New Conference Encourages Pastors to Reach Last 639 Unreached People Groups

The Holy Spirit has placed an anointing on the church to go and finish the Great Commission, according to the head of a ministry that is part of Campus Crusade for Christ International.

"There is a paradigm shift," said Dr. Robert Varney, executive director of CCCI’s Christian Embassy and a director for the "Finishing the Task" conference to be held this November in North Carolina.

"It's not about the [missions] agencies doing this any more. God ordained the church. Over the course of time, mission agencies have grown up and somehow, we send money to the mission agencies and said, 'You go do it.' But God has never worked like that."

According to Dan Grether of Mission Spokane, "Finishing the Task" was inspired by a Billy Graham conference held at Amsterdam in 2000. During the conference, the Rev. Graham challenged 500 people gathered from 120 nations to complete the Great Commission and to charge forward at a rate quicker than in the last decade.

After nearly 2000 years of missionary work, there remain in the world 639 people groups with populations of 100,000 or more that do not have anyone communicating the Gospel to them.

At the Amsterdam conference, a group of seven mission organizations that were seated at Table 71 – by which the group is now known – were challenged by the large number of people groups as of yet unreached by the Gospel.

"It became apparent to us – especially to Steve Douglass – that two thousand years after he gave us the Great Commission, we still haven't gotten the Gospel to every people group," Grether said.

The seven missions organizations - Campus Crusade for Christ Intl., Youth With A Mission, Wycliffe Bible Translators, the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board, Mission Spokane, Walk Thru The Bible, and Dawn Ministries – have since then come up with the idea of inviting larger churches (congregations of 2,000 or more) to a conference to encourage church planting movements among the last frontier of people groups.

"Part of our thinking is that there are churches part of the United States of America that are already mission-minded and have a lot of resources. Through this conference, our group wants to invite the pastors across the U.S. to come and be challenged to adopt one of those large last frontier people groups," said Grether.

The organizations will offer their well-known and much-used resources, including special oral biblical teaching resources, Nov. 14-17 at The Cove in Asheville, N.C., to a select group of mission-minded pastors. A little more than 50 pastors have signed on. There is room for 25 more.