Praying for an Unreached People Group

I want to share with you something that has become a passion of mine.  Please join me in this specific prayer.

A “people group” is a homogenous culture that can be located in one area or spread over a larger area that may include different countries.  Mission agencies began to focus on people groups rather than regions several years ago because a particular region may have many people groups resulting in the necessity of more than one strategy to reach the geographical region.  And if the people group was scattered across geographical regions, the strategies were being duplicated from region to region.  Now the focus is on people groups.  The result is a streamlined approach to reaching as many people as possible to fulfill the Great Commission.

As people groups are identified the mission agencies (the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, for example) allocate missionaries and resources to reach them.  Unfortunately, many people groups are yet to be reached due to limits on resources, funding, and missionary availability.

These limits are only limits to us; God will not be limited by them.  That’s where prayer comes in; after all, prayer is our petition to God to act according to his will.  I believe God’s will is to reach every person on the planet with the gospel message and I believe he will do it.  I also believe he will use Christians as the primary vehicle to transport that message to them.  There may be limits to what we can do as human beings, but God can do great things even through limited vessels like us.  We must pray that he will.

Part of the missional strategy for our church is to reach people for Christ all over the world: here at home, across our state and nation, and throughout the world.  This prayer emphasis is about reaching people throughout the world.  Let’s join together and lift our prayers to Heaven on behalf of an unreached people group.

First, we will pray that God will reveal to us a specific unreached people group for which to pray.  We will adopt them as a central part of our “ends of the earth” mission strategy.  Once identified, we will pray for missionaries to be assigned to work with them.  Based on Matthew 9:38 we will “ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest field.”  I believe God will answer our prayers.

We will learn about these people and pray for specific needs they may have.  The group may be poverty- or disease-stricken.  We will pray for their deliverance from this.  They may be absorbed by a false religion; we will pray for the gospel to penetrate the darkness.  They may be in the grip of animism; we’ll pray for the true Spirit of God to release them.  As we learn about them we will develop prayer strategies.

When God raises up a missionary we will pray for that person and support him or her in various ways.  We will not only adopt the people group but the missionary, too.  Every day of the year we will pray for the missionary.  We will stay in contact if possible.  Cross Road will be at the center of the support network for him/her.

Part of my prayer is that we will someday be able to take a group of volunteers from our church to the land of this people and work along side the missionary.

Acts 1:8 challenges me to take God’s message of salvation and hope everywhere to everybody!  Won’t you join me in praying for this?

 

This is part of what I mean by
Impacting Eternity at the Cross Road of Life