The Frontier
This article first appeared in PILGRIM Vol. II from FAI Publishing
I am writing while remembering a recent breakfast meeting with a brother in Christ. Midway through our (very first world) meeting he said, “Define the frontier for me.” As you might imagine, this launched a rich Great Commission conversation.
In my mind, I knew how to define the missional frontier. The frontier is a literal place. I know it’s chock-full of real people. But in my heart, I was tempted to bypass the obvious and seek the deep, philosophical answer. We often do this. We are prone to skip the plain and simple answer. I guess I hoped that by reaching for a deeper answer maybe I might appear more profound. I was tempted to talk about the dark places in our city or the frontiers of my own heart. Maybe I even wanted to let my friend off the hook by keeping it less tangible. By God’s grace, I came to my senses, realizing the last thing either one of us needed was yet another deep-thinking-no-action discussion. So we talked about real places and real people who have not been reached with the excellent news we call the Gospel.
In the interest of not wasting time, we got straight to the point. We focused our discussion around the word “frontier” as a title for the various places around the world called home by the approximately 3.1 billion non-Christian humans labeled by missiologists as “unreached.”
Unreached People Groups (UPGs) are ethnolinguistic groups within nations whose exposure to Christianity is so minimal or non-existent, that the Gospel is not self-sustaining within that people group. These are people who desperately need faithful and unashamed followers of Jesus Christ to bring them the story of their redemption.
We talked about those roughly 7,000 UPGs that comprise 3.1 billion people and about 41% of the population of the World. We talked about the fact that more than 95% of the UPGs live in a little sliver of the world we call the “10/40 window,” (a phrase coined in 1990 by missiologist Louis Bush, to describe the area of the globe located between 10 degrees north and 40 degrees north). This area includes the majority of the world’s Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist populations. It includes Israel and most of the Middle East. It is predominantly poor, and mostly unevangelized. The 10/40 window is the epicenter of the frontier.
These statistics probably bear updating, but last time anybody checked:
About 95% of full-time Christian workers are working amongst Christian or reached people groups. We have very few missionaries on the frontier. [1]
One one-thousandth of one percent (0.001%) of income earned by Christians goes to fund efforts to reach UPGs in the frontier. If you zoom in a bit on just dollars given to any missions, it doesn’t get much better. For every $1 given to missions, only one penny goes to reaching UPGs.
60% of UPGs live in countries closed to missionaries from North America. Access to the frontier is a real challenge.
Without a doubt, we have a resource problem. We need people who will go and we need money to do our work. We need creative access to reach the unreached. But we also have a heart problem. My favorite chapter of Scripture is Luke 15. Jesus tells a three-part story to answer the religious naysayers who question the way He is spending His life on the “wrong” people. The first parable, about a lost sheep, is particularly pertinent to grasping the importance of the frontier. Jesus, in a way that seems nonchalant, releases an absolutely astounding insight into his ministry. One aspect of good shepherding is to abandon the whole flock in order to reach one lost sheep. He says leaving 99 reached sheep in order to pursue one sheep lost-in-the-frontier is a good idea… even a joyful idea (joy in finding the lost is a central theme of Luke 15). According to Jesus, it is right and reasonable to expend ourselves seeking and saving the lost.
Don’t act like that makes sense to you.
If I asked you to watch my flock of 100 sheep for the weekend and one wandered off, I would want you to stay with the flock. Don’t risk losing the whole flock for one lost sheep. I would be sad that ONE got lost, but I would be very thankful that 99% of my flock was still safe and sound. But Jesus doesn’t see it this way. In the Lord’s economy, seeking and finding one dying sheep, lost and ensnared in the far reaches of the frontier, produces more joy than protecting the 99 who are living safely in the sheepfold. Valuation in the Kingdom of God can be confounding. So let me say again: seeking one lost sheep ultimately produces more heavenly joy than protecting 99 sheep who are not lost. (For what its worth, I believe the 99 sheep are safe and sound in the sheep pen.)
Here’s where it gets really challenging. If you apply this same line of reasoning to UPG statistics, it becomes a gut-punch. How much MORE should we feel the burden when we realize that not one, but billions are lost in the frontier of unreached people groups? But only a single penny out of every missions dollar is spent to reach these lost sheep. Only a handful of shepherds are searching for them.
Yet we spend untold billions of dollars building bigger and better sheep pens for people who are bored with the Gospel.
We want to be the ones who live like Jesus and make costly decisions to do Holy things. But these cold, hard statistics are a cold, hard betrayal of our perverted priorities. If we’re honest, we are the ones He is so lovingly chastising in Luke 15. For us to faithfully live into the mandate to make disciples of ALL nations [2], we have to actually spend our time, money, and manpower going to these places that are completely unreached. We have to go to the frontier. We have to care. We have to prioritize these unreached people with our intercession, time, and money. So we must go to them. To them, it’s just home. To us… it’s the frontier.
The frontier, for those of us bearing the privileged confession of Jesus’ name—having had the luxury of hearing it to begin with—is where the isolated, wandering, ignorant sheep Jesus would pursue are. If we are to “do business till He comes”[3], what then shall we do in His stead if not prove to the one wandering off the cliff that the Great Shepherd would lay everything on the line, at any cost, to rescue them? Is this not what we have received and experienced from His hand? Indeed, “he who has been forgiven much loves much”[4] and “to whom much is given, much is required.”[5] If we love the One willing to forfeit home and comfort to “seek and save that which was lost”[6], let’s live like Him. In the meantime, let’s honestly evaluate the stark exposure of our priorities reflected in these statistics that can feel so cold.
The sheep are very real people. The frontier is a very real place.
The Shepherd who pursues is a very real Man we really must obey. The Moravians used to say, “May the Lamb receive the reward of His suffering.” Our Lamb has conquered—let us follow Him.
I pray that we may.
[1] Original source:thetravelingteam.org/stats, via Frontier Harvest Ministries, 2007
[2] Matthew 28:19
[3] Luke 19:13
[4] Luke 7:47
[5] Luke 12:48
[6] Luke 19:10
