Are ‘Unreached People Groups’ Still a Thing?

Two years ago, I stood amid thousands at a missions conference in Bangkok as people prayed and sought God for discernment about how and where to be witnesses for Christ. The speakers challenged the crowd, who hailed from around Asia, to go to places where the gospel hadn’t yet been heard.

While approximately 40 percent of the world has yet to hear the Good News, most missionaries go to predominantly Christian or post-Christian contexts rather than to unreached people groups, Lausanne’s State of the Great Commission report noted last year.

But what do we mean when we use the term unreached people groups? The International Mission Board defines it as an ethnolinguistic group where evangelicals comprise 2 percent or less of the population. It’s a term that missions mobilizers and missionaries often use to point to the urgent and unfulfilled task given in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20).

Missiologists such as David Platt critiqued the term in 2019, arguing that the 2 percent threshold should not be the primary determining factor and that believers ought to focus on reaching unreached places as well.

Some have come up with alternative terms like unengaged unreached people groups (less than 2 percent evangelicals with no existing missionary efforts) or frontier people groups (less than 0.1 percent evangelical with no indigenous Christian movement). Others, including Brooks Buser, president of missionary training organization Radius International, and Chad Vegas, pastor of Sovereign Grace Church, pushed back against the criticism in 2020, noting that the apostle Paul gave “strategic primacy” to preaching in places where the gospel had not been heard (Rom. 15:20).

As technological advancements make us increasingly interconnected and as global migration patterns surge, can we still say a person or people group is “unreached”? Is the term unreached people groups still relevant and useful for missions in modern times? Can anyone be considered unreached if the Holy Spirit is always reaching people (Acts 17:26–27)? And is the term a help or hindrance for mission work in a Majority World context?

CT invited three experts to assess these questions from different angles: Chris Howles, a cross-cultural missions mobilizer, to weigh the effects of globalization, urbanization, and migration; Samuel Law, a Majority World missions researcher, to discuss the role and status of missionaries today; and Matthew Hirt, an author and lecturer, to examine Scripture’s proclamations about geography and evangelism.

We hope these essays probe your assumptions, enlarge your perspectives, and embolden you to do what King David sang in 1 Chronicles 16:24: “Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples.”

Isabel Ong is Asia editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Introduction".

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Also in this issue

As we enter the holiday season, we consider how the places to which we belong shape us—and how we can be the face of welcome in a broken world. In this issue, you’ll read about how a monastery on Patmos offers quiet in a world of noise and, from Ann Voskamp, how God’s will is a place to find home. Read about modern missions terminology in our roundtable feature and about an astrophysicist’s thoughts on the Incarnation. Be sure to linger over Andy Olsen’s reported feature “An American Deportation” as we consider Christian responses to immigration policies. May we practice hospitality wherever we find ourselves.