Where are the workers?

"The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest."  Matthew 9:37-38

The other day I posted about how YWAM Jax Beach focuses on sending people to bring the Gospel to the unreached people groups living in the 10/40 window.  One of the driving forces behind this vision is the lack of people currently working among unreached people groups.  There are roughly 2.84 billion people (40% of the world population) living in unreached people groups. Below are a few stats related to the allocation of Christian missionaries (both Catholic and Protestant) that blow my mind*.

• There are 419,500 missionaries in the world.
• Of those, only 2.4% are working among unreached peoples (10,200). This number is down almost 2% from ten years ago.
• The current ratio is 1 missionary for every 278,431 unreached people!
• Conversely, there are 95,000 Evangelical Christians for every one unreached people group.

The final number that astounds me is that as a Christian today, you have as good of a chance of being in an airplane crash (.0005%) as you do of working long-term to bring the Gospel to an unreached people group. With this in mind, the verse above carries as much significance today as it did when Jesus first said it.  God is moving in amazing ways among unreached people groups,  but imagine how the harvest could grow exponentially if the number of workers increased. With that in mind, please pray for Father to raise up more people to work in these fields.

* All stats taken from Thetravelingteam.org