There is a number that sits at the centre of every missions conversation, and most Christians have heard it enough times that it has lost its weight.

Somewhere around 2.9 billion people, depending on which missiological estimate you use, have no meaningful access to the Gospel. Not a Church within reach. Not a missionary in their language. Not a Bible in a form they can hold or read. Just silence, where the voice of God should be.

I want you to sit with that number for a moment. Not as a statistic but a reality.

2.9 billion is not an abstraction but the representation of a grandmother in a remote village in the Sahel who has spent her entire life praying to a god she was handed by her ancestors, never knowing there was a Saviour Who died for her specifically.

The 2.9 billion is a young man in a closed country who feels the weight of something holy pulling at him and has no name to give it, no community to point him to Christ, no Scripture in his tongue that could answer the hunger he carries.

2.9 billion is a representation of children, millions of them, who will grow up, grow old, and die without ever once hearing that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.

That is not a statistic but a catastrophe, and the uncomfortable truth is that it is a catastrophe that the Church has largely chosen to live beside rather than respond to with everything she has.

I have walked into villages in rural Nigeria where the name of Jesus Christ was genuinely unknown, sat down with new believers who wept when they realized that someone had left everything to come and tell them the Gospel, not being able to fathom the fact that someone would cross cultures, learn a language, endure hardship, to come and tell them something so costly and so beautiful? And I thought to myself: this is what the Church was made for. This is the entire point.

But when I return from those villages and I look at the broader landscape of the Church such as the conferences, programs, the budgets, and the prayer meetings, I often see something that troubles me deeply.

I see a Church that has become very good at meeting its own needs, expanding its own buildings, enriching its own experience, but a very small percentage of that energy, those finances, those prayers, is directed outward towards the unfinished task, towards the unreached, towards the harvest fields that are white and waiting.

We have, in many ways, redefined the Gospel. Not theologically but practically and functionally. We have taken a message that is inherently outward and turned it inward. We gather, worship, grow, and congratulate ourselves on how well we are doing it. Meanwhile, the billions who have never heard grow older every single day.

The Great Commission was not a suggestion but the final mandate of the risen Lord before He ascended.

Go into all the world. Make disciples of all nations. Baptize them. Teach them.

He did not say we should go into our cities and make disciples of the people who already look like us. He said ALL NATIONS which is the Greek word panta ta ethne, meaning every people group, every tribe, every tongue.

Unfortunately, that mandate has not been fulfilled, the task is unfinished, and the Church which includes your Church and my Church, has a role to play that we cannot outsource to a few brave souls and then forget about.

Missions is not a department in the Church that comprises of passionate men neither is it an item in a budget that gets reviewed once a year and celebrated in a special Sunday service where a missionary couple shows slides from the field.

Missions is the posture of the Church that proves who we are when we truly understand who He is and what He has done.

So for the next fifteen days, I want to take you somewhere uncomfortable by talking about two things the Church has largely been reluctant to talk about honestly which are GIVING and PRAYING for missions and missionaries.

I won’t write generically or vaguely; I’d rather be very specific, practical and with full weight.

Because here is what I have come to believe after years of working in rural Church planting, after walking into villages where the Gospel has never been preached, after sitting with missionaries who labour in obscurity with little support and fewer prayers on their behalf:

the greatest hindrance to global missions is not government restrictions, not cultural barriers, not the hardness of unreached peoples. It is a Church that does not GIVE, and a Church that does not PRAY.

If we give, workers go. Fields get entered. Churches get planted. The Word goes out in languages it has never been heard before. Lives are transformed. Eternity shifts.

If we pray, heaven moves. Doors open that no man can shut. Hardened hearts soften. The Spirit of God goes ahead of every missionary and prepares the ground. Things happen on the field that cannot be explained by strategy or skill alone but only by the faithfulness of intercessors who hold the line from a distance.

And if we do neither, folding our hands, closing our wallets, and narrowing our gaze to what is comfortable and familiar, then we must be honest with ourselves about what we have done.

We have taken the most explosive, world-altering message in human history and domesticated it, making it small.

I refuse to make it small.

Over the next fifteen days, I am going to do my best to disrupt your comfort in the best possible way. Not to condemn, but to awaken, to call us together, back to the full weight of what it means to be the Church of Jesus Christ in a world where billions have never heard His name.

The numbers should keep us awake. Not in despair, but in holy, motivated, unstoppable urgency.

Let the fifteen days begin.

Grace to you!