01
Peoples, not just countries
Mission is usually counted by nation because nations are easy to count. But the Great Commission speaks of panta ta ethne — all the peoples — and a people group can span four borders or sit unreached inside a country with a very large church. The Hui speak Mandarin and live surrounded by one of the fastest-growing churches in history. The Sundanese live in a nation with twenty-eight million Christians.
02
How to read these numbers
A "people group" is an ethnic or linguistic community large enough to be reached as a unit. Where a group spans borders, the figure covers all countries. Researchers disagree about where one group ends and another begins, so two sources can differ by millions for the same name. Treat every number here as an order of magnitude, not a census.