From Unreached to Reaching Many
Growing up in northeast Iraq, Kojin was surrounded by a 100 percent Muslim population. There wasn't a single follower of Christ.
He read the Quran several times, trying to convince himself that it came from God and that it would be a sin to question its teachings. But in his heart, he couldn’t accept that as true. He understood that ideas have consequences, and it was not possible for him to accept the consequences of this book as divine.
For a while, he tried to be an atheist and freethinker, but he couldn’t sustain that approach. Several times, drawn by fear and conscious of the supernatural, he tried again to faithfully practice the Islamic religion. One day, in the window of a bookstore, he saw a little book titled: The Gospel According to Luke. The bookstore owners had only one copy, so they offered to let him pay a daily fee to borrow it. He read it in a single day and loved it.
Desperate to know more about Jesus, Kojin searched. But he found no further information anywhere.
"When I took the book back to the bookstore,” he said, “I asked them if they had any other books about Christ. They said, ‘No, that's all we have.’”
A few years later, Kojin finally met some followers of Jesus, people who had been discipled by our team. After that, everything changed – not just for him, but for the many people in his region that he eventually led to the Lord.
Andy in N Iraq
Kojin’s story, his miracle, is what Frontiers is all about. We are about the gospel getting to the least reached. Our mission is to invite “all Muslim peoples to follow Jesus, prioritising those with least access to the gospel.”
This year, we celebrate what the Lord has done through Vision 5:9 – a network we at Frontiers helped to start in order to engage all Muslim peoples with effective teams by the year 2025 in partnership with all those who share this vision. Together, we are all still working toward this goal, and we haven’t reached it yet. But there has been significant progress. By the grace of God, since the inception of Vision 5:9 in 2001, the number of totally unengaged Muslim people groups has dropped from 2,700 to less than 200!
In the last few years, within Frontiers, we have focussed our mobilisation efforts on a list of unreached priority peoples and places – our priority 100 peoples and places. We give thanks to the Lord for the significant advance he has given us through this emphasis. Since we developed the Priority 100, at least half of our new teams have been launched to those destinations, and the percentage of teams going to these locations has been increasing every year.
Since we developed the Priority 100, at least half of our new teams have been launched to those destinations, and the percentage of teams going to these locations has been increasing every year.
But as our founder, Greg Livingstone, said we must “never stop opening the work among new people groups just in order to consolidate”
Without diminishing our passion to pursue movements and leave behind biblical churches, we need to focus in on our effort to take the gospel to those, like Kojin, who have not yet heard about Jesus.
This month our field leadership teams, sending base leaders, and priority engagement catalysts will work together to produce a new pioneering list of least reached peoples and places. This will be part of a more comprehensive process to engage an agreed number of new peoples and places in the next five years.
As always, this will involve the supernatural work of our sending bases to recruit God-sent apostolic team leaders who are passionate to take the gospel where it is not yet known and stay there until they see transformation.
You are also part of this effort. Please pray for our leaders as we come together, that we will have wisdom and unity to discern together the will of God. Ask the Lord of the harvest to send workers. Ask the Holy Spirit to open doors and open hearts. And be ready to obey the Lord as he reveals how you are to contribute to this task in the coming season.
Billy Graham summed up the need to focus on the least-reached very clearly: “To build our evangelistic policies on near-neighbour evangelism alone is thus to shut out at least a billion people from any possibility of knowing the Saviour”
