In Christianity, an unreached people group refers to an
ethnic group
An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...
without an indigenous, self-propagating
Christian
Christians () are people who follow or adhere to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The words ''Christ'' and ''Christian'' derive from the Koine Greek title ''Christós'' (Χρι ...
church movement. Any ethnic or
ethnolinguistic
Ethnolinguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics) is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language and the nonlinguistic cultural behavior of the people who speak that language.
__NOTOC__
Examples ...
nation without enough Christians to evangelize the rest of the nation is an "unreached people group". It is a missiological term used by
Evangelical Protestant
Evangelicalism (), also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity that affirms the centrality of being "born again", in which an individual exper ...
s.
The
Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization
The Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, more commonly known as the Lausanne Movement, is a global movement that mobilizes evangelical leaders to collaborate for world evangelization. The stated vision is "the whole church taking the whole ...
defines a people group as "the largest group within which the
gospel
Gospel originally meant the Christian message (" the gospel"), but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was set out. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words a ...
can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance."
"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, Including nations where other forms of Christianity are prevalent such as
Western Catholicism,
Eastern Christianity
Eastern Christianity comprises Christian traditions and church families that originally developed during classical and late antiquity in Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, Northeast Africa, the Fertile Crescent an ...
or
Lutheranism
Lutheranism is one of the largest branches of Protestantism, identifying primarily with the theology of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German monk and Protestant Reformers, reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practice of the Cathol ...
.
The
Great Commission
In Christianity, the Great Commission is the instruction of the resurrected Jesus Christ to his disciples to spread the gospel to all the nations of the world. The Great Commission is outlined in Matthew 28:16– 20, where on a mountain i ...
of Christianity is a
biblical
The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of ...
mandate to make Christian disciples in every nation of the world. According to the biblical books of
Matthew, Mark and Luke, these were the final instructions of
Jesus Christ
Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label= Hebrew/ Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and relig ...
before he ascended into heaven. This is a basic tenet of Evangelical Christianity. Therefore, spreading Christianity to the remaining people groups without access to it is a goal of some adherents of the faith today.
See also
*
Uncontacted peoples
Uncontacted peoples are groups of indigenous peoples living without sustained contact with neighbouring communities and the world community. Groups who decide to remain uncontacted are referred to as indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. ...
References
{{Reflist
External links
* https://joshuaproject.net/help/definitions
* http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/november/1.44.html?start=4
* https://www.peoplegroups.org/understand/294.aspx#310
* http://www.lausanne.org
Etnopedia's Definition of a people group
Christian missions
Anthropology