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Top 40 Underserved and Unreached Places

Unreached PLACES? You ask. I thought we were praying for Unreached PEOPLE! We certainly are. But unreached people tend to live in unreached places. So, let’s check a map for the “where” as well as the “who” of unreachedness. People used to see the unreached in terms of national boundaries, but this may be too generalized. Then, we began to see them in terms of unreached people groups, but this may be too specific. Our minds blur over when we hear that there are about 7,000 such groups in the world today. Pray for one group each day and it takes 19 years to get through the list!

A new way of looking at the unreached is by province or state. This perspective gives us a manageable way to see the global picture. We can comprehend it in broad strokes and focus our prayers for the unreached.

With today’s Missiographic, let’s look only at the 40 provinces that have over 10 million people and are <5% Christian and/or <2% evangelical. Several things immediately jump out at us from this perspective:
• All 40 least reached provinces are in Asia
• 17 are in India alone, and another 10 in China
• Most of the 40 names we have never heard before, much less prayed for. Those we do know we know from the news (Tehran, Beijing, Istanbul, Delhi) or from Chinese cuisine (Hunan, Sichuan).

Each of these places has a story, a profile, a dominant anti-Christian force (Hinduism, Islam, or secularism), and a massive need for the gospel to arrive on wings of prayer. 

Personal Reflection: 
• Choose a province and do some on-line research about images of that place, as if you were considering taking a vacation there. Let the place become focused through your eyes.
• For the rest of these seven days, hang a piece of chain from the top of a doorway in your house. Every time you go through that door, thank God for your freedom and remember these 40 places where Christians have little or no freedom.

Prayer: 
• May the small number of Christians who are already in these places be multiplied like the loaves and fish, so the bread of life is available for everyone.
• May the persecuted stay faithful to You, Lord, and may they know they have friends around the world faithfully praying for them.
• Lord of the harvest, let all 40 of these places defy the statisticians’ projections that none of them will be more than 10% Christian by 2050. Let all 40 thrive “for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” as Isaiah 11:9 says.