If you walk around Pei you for just a few minutes you may see polo shirts, cell phones, a few 10 watt solar panels and even a couple outboard motors. So why would we consider this place UNREACHED. The answer to the question can only be answered by answering this question first: Unreached with what? This question is critical to our time. We are approaching a time in missions as a whole where: benevolence, micro finance and in general socially good stuff is replacing the call to take the Gospel and Make Disciples. There is a generation of missionaries like me, raised in a millennial culture, covered in tattoos and have heard through churches and leaders that God wants us to address social injustice, poverty and marginalization as a means to dispense truth.
But here’s the snag. All these crowd funded organizations and movements start and help get solar and lights and phones and radios, and while it is well and good … We trade the good for the best. The Pei are UNREACHED because they never heard the Gospel in their heart language or had a discipler stick with them to fulfill the great commission. It doesn’t do any good to go to a nation of people and make them more comfortable, more educated, or more Connected all the while their eternal destiny of separation and punishment remains the same. How many tears will the Lord have to wipe away on the day he points out this fact to those who have peddled the things of this world as comparable to missionaries like Hudson Taylor, Sophie Mueller, Jim Elliot and the likes.
In Romans Paul talks of the UNREACHED in a similar way while explaining his absence from that Church
“I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ. It has been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation. Rather as it is written: ‘those who were not told about him will see, and those who have not heard will understand.” -Paul
Of all the good things that we can do for nations around the world, it will all pale in comparison to the Great Commision. When the ill fortune comes or the sickness or death in a village, the first things to be destroyed will be the phones, generators, panels, and lights. I have witnessed it! Their Lies need to be displaced by Truth and Discipleship.
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