Most of the world’s unreached people live in a region extending south-north from ten degrees north to forty degrees north latitude, and west-east from West Africa to East Asia.
(This area contains Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Chad, China, Cyprus, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Gaza Strip, Gibraltar, Greece, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Korea–North and South, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Macau, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Morocco, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Niger, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, West Bank, Western Sahara and Yemen. Source: Operation World.)
This area, now called The 10/40 Window, is where most of the world’s Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists–billions of spiritually starving people–live.
If we truly commit to giving people a chance to experience Jesus Christ in Spirit and in truth, we must focus on the people who haven’t heard yet. We must consider the: 1) area’s Biblical and historical significance; 2) degree to which its people still haven’t heard the good news; 3) way its religions dominate the people: 4) extreme poverty of most of the area’s people; 5) completely unreached ethnolinguistic groups: 6) least evangelized huge cities; 7) strongholds of Satan.
First, let’s remember that God placed Adam and Eve in this area’s heart, saying man should subdue the earth, but man disobeyed and fell by believing Satan’s lies, which now dominate the 10/40 window. Noah’s ark rested here, and later man built Babel’s Tower again to defy God, and again fell into Satan’s snare, since the resulting multiple languages, scattered locations of the people, and various nations made evangelism much harder than it would have been before. Then God chose one man, again from this region, to show truth and through whom, ultimately in Christ Jesus, He would reach out to save the world.
Through Abraham’s life in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Canaan, and through Israel’s fortunes changing up and down as they turned to or from God, we see God’s hand, and we hear His voice through the prophets. Here Jesus Christ lived, spoke, died, rose and spoke again. Here the Church was born and began her growth.
Second, most of this part of the world’s people not only have not heard the gospel, but have no way to respond to it–no Bibles, for example. And two thirds of the world’s people–whom we’ve been told God loves, and whom we’ve been told to reach–live here. Of the world’s fifty least evangelized nations, thirty-seven are in the 10/40 window of the uttermost part of the earth.
Third, looking at a map west to east across the 10/40 Window makes the heavily oppressive religious blocks clear enough. The Muslim world stretches across North Africa and the Middle East, the Hindu heartland across South Asia, including India, and the Buddhist center is East Asia, including China. From the 10/40 Window, Islam agressively expands over the earth. Let us proclaim at least as powerfully that the Koran’s–and Bible’s–highest prophet is Jesus Christ, also the Son of God who died and rose to save millions of Muslims.
In India, fattened cows roam the streets among hungry humans because spiritual blindness hits India even harder than do poverty and disease. India needs light and a true and living Way.
China chose Marxism, but Buddhism still influences its people, and animism and the occult still rule some subgroups of China’s 1.2 billion people. They need Jesus.
Fourth, of the poorest of the world’s poor people, over 80%–2.4 billion–live in the 10/40 Window. Only 8% of the world’s missionaries work among them, even though most of the world’s unreached live in the world’s poorest nations. Besides, the gospel is good news for the poor (Luke 4:18; 6:20; 7:22). The law, the prophets, the wisdom books and Jesus’ teaching and ministry all repeat God’s love for the poor and our consequent duty to defend and care for them.
Fifth, the 10/40 Window contains 90% of all the large ethnolinguistic people groups. (NOTE: here are the least evangelized ethnolinguistic peoples in the 10/40 Window: In South Asia, Assamese, Baluchi, Bengali, Bhil, Bhotia, Bihari, Bondili, Braj Bhakha, Chattisgarhi, Deccani, Gujarati, Hindi, Ho, Kanauji, Kashmiri, Maharastra, Nepali, Orisi, Rajasthani, Sindhi, and Urdu; in the former CIS, Tadzhik and Turkmen; in Northeast Asia, Bhotiya, Chuang, Han, Hui, Japanese, Manchu, Miao, Mongol, Puyi, Tujia, Uigar, Yao and Yi; in Southeast Asia, Burmese, Khymer, Lao, Mon, Shan, Thai and Tibetan; in West Africa, Bedouin, Berber, Dyerma, Fula, Hausa, Lobi, Malinka, Mandinka, Tuareg, West Arab, and Wolof; in West Asia, Arab, Azerbaijani, Hazara, Jew, Kurd, Pathan, Persian/Parsi, Turk and Uzbek. Please pray for workers who know or will learn these languages and go. Source: Frank Kaleb Jansen, The Unreached People Map.)
Sixth, this part of the world contains ALL of the fifty least evangelized large cities (i.e. cities of over one million in population) Here they are: Kabul, Afghanistan; Algiers, Algeria; Chittagong, Bangladesh; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Baotou, China; Datong, China; Huhahot, China; Lanchou, China; Nanjing, Chinga; Pingxiang, China; Taijuan, China; Calcutta, India; Jaipur, India; Kanpur, India; Lucknow, India; Surat, India; Vadodara, India; Varanasi, India; Baghdad, Iraq; Mashdad, Iran; Teheran, Iran; Tel Aviv, Israel; Fukuoka, Japan; Hiroshima, Japan; Kawasaki, Japan; Kitakyushu, Japan; Kobe, Japan; Kyoto, Japan; Nagoya, Japan; Osaka, Japan; Sapporo, Japan; Sendai, Japan; Tokyo, Japan; Yokohama, Japan; Amman, Jordan; Pyongyang, North Korea; Tripoli, Libya; Casablanca, Morocco; Faisalabad, Pakistan; Karachi, Pakistan; Lahore, Pakistan; Rawalpindi, Pakistan; Jiddah, Saudi Arabia; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Dakar, Senegal; Bangkok, Thailand; Tunis, Tunisia; Ankara, Turkey; Istanbul, Turkey; Izmir, Turkey. Pick one and intercede in prayer and spiritual warfare over it. (Source: Viv Gregg, Urban Leadership Foundation.)
Seventh, Satan’s strongholds have been many and very strong here, keeping people from hearing the gospel (2 Corinthians 4:4). The places of dominant Satanic strength, according to the Sentinel Group, are Bhutan, India, Iran, Iraq, Nepal, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
So what can we do? Plenty. First, we pray. Although we live in the world, we do not fight as the world fights. Rather, we have divine power to demolish strongholds (2 Corinthians 10:3-4), so we do not surrender to Satan one person. Daniel exemplies our approach: he prayed, was highly esteemed by God and by his contemporaries. He fasted on bread and water for three weeks until a majestic angel appeared as lightning bringing Daniel’s prayer’s answer (Daniel 10:12) and to tell Daniel that the demon assigned to the Persian king had detained the angel for twenty-one days until the archangel Michael arrived to help. Only then could the angel go to Daniel. This shows how Satan fights for territory.
Two demonic forces stand at the center of the unreached world–the prince of Persia (Iran) and the spirit of Babylon (Iraq). We must penetrate this world, bringing good news back to Eden, to complete the Great Commission and the knowledge of truly subdueing the earth in God’s way.
Of course Satan will resist defeat, but we can and must depend on the armor God gives us (Ephesians 6).
Perspective: Missions two hundred years ago started on the coastlands of the world. A century later, missionaries pushed for the interiors. In the past few decades, missions have focused on people groups, and more recently we’ve emphasized large cities. Today, we must concentrate on the 10/40 Window. This doesn’t mean curtailing Christ’s work elsewhere in evangelism, church planting, training, relief, and development, but if we obey the Scriptures to reach all the world and don’t waver in our commitment that every person hear the gospel, we must know that, since the 10/40 Window contains most of the people who haven’t heard of Jesus yet, it is our window of opportunity. People on the other side of all the obstacles hunger for Jesus Christ. We must innovate to reach billions, and mobilize massive prayer. May we commit every resource in energy, attention, ability, time, life, money, courage and wisdom to tell the world about Jesus before He returns.
What to Do? First, please in your local church establish a task force of people committed to pray for world evangelism. Assign responsibilities within the task force, including communication within church leadership, promotion, leadership of prayer groups.
Second, please select an unreached people, a least evangelized city and nation from the list in this article. Commit to pray for their hearing the good news. Get information about these people, cities and nations from library resources, from encyclopedias, from your newspapers, and by writing their embassies. Assign task forces to each people, city and nation.
Third, please consult church leaders, SET GOALS from the present through the next three to five years and, based on God’s Word and your local realities, set goals for what you expect God to do in and through your church, locally and globally, by that date.
Fourth, organize a local church seminar to prepare for this. Coordinate a month of prayer and fasting to pray for spiritual breakthroughs, the Holy Spirit’s outpouring, and the Lordship of Jesus Christ to be established in every people, city and country in the 10/40 Window. If you can afford it, send a team to one of the countries, cities or peoples to pray on-site.
Last, choose a special month of prayer and fasting: in India, August might be good because by then the monsoon is everywhere and the monsoon makes some other forms of work, such as travel, more difficult. During the chosen month, have pre-dawn meetings at the church, organize concerts of prayer in your city, and join several other churches for a united prayer march in your city on agreed-upon dates.
God bless you. He wants a whole new spiritual outpouring breaking through to new people.