08 Apr Our Role in a Highly-Churched Country

The countries of Central America have large evangelical populations. Guatemala and El Salvador are 26% evangelical, Honduras is 23%, Nicaragua 22%. That’s nearly as high as the United States (26%, according to one study). So how does this affect our role?

Those countries don’t need pioneering missionaries from North America. They have plenty of Christians. Instead, our work really consists of church expansion. We want to provide resources and train leaders, and to help the Hondurans and Nicaraguans and others take the next step in becoming healthy, growing, viable congregations. That’s what they seem to look to us for.

Central America isn’t the 10/40 window, that area of the world stretching across Asia and northern Africa where 95% of the people haven’t heard the Gospel, and which is home to 87% of the world’s poorest of the poor.

Part of the Gospel ministry is compassion. But the other side is to reach the unreached. We must keep that balance. We will encounter compassionate needs everywhere we go, and we want to partner with people who are starting new churches. But we need to keep our eye on the unreached and the 10/40 window.

One of the stated priorities of Global Ministries is, “We focus our efforts and resources on lesser-reached people groups.” We don’t want to spend all our resources in heavily-churched countries, and not get around to countries where there is no opportunity to hear the gospel.