The Great Commission Is Still On: Where the Gospel Actually Stands

If you only read headlines, you would conclude the Church is shrinking and the mission is stalling. The actual numbers tell a very different story — and it is a hopeful one.

The Church is not losing ground

In 1900, just 17.6% of the world's Christians lived in the Global South. Today that number is 69%, and it is projected to reach 78% by 2050. Sub-Saharan Africa is now the fastest-growing region on earth for the Gospel. Latin America sits around 90% Christian. Iran has one of the fastest-growing underground churches anywhere on the planet, and Algeria — a nation that is roughly 2% Christian — is witnessing one of the great church-growth stories in the Muslim world.

Christianity did not decline in the twentieth century. It relocated. What looks like collapse from a Western window is, globally, one of the largest ingatherings in human history.

And the mission is genuinely unfinished

Here is the other half, and we should not soften it. Roughly 2.3 billion people still have no meaningful access to the Gospel. Not "have heard and declined" — no access. No church nearby, no Bible in their heart language, no believing friend to ask.

Of the world's 10,423 distinct people groups, 4,490 are unreached and 3,214 are frontier — fewer than one in a thousand follows Jesus. Most sit inside the 10/40 Window, the band across North Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia where the least access and the most resistance overlap.

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?

Romans 10:14

Both things are true at once

God is moving in extraordinary ways and billions remain unreached. Holding both keeps us out of two ditches: the despair that says nothing is working, and the complacency that says the job is basically done.

The right response to both facts is the same — worship, then obedience. He is building His Church. He also chose to do it through ordinary people who say yes.

So what is your part?

This is the part people get wrong. They assume "mission" means relocating overseas, and since they are not doing that, they conclude they are on the sidelines. They are not.

• Pray with a target. Adopt one nation or people group and pray for it by name. Put it on your fridge. This costs nothing and moves heaven.
• Make two disciples. Not converts — disciples who can make disciples. That is the math that finishes the mission.
• Reach your own city. God is bringing the unreached world to Western cities. Loving your actual neighbour may reach a people group a missionary cannot legally enter.
• Fund and send. Someone has to pay for the ones who go. That is frontline work, not back office.

The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.

Matthew 9:37