Tracking Christian mission progress

More than 6,000 people groups - representing about 2 billion people - are considered "unreached" by the Joshua Project. The Joshua Project seeks to "highlight the ethnic people groups of the world with the least followers of Christ. The mission of Joshua Project is to help bring definition to the unfinished task of the Great Commission by identifying and highlighting the people groups of the world that have the least exposure to the Gospel and the least Christian presence in their midst." Those unreached people groups represent a huge amount of work yet to be done for missionaries and Bible translators.

On their website, the Joshua Project presents profiles of each unreached people group so that we can become more aware of who we are praying for and working toward reaching. One people group is the Tajik people which are in Tajikstan and northern Afghanistan. They have a separate profile for the Afghani Tajiks and it is quite interesting. You can learn that they speak Dari Persian, are descended from the Persians, were "forcefully converted to Islam by Arabs in the 7th century", and most Tajiks are Sunni Muslims.

Along with these profiles they display the Joshua Project Progress Scale rating for the people group. It is a fusion of several other indicators: % Evangelical, % Adherent, Johnstone Church Planting Indicator (CPI), IMB-SBC World Evangelization Status Indicator, Morelia Scale, World A-B-C classification and others. The Afghani Tajiks have a scale rating of 1.2 which means evangelicals are greater than 0.01% of the people group's population but less than 2% and adherents to Christianity are less than 5%.

The Joshua Project also has Mission Facts which are short explanations of the work yet to be done to reach the world with the good news of Jesus. Examples:

• 48 of the 77 people groups in Afghanistan do not have even Bible portions available in their primary language.
• About 4,400 languages are without Scripture portions available, with some 634,000,000 speakers. Translation projects are in progress in an estimated 1,600 languages that currently are without adequate Scriptures. There are about 2,500 languages needing Bible translation work to begin.
• There are 1,007 languages with the Jesus film available, 323 with Gospel radio available, and 4,170 with Gospel recordings available (plus approximately 2000 language recordings that have not had Ethnologue codes assigned yet). 2,209 languages have none of these resources available, with about 195,000,000 speakers.

Be sure to check out the Joshua Project website for a lot more on the progress of mission work around the world. Note that over in the right side bar of the Christians and the Media front page is a short profile from Joshua Project of an unreached people group.