Leaders of 29 denominations and Christian organizations met recently in Dallas to begin sharing information they possess about the 1.3 billion people around the world who have not heard the gospel sufficiently to accept or reject it. The missions leaders also grappled with the fact that the majority of their missionaries cannot go where most of the unevangelized live.
“This is a historic moment in cooperation in evangelical research,” said Samuel Wilson, senior research associate for the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. In the past, missions agencies sometimes concealed plans from one another, competing to be the first to launch work in countries or regions, said Wilson, who also directs research at the Zwemer Institute of Muslim Studies in Pasadena, California. “Now there is a totally different kind of spirit, a healthy spirit that says, ‘We will share information and we will cooperate with one another.’ ”
The meeting was a follow-up to one in September initiated by R. Keith Parks, Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board president (ct, Nov. 6, 1987, p. 52).
As a result of the meeting, missions-oriented groups will now have access to the SBC Foreign Mission Board data base listing the world’s ethnic-linguistic cultures, or “people groups,” and the extent to which they have been evangelized. This data base is the result of several years of work by missions researcher David Barrett and various SBC Foreign Mission Board staff.
By Art Toalston in Dallas.
