← The Unfinished Mission
Contents · 40 / 41
  1. Copyright and Edition Notice
  2. Introduction: The Mission That Is Not Finished
  3. The Mission
  4. The God Who Sends
  5. Blessed for the Nations
  6. Jesus and the Nations
  7. From Jerusalem to the Ends of the Earth
  8. What Does It Mean for the Mission to Be “Finished”?
  9. How Christianity Became Global
  10. From Apostles to a World Faith
  11. Mission, Empire, and the Modern Missionary Movement
  12. Christianity Moves South and East
  13. From “The West to the Rest” to “Everywhere to Everywhere”
  14. Mapping the Unfinished Mission
  15. What Does “Unreached” Actually Mean?
  16. Where Gospel Access Remains Least
  17. The Many Muslim Worlds
  18. South Asia: Religion, Caste, and Community
  19. Beyond the Religious Label
  20. The Secular and Post-Christian Frontier
  21. The Language and Scripture Frontier
  22. Cities, Migration, and the Moving Mission Field
  23. Why the Gaps Persist
  24. The Allocation Problem
  25. The Hard Places
  26. The Distance Problem
  27. When Mission Becomes Peripheral
  28. The Calling Question
  29. The Problem of Short Horizons
  30. When Mission Goes Wrong
  31. What Faithful Mission Requires Now
  32. The Local Church as the Missionary Horizon
  33. Contextualization: Faithful Gospel, Local Form
  34. Local Ownership and Global Partnership
  35. Missionary Formation and Member Care
  36. New Pathways Into the Missionary World
  37. The Whole Church and the Unfinished Mission
  38. Conclusion: Faithful Until the End
  39. Methodological Note: Statistics, Categories, and Source Freeze
  40. Glossary
  41. Selected Bibliography

Publication

Glossary

~3 min read

Contextualization. The process of communicating and embodying Christian faith in forms intelligible within a particular cultural and social world while remaining accountable to Scripture and Christian confession.

Diaspora mission. Christian witness and church life shaped by the movement of peoples across borders or regions, including mission by, among, and through migrant communities.

Ecclesial access. Realistic access to a Christian community a person could meaningfully enter, not merely the existence of a church somewhere in the same country or city.

Evangelical. In this book, a broad Protestant Christian category centered on the authority of Scripture, the gospel of Christ, conversion, and active witness. Statistical sources may operationalize the term differently.

Frontier people / frontier unreached people group. A missionary-research category for populations with extremely low evangelical presence or little evidence of an indigenous gospel movement. Exact thresholds depend on the database used.

Gospel access. The realistic opportunity to encounter and understand credible Christian witness. This book analyzes four domains: informational, linguistic, relational, and ecclesial access.

Informational access. Availability of credible and sufficiently comprehensible information about Christian belief, Scripture, and practice.

Linguistic access. Availability of Christian witness and Scripture in languages and forms a community can understand deeply, including oral and sign-language contexts where relevant.

Local ownership. Meaningful local authority over priorities, decisions, resources, leadership, institutions, and public representation; not merely the employment of local staff inside externally controlled systems.

Locally rooted church. A Christian community embedded sufficiently in its social and linguistic environment to sustain ordinary Christian life and increasingly carry witness, leadership, discipleship, and decision-making without permanent outsider control.

Mission. The participation of God’s people in God’s redemptive purpose, centrally through witness to Christ that makes disciples, crosses boundaries, and forms communities of faith. The term is used more narrowly than a synonym for every good Christian activity.

Missio Dei. “Mission of God.” A missiological concept emphasizing that mission originates in God’s action and purpose rather than in the institutional expansion of the church.

People group. A human research category used by mission organizations to identify populations among whom barriers of language, culture, ethnicity, religion, caste, geography, or social acceptance may hinder the flow of the gospel. It is an analytical tool, not a claim that humanity consists of perfectly fixed units.

Polycentric mission. Mission arising from multiple geographic, ecclesial, and cultural centers rather than from one dominant sending region.

Relational access. Meaningful access to trustworthy Christians with whom questions, faith, and life can be explored through actual relationships.

Sending church. A local church that discerns, prepares, commissions, supports, pastors, and remains accountable with workers it sends, rather than functioning only as a source of funding.

Unengaged unreached people group (UUPG). A database category for an unreached population in which no active church-planting engagement or workers are reported under the source’s operational definition.

Unreached people group (UPG). A strategic category for a population judged to lack sufficient locally rooted Christian presence to sustain broad evangelization without outside assistance. Thresholds and counting methods vary by organization.