THE HARD STUFF By Alex Pettett, World Witness Executive Director
Forty years ago, the Unengaged/ Unreached (Frontier People Groups) were 60% of the world’s population. Today, it is down to 25% or roughly 2 billion people. That is amazing progress! What is left is all the hard stuff.
aid visits for Afghans, 4 outreaches to Muslim students, and regularly conducts 2 discovery Bible studies.
Among our least-reached ministries are church plants in Spain and the United Kingdom.
To go after the “hard stuff,” World Witness believes our core values of humility, boldness, and connectedness are critical. First, we want to work in Christ’s strength, not ours, which takes humility. If we are working from Christ’s strength, we have boldness to proclaim His name, and not our name. And lastly, Christ’s strength is multiplied when we strive for connectedness in working through the church, and not alone.
continued to encourage the Church to stand in persecution, and church tradition places his martyrdom in Rome. But before this, it’s as if Peter’s name began to fade from Scripture, as Christ’s name and story grew ever larger.
Some of the Unengaged/Unreached people groups are the 71,553,000 Urdu-speaking Muslims in India, the 32,097,000 Pashto-speaking Muslims in Pakistan, the 31,328,000 Marathi- speaking Hindus of India, and the 61,482,000 Turkish-speaking Muslim people in Turkey. These 2 billion people represent the most Gospel- resistant people in some of the most
You probably noticed that the largest groups’ religion is Islam. For years, World Witness has endeavored to work with Muslim people groups that reside in Europe, Africa, and Pakistan.
In 2023, Bridge Europe reports work among Muslims includes 15 new baptisms, 3 multi-ethnic church- plant works, student café ministry to 150 students, and social media outreach videos that have hundreds of thousands of views. SEED Ministry, working in Pakistan and East Africa, has a total of 5 cohorts reaching 245 students/pastors. In the United
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The Meberg family served in a small town in Mardin, Turkey, for many years. They left behind two converts, one who turned out to be an anti- missionary spy. Neither were true Christians but rather were wolves in sheep’s clothing. The Mebergs left feeling broken and tired. But their bold witness and proclamation of Christ’s name gave a nearby church courage to raise up another church planter, a Turkish man, to take their place. Now, there is a large protestant church, composed mostly of former Muslims, in this once spiritually desolate place. Except for the pastor, no one knows the name Meberg in Mardin, but the name of Christ is well known, for that is the one thing the Mebergs left behind.
This work requires apostles. The “one who is sent out.” From the Gospels, Peter’s as someone “doing the hard stuff.” He was brash, bold, and learned lessons the hard way. He had grit, staying power, and eventually whole-hearted submission to Christ. Except for a brief mention of his being in Jerusalem in Acts 15, the last thing revealed about his work is that “he departed and went to another place…” (Acts 12:17). We know from Peter’s epistles that he
To be an apostle/missionary today is to be willing to go out humbly and boldly proclaiming Christ in Christ’s strength, and if need be, have your own name forgotten by the world, so that Christ’s name will forever be remembered. The vehicle that carries this name is the eternal Body of Christ, the Church. This is what it means to work in humility, boldness, and connectedness. This is what it will
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