80% of the world’s evangelical Christians live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Over the last 50 years, God’s church has grown exponentially in these areas.

These regions have tremendous mission sending potential to help bring the gospel to unreached peoples, but they currently send only 20% of the world’s cross-cultural missionaries!

Articles

Authors

You already signed this document

You need to sign the document to continue in the process

Something went wrong

Thank you for signing the document

Fetching data from DocuSign...

You already signed the Partnership Agreement

You are not registered for Facilitator Training

Thank you for completing Step 2: Sign Partnership Agreement

Thank you for signing the Partnership Agreement

Schedule

Give to Teams or Projects

Your partnership will help us reach the nations through the nations.

Partner with our staff

Give to a Training

We are always on the lookout for ambitious and talented people to come and join Via. If you are passionate about the bringing God's glory to the nations and want to help mobilize the global church then we would love to hear from you.

Open Roles

Careers & Internships

Total Number of Evangelicals

Cultural Bridges to UPGs

Regional Access to UPGs

Religious Freedom

Prosperity

Current Sending Abroad

Mobilization Potential

Custom Mobilization Potential

Number of Evangelicals

Cultural Bridges

Strategic Access

Religious Freedoms

Current Sending

This infographic provides a visual score for seven data points ranked on a 0 to 100 scale. Faded icons show scores for other countries on the mobilization index. See below for actual scores and country-specific insights.

ADDITION

FINANCIAL DEPENDENCY

INACCESSIBLE

LIMITED MISSION FORCE

DISTANT AND FOREIGN MISSION FIELD

THE WORLD IS THE MISSION FIELD

Thanks! Your payment was successful

Show Notes

Interested in printing in your country or translating these into your language?

to get the conversation started! We want to make these resources available to all in a way that honors everyone involved in the work.

Please enter the website of the organization you are partnering with.

Filter

Tools

Search

Team Profile

Hindsight is always 20/20, as they say, and looking back and studying history can definitely give us a more&nbsp;objective and (hopefully) accurate view of what has already transpired. Peering into the rear view mirror of&nbsp;missions history, attempting to see it from God&rsquo;s perspective, is certainly a daunting, but exhilarating,&nbsp;endeavor. One modern thinker who has done a stellar job of helping us understand when, where, and how&nbsp;God has been at work over the centuries is missiologist, Dr. Ralph Winter, founder of&nbsp;the U.S. Center for World Mission.
In his classic article, &ldquo;Ten Epochs of Redemptive History,&rdquo; Winter deftly breaks the last&nbsp;4,000 years down into ten &ldquo;super centuries,&rdquo; with each 400 year period characterized&nbsp;by a unique missions thrust. In his timeline, he labels the period from 1600 to the&nbsp;present as the &ldquo;Ends of the Earth&rdquo; segment, believing we are in history&rsquo;s tenth and&nbsp;final stage of God completing His mission to imbed a gospel-sharing, national-led&nbsp;church in every remaining unreached people group on the planet. Breaking this last&nbsp;epoch down even further, Dr. Winter shows how during the past 225 years there has&nbsp;been an ever-widening impact of the Church and mission agencies identifying and&nbsp;teaming up to take the name and fame of Jesus to every corner of the globe.
The Four Men and Three Eras
Winter further expanded our thinking in his article, &ldquo;Four Men and Three Eras,&rdquo; specifically highlighting the people and movements that spawned this final push to complete world evangelization. The three eras were the Coastlands, the Inlands, and finally People Groups. He also highlighted four men who spearheaded each of these eras. Young William Carey launched the First Era in 1792 when he sailed from England and spent 40 years planting the gospel along the coastlands of India. Hudson Taylor, a First Era missionary also from England, started the China Inland Mission in 1865 with a burden and plan to carry the good news from the coastal cities of China into the towns and villages of the interior, thus inaugurating the Second Era. Finally, Dr. Winter describes a Third Era, initiated in the1930&rsquo;s by Wycliffe Bible Translator&rsquo;s founder, Cameron Townsend, and missionary to India, Donald McGavran. They discovered the &ldquo;peoples&rdquo; of the world were not broken down into countries, but by nations&mdash;which in the Greek New Testament is the word &ldquo;ethne.&rdquo; These thousands of ethne across the planet were actually a myriad of complex and longstanding affinity groups, each with their own language, culture, and religion. Consequently, Townsend, McGavran, and other Third Era missionaries, had to contextualize their message, customizing their approach to make the gospel most accessible and acceptable to each and every unique &ldquo;unreached people group.&rdquo;
So from 1792 to present day, shifting their focus from the Coastlands, to the Inlands,&nbsp;and finally to People Groups, mission leaders have been growing in their understanding&nbsp;of the methods necessary to most effectively finish the job of &ldquo;making disciples of all&nbsp;nations.&rdquo; Delving into the three eras Dr. Winter describes, we can clearly track how the&nbsp;Lord has been methodically expanding His Kingdom. I have to admit, though, I felt sure&nbsp;this final era would be completed by now, wrapped up with a bow and presented to&nbsp;God like some kind of graduation gift. In fact, when I first met Dr. Winter in 1985 while&nbsp;taking the impactful Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course, I felt sure, as so many leaders did, that the Great Commission would definitely be fulfilled by the&nbsp;year 2000. It would totally be done, finished, turn out the lights and go home!
Why Are We Still Here?
Yet here we are. Many years later. Still praying, still working, and still raising up workers to penetrate the thousands of remaining unreached groups who have never had the opportunity to hear and respond to the life changing message of salvation in Christ alone. Why is that? What is God up to? What are we to make of this &ldquo;delay&rdquo;? Dr. Winter rightly informs us that each of the three eras thought they were the final era, God&rsquo;s chosen instrument to conclude His purposes. The Father works at His pace, not ours. He decides when the job is done, not us. Could it be that behind the scenes, the Lord of the Universe is gradually, quietly, brilliantly, initiating a Fourth Era, in which He is building upon the first three, providing us new insights to multiplying the gospel into the remaining unengaged people groups of our planet? So, what is in the mind of God? Let&rsquo;s ask the Lord to take our blinders off, to help us explore and discover the new and wonderful things He is doing among us. What if in God&rsquo;s history books, that article is actually entitled, &ldquo;Five Men and Four Eras&rdquo;? What if Dr. Winter himself is the fifth man, being used by the Lord to usher in a Fourth Era? An era not describing locations or categories like Coastlands, Inlands, or People Groups, but a fourth (and final?) era that was simply a strategy instead &mdash;the missional, multiplying, strategy of mobilization.
If Jesus&rsquo; words are true, and &ldquo;the harvest is plentiful,&nbsp;but the laborers are few,&rdquo; then obviously part of the&nbsp;answer is more cross-cultural workers. But who are&nbsp;these new workers, and where will they come from?&nbsp;The answer was born in the Third Era. In the past 60&nbsp;years, evangelicals have grown globally from less than&nbsp;140 million to now over 600 million, with the vast&nbsp;majority being in Africa, Asia and South America. But&nbsp;history tells us that before missionaries are sent, they&nbsp;are first mobilized.&nbsp;
Consequently, to see a missions sending movement to&nbsp;the unreached, there first needs to be a missions&nbsp;mobilization movement among the unsent. The&nbsp;&ldquo;unsent&rdquo; are those hundreds of millions of Bible&nbsp;believing Jesus followers around the world who have&nbsp;little or no missions vision. As this sleeping giant is&nbsp;awakened, the Fourth Era is simply: the mobilization of&nbsp;the Church worldwide to rise up and play its strategic&nbsp;role in finishing the Great Commission. Imagine a&nbsp;groundswell of sub-Saharan African missionaries moving&nbsp;to win the unevangelized North Africans for Jesus; a wave of Latinos evangelizing the Arab world; a&nbsp;movement of tens of thousands of Chinese missionaries carrying the gospel through Muslim lands back to&nbsp;Jerusalem; a flood of south Indians sharing the gospel with hundreds of millions Hindus in north India. The&nbsp;whole church mobilized to send missionaries to the whole world!
What is Mobilization?
What do we mean by &ldquo;mobilization&rdquo;? Wikipedia defines it as, &ldquo;the act of assembling and readying troops and supplies for war.&rdquo; This secular description can also be applied to the eternal, invisible spiritual battle taking place between God and Satan over the souls of men. The Lord, our Commander in Chief, is seeking to assemble His troops, and provide us with all the training and resources needed to defeat the enemy and win the war. Winter believed one of Satan&rsquo;s primary ploys was to keep God&rsquo;s people blinded to the desperate&nbsp;spiritual lostness of large portions of our planet&rsquo;s population, causing billions to be cut off from ever hearing&nbsp;about the love of Christ. Accordingly, Winter constantly exhorted believers with a mobilization&nbsp;message&mdash;that first &ldquo;reaching&rdquo; the saved was the key to ultimately&nbsp;reaching the lost.
Standing before a crowd of university students, I heard Dr. Winter&nbsp;challenge and shock them by saying, &ldquo;Suppose I had a thousand&nbsp;college seniors in front of me who asked me what they ought to do&nbsp;to make a maximum contribution to Christ's global cause. What&nbsp;would I tell them? I would tell them to mobilize. All of them!&rdquo; I&nbsp;was stunned. How in the world could this former missionary be trying to talk people into not becoming&nbsp;missionaries? Because the need to sound the alarm is so great. Yes, some need to go as pioneer missionaries.&nbsp;At the same time others need to exercise an unusual kind of faith to actually not go to the mission field, but&nbsp;to assist the entire mobilization process. Winter knew that mobilization would result in a multiplication of&nbsp;missionaries sent, therefore he claimed, &ldquo;The number one priority is for more mission mobilizers. Anyone&nbsp;who can help 100 missionaries to the field is more important than one missionary on the field. In fact,&nbsp;mission mobilization activity is more crucial than field missionary activity.&rdquo; If accurate, this startling&nbsp;statement demands we think differently.
A New Paradigm?
Maybe recalibrating our approach with some Fourth Era reasoning is past due. Jesus issued the Great Commission almost 2,000 years ago. Americans have been sending out foreign mission teams for well over 200 years. The world population is fast approaching eight billion, yet almost a third of these are still cut off from the gospel. Dr. Todd Johnson, Winter&rsquo;s son in law and Director of the Global Research Center at Gordon Conwell Center, recently released a disturbing research statistic: &ldquo;86% of all Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists will never meet a Christ follower.&rdquo; Since reading that I am not sleeping well. Life cannot go on as normal knowing billions of these precious souls will live and die, never even having the chance to hear the gospel. With all our bravado, entrepreneurship, technology, and resources you would think we would have made more progress. Certainly we celebrate the significant gospel advances that have been made over the past 100 years. Praise God! It&rsquo;s obvious, however, to truly address this overwhelming need, a new approach is required.
Business as usual will not cut it anymore. We must think outside the box. Missiologists tell us we need an&nbsp;additional 100,000 long-term cross-cultural missionaries to penetrate these final frontiers. Dr. Winter&nbsp;spearheaded the identifying and studying of these unreached people groups for well over 40 years. Maybe&nbsp;it&rsquo;s time to turn some of our attention toward the incredibly neglected unsent people groups of our planet.&nbsp;This is where the mobilizers come in. If the global evangelical church were mobilized to send out missionaries&nbsp;at the same rate as the US and South Korea, that would flood the unreached with over 450,000 goers! This&nbsp;is the potential of the Fourth Era.
Jesus is a Mobilizer
&ldquo;A mobilizer, in simplest terms, is one who multiplies, disciples or mentors in missions. Jesus Christ was a mobilizer,&rdquo; says Greg Parsons, Global Director of the Frontier Mission Fellowship, and author of the most recent biography of Ralph Winter. Parsons, one of Winter&rsquo;s disciples, calls us to take a close look at some of the things Jesus did and did not focus on: 1) He didn't focus on planting churches, 2) He didn't focus on evangelism, and 3) He didn't focus on theological education. Rather, His ministry focused more on the big picture than on any one person around Him. In Matthew 9 Jesus proclaimed &ldquo;The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Pray to the Lord of the harvest that He would send out workers into the harvest.&rdquo; The Lord&rsquo;s goal was to mobilize key individuals who would carry on beyond Him, and who would ultimately have a burden for the multitudes of lost people.
How about us? Have we overlooked the key Jesus was giving us in Matthew 9 to reaching the whole world?&nbsp;Could it be the Master was trying to show us focusing on the saved will ultimately result in winning the lost?&nbsp;Jesus first saw the great need, but then concentrated His ministry on equipping more laborers. The Holy Spirit&nbsp;(the great Mobilizer) is seeking to enlist each of us to join with God by investing our lives recruiting people and their resources to the person and purposes of Jesus Christ. If Dr. Winter really did unknowingly usher in a&nbsp;Fourth Era of the Modern Missions Movement, let&rsquo;s attempt to understand and embrace it. He believed "the&nbsp;greatest mobilization effort in history is now gaining momentum, moving ahead with a quickening pace, with&nbsp;more goals that are concrete, measurable, and feasible." You may be ready to jump in, but beware: it will&nbsp;require you to think backwards, develop new prototypes, and operate differently than ever before.
Identifying the "Mobilization Gaps"
Just what are the critical components to making well-informed, prayer-saturated decisions regarding the most strategic way forward? Our organization, Via, has been working with respected missiologists and researchers from various countries to put together a &ldquo;Mobilization Index.&rdquo; It provides a wide range of demographics for the 57 countries that have one million or more evangelicals. One key statistic shows the gap between who could be mobilized and who actually is mobilized. These disparities are called &ldquo;mobilization gaps.&rdquo; Let&rsquo;s take the African gateway country of Kenya. That nation, along with twelve others, make up English speaking Africa, and contain over 130 million evangelicals. But our research shows there are less than 5,000 cross-cultural workers sent out from those 13 countries. That&rsquo;s one missionary for every 26,000 born again believers. So the &ldquo;mobilization gap&rdquo; is huge there! But what if mobilization teams were placed throughout that region, seeking to raise up one cross cultural worker for each 1000 evangelicals? That would increase their missionary sending from 5,000 to 130,000 cross-cultural goers&mdash;the greatest missionary force in all of history!
Mobilization Targets the &ldquo;Unsent&rdquo; in Order to Win the &ldquo;Unreached&rdquo;
So how can we see new mission movements ignited&nbsp;throughout the world? Will it be through sticking exclusively&nbsp;with the roles we are familiar with &mdash; church planters, evangelists, student workers, or theological educators? Or will&nbsp;we acknowledge God is up to something new, and affirm a critical category of workers is emerging--the missions&nbsp;mobilizers? Since Dr. Winter&rsquo;s watershed message at Lausanne&nbsp;in 1974, most&nbsp;mission&nbsp;agencies&nbsp;have placed a&nbsp;priority on&nbsp;&ldquo;unreached&rdquo;&nbsp;people&nbsp;groups, and&nbsp;missiologists&nbsp;have spent&nbsp;decades slicing and dicing every country, language, and&nbsp;culture to break down the remaining task into bite-size&nbsp;pieces. The task is clearly set before us, so why aren&rsquo;t we&nbsp;finished with world evangelization yet? It could be that God&nbsp;is handing us a new template He wants us to operate from&nbsp;to redirect many of our people and resources toward the&nbsp;&ldquo;unsent&rdquo; in order to mobilize national believers to reach the&nbsp;&ldquo;unreached&rdquo;?
Would you personally begin a journey to understand the powerful potential of mobilizing the unsent? Would you converse with your coworkers about what this might mean for your team, church, or organization? It will take some creative, even radical, thinking to embrace this idea and intensely refocus your efforts to accomplish it, but the rewards could be seismic in their global impact. Do we, as the Western church, have enough humility and dedication to embrace this seemingly &ldquo;back seat&rdquo; role in a new era of world evangelization? Will we be content to play our part in the global body of Christ, selflessly encouraging, empowering and mobilizing the global &ldquo;unsent&rdquo; Church to move past their identity as a mission field and fulfill their calling to be the greatest mission force this world has seen?
If you are considering missions, pray about the impact you could have by going to a Christianized nation to mobilize missionaries from there. This type of cross-cultural worker is called a &ldquo;Frontier Mobilizer&rdquo; or &ldquo;Gobilizer&rdquo; if you will. If you&rsquo;re a Missions Pastor or give to missions, consider reevaluating your giving and sending strategies, pointing more of your people and resources toward mobilization. If you&rsquo;re a mission agency, why not study our &ldquo;Mobilization Index&rdquo; to aid you in making strategic decisions regarding whether you should send missionaries or mobilizers to particular countries? If you&rsquo;re already a mobilizer, but operating in the global North, consider shifting your efforts to the global South where ten times the number of people are coming to Christ each day. Yes, these brothers and sisters, who are now the majority of global Evangelicals, are waiting. God could use you to help stir up a spiritual tsunami among the global Church, where there are huge untapped pockets of believers across the planet just waiting to be mobilized.
Know this for sure, this Fourth Era is not an ending, but an exciting new chapter of God&rsquo;s great plan. It&nbsp;doesn&rsquo;t disregard the past, but rather honors and builds upon it. I think we can safely say if William Carey&nbsp;were alive today, he would be thrilled to see a movement of 25,000 South Indians taking the gospel to their&nbsp;unreached countrymen in North India. Imagine the excitement of Hudson Taylor knowing 90,000 Chinese&nbsp;missionaries were saturating huge chunks of Asia with the name of Jesus. Cam Townsend would wildly cheer&nbsp;on a flood of 130,000 missionaries sent from sub-Sahara Africa to North Africa and beyond. McGavran would&nbsp;express pure delight in 60,000 Latino missionaries launching to the Arab world. And without a doubt, Dr.&nbsp;Ralph Winter, a friend and mentor of mine, would find great pleasure in these kind of nationalized,&nbsp;indigenous mobilization efforts. Why? Because this reserved and modest pioneer of the Fourth Era has&nbsp;always promoted a &ldquo;we must decrease, and they must increase&rdquo; attitude towards the role of other nations to&nbsp;complete the evangelization of the world. It&rsquo;s been a part of his DNA from the beginning, and it needs to work its way into our missional bloodstream as well.
What is the goal of the Fourth Era? A global mission mobilization movement in which the whole Church rises&nbsp;up to powerfully advance Jesus&rsquo; Great Commission to the ends of the earth. Each of us have a strategic part&nbsp;to play. If not us, who? If not now, when?

The Four Men and Three Eras

Why Are We Still Here?

What is Mobilization?

Jesus is a Mobilizer

Identifying the "Mobilization Gaps"

Mobilization Targets the &ldquo;Unsent&rdquo; in Order to Win the &ldquo;Unreached&rdquo;

Mobilization: The Fourth (and Final?) Era of the Modern Missions Movement

In This Article

Steve Shadrach