Why We Say "Unreached Language Groups"

Somewhere this morning a woman is grinding millet outside a house with a tin roof. She is humming. The song is in the only language she has ever spoken, the language she dreams in, the language she used to name each of her children. There is no Bible in it. No church meets in it. In the language of her own heart, there is no word for what God did on a hill outside Jerusalem.

She is why we changed how we speak about the unreached.

For years we wrote about unreached people groups. It is a good phrase with a long history. Ralph Winter gave it to the church in 1974, and it did something remarkable. It turned the eyes of ordinary Christians away from a map of countries and toward the actual peoples living inside them. Whole generations went overseas because of that phrase. We are not embarrassed by it, and we still use it when it helps someone find us.

But over time the phrase grew loose. It stretched to cover almost anyone: a province, a profession, a slice of a wealthy city. When a word can mean nearly anything, it slowly stops meaning much at all.

So we have started saying unreached language groups.

The difference might seem small but it matters. A language group is the community that shares a mother tongue, the words a mother uses over a crib. An unreached language group is a community without access to the gospel in its own language. There may be no Bible in it. There may be no one nearby able to explain the great rescue plan in the words a child there actually thinks in.

Language is not a detail of the missionary task. It is close to the whole of it.

Scripture has known this from the beginning. At Babel God scattered the nations by confusing their speech, and nearly every division of humanity since has run along those seams. Then at Pentecost the Spirit fell, and the wonder was not that the crowd suddenly understood Greek. It was that Galileans spoke Parthian and Median and Elamite, and each person in that street heard the wonders of God in the language he was born into. God did not wait for the nations to learn someone else's language. He met them in their own. And when John is finally shown the end of the story, the worshipers are gathered from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. Tongue is on the list. It was always on the list.

That is the standard we want to hold ourselves to.

Nothing about the letters changes. The same peoples, the same children telling you about their homes, the same watercolors on the same thick paper. We are not narrowing who we write about or raising a bar anyone has to clear. The communities we have written to your children about for years are the communities we will keep writing about. We have only found a phrase that says more plainly what we always meant.

The older phrase was carrying too much. The newer one says the thing itself. Here is a community, and the gospel has not yet arrived in the words they think in.

You will still find the older phrase around, on our own pages and everywhere else. Faithful people we admire use it, including the people who taught us to think this way. We are not correcting anyone. But we do think the older phrase had begun to carry more than it could hold, and that saying it plainly serves the peoples we write about.

There are more than 3,000 language groups where the gospel has not yet arrived.

Not thousands of strategies. Thousands of tongues, each one carrying somebody's mother, somebody's grandfather, somebody's word for forgive.

God has never once been unable to find the words.