Responding to the Reality of Unreached People Groups in our Back Yard
Our focus this week here at GBC is on “Reaching the Unreached.” There is a lot on the calendar designed to create a greater awareness of the vast array of opportunities that surround us right here. It is our hope that the Holy Spirit will produce a deep love for the many ethnic groups that live in the Bay Area and that this will lead to focused efforts at penetrating these communities with the gospel.
According to Wikipedia nearly 43% of California residents speak a language other than English at home. This is a proportion far higher than any other state. The Bay Area leads the state in this multiplicity of language. I offer this graph to help you visualize this diversity. It was formulated with US Census data. It does not reflect unreached people groups per se but it does vividly portray the mixture of nations in our own back yard.
Bay Area Ethnic Diversity
Wednesday evening’s meeting will shed light on the difference between “unreached people groups” and ethnic diversity. Not everyone agrees on a precise definition but Tim Svoboda of YWAM offers the following:
An unreached people group is a sociological grouping of people that shares a common affinity with one another and does not have an adequate amount of indigenous believers and resources amongst them to evangelize their own group of people.
You can find more information on “unreached people groups” at the Joshua Project.
As a congregation we will be discussing not only definitions and principles but practical ways we can begin to be more proactive in targeting efforts towards the unreached. I want to point you to the following article in order to prime the pump for this topic:
It is a post alluded to by Dustin in his message this past Sunday and written by Trevin Wax entitled “Failure to Live on Mission is a Worship Problem.”