Sometimes, finding unreached people groups means getting your truck stuck in a riverbed, driving 12 hours and traveling to village after village after village, asking if anyone knows anything about an unengaged and unreached people group.
More than 3,000 people groups around the world have no strategy for reaching them with the gospel. Project 3000 is a concerted effort to ensure that every people group has access to the gospel.
The International Mission Board is sending 300 missionary explorers to research every remaining people group with no known gospel presence. The explorers are young, usually in their 20s, and spend their term overseas traveling with national partners to locate, research and share the gospel with these people groups.
Village to village
During his time on the missions field, missionary explorer Rees Morgan was based out of Guinea and traveled to eight countries to research 12 people groups.
When he shares about his role, he tells people, “I go short term so that others can go long term. I go short term to make contact with these people, so that I can write up jobs that allow the local African churches and then the global Church to go and be with these people long term for the gospel.”
During his time overseas, Morgan experienced many of the daily adventures missionary explorers face. On one trip, Morgan and his national partner got stuck trying to cross a creek while searching for one of the people groups. They had to drive until they found a bridge and then drive 12 hours along a small creek bed until they reached the border of of Cote d’Ivoire.
They went from village to village within the country, asking local churches and people in marketplaces if they’d heard of the Konyanke people.
No one really knew who they were, if they even existed, or where they were located. Morgan and his partner followed vague clues, such as “in a village that way.”
On one of their stops, they thought they’d found a village, but it turned out to be the Kla people group.
An old man in the village claimed he knew the Konyanke and that the village was somehow connected, so Morgan and his national partner stayed a week.
The man shared a story worthy of a movie, how people groups fled during the Muslim conquest, and the son of the chief of the Konyanke was trapped in a sacred forest for seven years, which led them to live in the village they are in now.
Morgan and his partner decided to go one village further and finally found the Konyanke.
“We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
Joyfully, they shared the gospel and gathered the information they needed.
Faithful pursuit
The Tura people were next on Morgan’s list, and he met a Tura missionary in one of the villages.
The IMB had no knowledge of any believers among the Tura, but Morgan learned around 20% of the population are Christian, and churches are sending missionaries of their own. The missionary they met went to the Kla village where they’d spent a week and shared the gospel. Twelve people committed their lives to Christ. Now, a church is being planted.
Morgan emphasized that God was already at work among the Tura. His faithful pursuit of the people group predated Morgan’s visit.
“God already knows what’s there,” Morgan said.
He said God gave him the opportunity to go and be a part of what He’s already doing.
Morgan prays the Kla and Tura believers will take the gospel to the Konyanke. The Kla and Tura people groups are animists, and sharing the gospel with Muslim people groups requires different strategies. This opens the door for opportunities to train believers from animistic people groups in how best to share the gospel with Muslims.
When researching the people groups, explorers write cultural profiles. Morgan’s usually amounted to 20 pages that detailed who the people group is, what they believe and the contacts he made in the group. With each group. Morgan submitted a one-page document with the next steps, such as contacting certain people. This helped local and IMB missionaries develop strategies for continued evangelism. He also created prayer flyers for the people groups that churches could use to bring the people group before the Lord in prayer.
Morgan said a big part of his role was networking and mobilizing.
“The local people who are a couple cities away will be much more faithful in stewarding that relationship than the IMB,” Morgan said.
The reason for this is distance.
“We need to recognize how great it is that we got to rely on some of the local churches that are not too far away from these places,” Morgan said.
In his current role as a mobilizer for Project 3000, Morgan is attending conferences and visiting churches and universities to recruit, mobilize and share about this opportunity through the IMB. He also teaches ethnography to new missionaries who are preparing to serve in research roles.
To Learn more about Project 3000, click here.
Some names changed for security.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Tessa Sanchez and originally published by the International Mission Board.
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