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Great Commission Prioritization of Countries: Helping to Make Completing the Great Commission More Meaningful for All Believers

In areas where there are no hospitals or schools, most people would agree that it should be a priority to provide medical help or education to the people who live there. In a similar way, where very few people have heard the gospel, most Christians would agree that we should prioritize bringing the truth about Jesus. As Paul said,

It has always 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.” (Romans 15:20-21)

David Bryant said, “Today, five out of six non-Christians in our world have no hope unless missionaries come to them and plant the church among them.” If this is true, perhaps we should do something about it.

Where are the people who have not heard about Jesus? This is a critical question that will be addressed in this article since there is a great need to prioritize and strategize. Because many Christians and churches cannot locate unreached people groups on a map or target them with their mission giving, this article focuses on a country-by-country approach.

Thus we will look at the status of the Great Commission in the nations of the world to answer the question, “Where do people have the least opportunity to hear the gospel?” The nations will then be prioritized using available data. Such findings can be helpful for praying, for churches regarding their mission programs, for individual giving toward the Great Commission, etc. Possible next steps are offered. It is hoped that a country prioritization approach will provide a more concrete, understandable way for Christians to emphasize the least reached in their Great Commission involvement.

Excellent missions-related information is available today. For example, the Joshua Project (JP) has large amounts of data available freely to churches, organizations, and individuals who can apply it to their specific applications as was done in this paper. Similarly, information from World Christian Trends AD 30 – AD 2200 (WCT)¹ was also used in this country prioritization.

There are numerous parameters that could be used to evaluate the state of the Great Commission in the nations of the world. The weighting of the final ten criteria used here to evaluate countries and produce an overall score out of one hundred possible points is shown in Figure A1.

For 15,893 people groups, the Joshua Project has scores for progress, ministry tools, and location (identified as “Country Indices” in Table A1). The JP article, MFPrioritizationArticle.doc, provides a description of these three criteria. Using a simple computer program, these three scores were separately multiplied by the respective populations of all the people groups in a given country and then added together. These country totals were then divided by the total population of the people groups in each country to provide an average score for these three categories in each nation.

The JP website also provides information about each country regarding the percentage of people living in a least-reached people group, the population in least-reached people groups, the number of least-reached people groups, and the total population. David Barrett and Todd Johnson provide data regarding the number of disciple offers per person per year, the number of Christian workers per million population, and the cost (to lead to the baptism) of each new convert.