What's the Plan?

by Daniel Byrd

God desires praise, glory and obedience from all peoples. He wants His creation back. This is the primary message of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. (Gn 12:1-3, 28:14; Jos 4:24; Ps 67; Mt 28:19-20; Jn 20:20; Ac 1:8, 26:17-18; Rev 5:9). The focus of the church is to carry out Jesus’ command to preach salvation in His name to every “tribe and language and people and nation”. The goal is to have an evangelizing church movement within each people group of the world. A close look at the Greek language shows that Jesus’ commission was to disciple all peoples or ethnic groups, not countries, as most of us tend to assume. For evangelistic purposes, a people group is the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering language or acceptance barriers. An unreached people group is a people with no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to finish evangelizing their community without further outside/cross-cultural assistance.

Through the efforts of thousands of missionaries over the years, there are now Christians in every country of the world. But linguistic and cultural barriers still separate an estimated 10,000 (of the 24,000 people groups worldwide) from full access to the Gospel. The majority of the peoples of Mozambique (our target) are not yet at the “reached” stage. They do not have a strong, indigenous church-planting movement that is able to evangelize the rest of the community with no or little outside help. The peoples of Mozambique are more at the “engaged stage” where the work has begun and cross-cultural workers are on site with the goal of establishing a viable, indigenous church-planting movement.

With this in mind, the mission involves teaching church planting principles and equipping national leaders to be the primary trainers in church multiplication. The goal is that the national church pass to the next stage in which it is able to mobilize its own missionaries to unreached peoples beyond its own culture. That’s the plan.

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