written at the First International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, where it was adopted by 2,300 evangelicals in attendance.
The First International Congress on World Evangelization (ICOWE), also sometimes called the Lausanne Congress or Lausanne '74, was a Christian conference held from 16 to 25 July 1974 in Switzerland.
The 1910 World Missionary Conference, or the Edinburgh Missionary Conference, was held on 14 to 23 June 1910. Some have seen it as both the culmination of nineteenth-century Protestant Christian missions and the formal beginning of the modern Protestant Christian ecumenical movement, after a sequence of interdenominational meetings that can be traced back as far as 1854.
The Second International Congress on World Evangelization, often called Lausanne II or Lausanne '89, was a Christian conference held in Manila, Philippines in 1989.
Protestants in Myanmar make up 5% of that nation's population in 2023. Most Christians are from the minority ethnic groups such as Karen, Lisu, Kachin, Chin, and Lahu. An estimated 0.1% of the Bamar population is Christian.
The Hebrew Christian movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries consisted of Jews who converted to Christianity, but worshiped in congregations separate from denominational churches. In many cases, they retained some Jewish practices and liturgy, with the addition of readings from the Christian New Testament. The movement was incorporated into the parallel Messianic Jewish movement in the late 1960s.
Ralph Dana Winter was an American missiologist and Presbyterian missionary who helped pioneer Theological Education by Extension, raised the debate about the role of the church and mission structures and became well known as the advocate for pioneer outreach among unreached people groups. He was the founder of the U.S. Center for World Mission, William Carey International University, and the International Society for Frontier Missiology.
Christianity is the most prevalent religion in the United States. Estimates from 2021 suggest that of the entire U.S. population about 63% is Christian. The majority of Christian Americans are Protestant Christians, though there are also significant numbers of American Roman Catholics and other Christian denominations such as Latter Day Saints, Eastern Orthodox Christians and Oriental Orthodox Christians, and Jehovah's Witnesses. The United States has the largest Christian population in the world and, more specifically, the largest Protestant population in the world, with nearly 210 million Christians and, as of 2021, over 140 million people affiliated with Protestant churches, although other countries have higher percentages of Christians among their populations. The Public Religion Research Institute's "2020 Census of American Religion", carried out between 2014 and 2020, showed that 70% of Americans identified as Christian during this seven-year interval. In a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, 65% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians. They were 75% in 2015, 70.6% in 2014, 78% in 2012, 81.6% in 2001, and 85% in 1990. About 62% of those polled claim to be members of a church congregation.
Protestants in Thailand constitute about 0.77% of the population of Thailand. Protestant work among the Thai people was begun by Ann Judson in Burma, who evangelized Thai war captives who were relocated to Burma. Protestantism was introduced to the country of Thailand in 1828 through the work of Karl Gutzlaff and Jacob Tomlin, the first two resident Protestant missionaries in Thailand.
Evangelical Ministries to New Religions (EMNR) is a coalition of Christian countercult organizations. It was founded by Gordon Lewis, James Bjornstad, Ronald Enroth, and Walter Ralston Martin in 1982.
The Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, more commonly known as the Lausanne Movement, is a global movement that mobilizes Christian leaders to collaborate for world evangelization. The movement's fourfold vision is to see 'the gospel for every person, disciple-making churches for every people and place, Christ-like leaders for every church and sector, and kingdom impact in every sphere of society'.
Integral mission or holistic mission describes an understanding of Christian mission that embraces both evangelism and social responsibility. With origins in Latin American, integral mission has influenced a significant number of Protestants around the world through the Lausanne Movement.
The Joshua Project is an evangelical Christian organization based in Colorado Springs, United States, which seeks to coordinate the work of missionary organizations to track the ethnic groups of the world with the fewest followers of evangelical Christianity. To do so, it maintains ethnologic data to support Christian missions. It also tracks the evangelism efforts among 17,446 people groups worldwide—a people group being "the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement," according to the project's website—to identify people groups as of yet unreached by Christian evangelism.
Anglican Frontier Missions is an American-based Christian mission organization that "To plant biblically-based, indigenous churches where the church is not, among the 2 billion people and 6,000+ unreached people groups still waiting to hear the Gospel for the very first time."
Michael Young-Suk Oh is a Korean American evangelical and the Global Executive Director/CEO of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization.
International Student Ministry (ISM) refers to evangelical Christian ministry among international students within an academic context, often carried out by Protestant college religious organizations, volunteers and churches. It is considered part of the church's mission, within the broader framework of diaspora missions. The first two decades of the 21st century have seen a sharp growth in the number of international students globally with a corresponding development in ISM.
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