UNREACHED
In Revelation 7, John shares his vision of heaven with members from every tribe, tongue, people and language standing in the throne room before the Lamb.
Yet today there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups around the world.
For the last six years, my family and friends have been on a journey to find, vet and fund the task remaining.
Come journey with us to the ends of the earth as we share the supernatural stories of God at work through the men and women he has called to reach the UNREACHED.
UNREACHED
East-West: Long-Term Fruit From a Short-Term Trip
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
We share how East-West Ministries fuels church-planting movements in the spiritually darkest places and why local ownership, simple training, and courageous witness are building lasting fruit. Stories of persecution, collaboration, and measurable faith goals show practical ways to engage now.
• vision rooted in Revelation 7 and the need among 7,000+ unreached people groups
• early callings to missions and the path from short-term to long-term service
• East-West focus on Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and animist contexts across 52 countries
• practical on-ramps: short-term trips, evangelism training, and field readiness
• giving and prayer partnerships with real-time updates and project impact
• frontline stories: long-term fruit from short trips; house-church multiplication
• persecution realities in India and resilient strategies for hard places
• shift to local ownership and indigenous leadership as the biblical model
• collaboration through the Coalition of the Willing and shared village-level maps
• 2033 vision for a church in every village; role of tech and AI
• 2026 faith goals: gospel shares, disciples, leaders, churches, workers, new UPGs
https://www.eastwest.org/
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In Revelation 7, John shares his vision of heaven with members from every tribe, tongue, people, and language standing in the throne room before the land. Yet today, there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups around the world. My family and friends have been on a journey to find, bet, and find the task remaining. Come journey with us to the ends of the earth as we share the supernatural stories of God at work with a minimum he is called to reach the unreached. Hello, friends. Welcome back to the Unreach Podcast. Dustin Elliott here, your host today. And today we have two special guests, the CEO and the president of East West Ministries. Kurt, Kristen, welcome to the show. Why don't you give us a little bit of your story and background? How'd you meet the Lord? How'd you get involved in missions?
SPEAKER_00:That's great. Thanks, Dustin. Yeah, super honored to be here. Thank you for the opportunity. Any chance to be able to tell of what the Lord is doing among the nations and invite people to be a part of that is certainly a joy. So eager for the conversation today. So fortunately, I had the wonderful privilege of growing up in a Christian home and uh was in a church where they just had a deep value for missions and for training up children to understand a great commission worldview. And so I had a chance to learn how to share the gospel from a very early age after I came to faith and had opportunities to put that into practice and go door to door as a child with my dad. Wow, how do you end in hand? And it was just a great experience to really watch my dad model what it looks like to tell the story of Jesus to others. And then just grew in my own passion for that as I began to see people say yes to following Jesus. I thought, how do I do more of this? And then over the years, the Lord just blessed me with incredible opportunities to go to the nations. My first international trip was with my dad, fittingly. And so we got to go to South America together and then from there got to go on a number of different trips and then ultimately moved to South America with the International Mission Board and got to live out more of a frontlines call for a few years from South America. So wonderful experience with that.
SPEAKER_02:How old were you, do you think, when you went on that first trip?
SPEAKER_00:Uh my first international trip, I was 17.
SPEAKER_02:17. Okay. And how old were you when your dad started kind of taking you and door knocking and just local evangelism?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I was about 10 years old when we started sharing the gospel together. Uh but my family was going on mission trips from the time I was six years old. So had very early exposure to what that looks like. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:I just think that's great context for the listeners because sometimes we're wondering how old is an old enough, you know, age of reason isn't explicitly defined in the Bible, but we can tell some kids uh certainly get it and have an understanding of it sooner than others. And uh so I think it's helpful to know, yeah, you can start pretty young. You you know, they can handle the Bible pretty young and uh and and tell people about Jesus. So thank you for your intro. Kurt, your turn, sir.
SPEAKER_01:You know, looking back, I think my calling to missions actually started with a grandmother who always uh was telling us missionary stories, missionary biographies, praying for missionaries. And my brother and I both ended up being missionaries. So I credit my grandmother's prayers with uh the foundation of that. For me, though, it really started in college. I uh was involved in intervarsity Christian fellowship at the University of North Carolina, and uh every month our chapter meeting speaker were missionaries from somewhere in the world. And so, golly, for four years all through college, I was hearing frontline missionary stories. And then I attended their Urbana conference uh in uh 1976, and uh God literally called me two missions at Urbana 1976, and uh it was irresistible. Billy Graham spoke, Luis Palau spoke. Wow, there was a missionary from Uganda, Helen Rosevere spoke. I mean, it yeah, it there was no way you could say no to God if he was calling you to missions in that context. That led me. I was actually pre-med uh and I went to started medical school the following year, uh, thinking I would do medical missions, and that's what took me to Benin, West Africa, and I worked in a mission compound there for the summer. And then God, I would say, re-re-called me or redirected me when I was in Africa to leave med school and go to what I call the everything else of missions, but it was really about reaching the unreached. Uh Paul says in Romans 15 20, it's always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else's foundation. Rather, as it is written, those who were not told about him will see, and those who have not heard will understand. And uh that God planted that verse in me before I even knew what unreached people were.
SPEAKER_02:Both of you got called into missions early, both of you went to the field, and it hurts you actually you pursued a depth of knowledge here. So you you got a a a degree from DTS and then also from Columbia International. So you really when you decided to go all in, you wanted to get that basis and that deep doctrine and that deep theology uh aligned, right?
SPEAKER_01:Uh yeah, that's correct. I spent a year actually at CIU in South Carolina before I came to Dallas, and uh that was probably the best uh spiritual year of my life uh because that school, Columbia International University, is a missions-sending school. They have it was full of missionary kids and uh missionaries and missionary kids, and it was just a a fertile environment to uh to continue to sense the call and the the direction of God to missions.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and there's plenty of good shrimp and grits and fried chicken nearby. That doesn't hurt either.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. So, Kurt, tell us about how how is East West engaged? Where where are you working? Yeah, give me the macro view of of the operation.
SPEAKER_01:So the you know, the macro view without naming some of those uh countries uh that are at greater risk, but our vision statement is to glorify God by multiplying followers of Jesus in the spiritually darkest areas of the world. Our founder was a marine captain and uh bronze star Purple Heart uh in Vietnam. And the the DNA of the Marine Corps is to take the beach, take the hill, take the difficult places. And I think that DNA was spiritually infused East-West. So we're primarily focused on uh Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, uh, and then a lot of dark animist uh areas of the world where the gospel has not been uh reached those uh peoples in 2,000 years.
SPEAKER_02:Are you on three four continents, three continents, five continents? I think y'all are pretty much everywhere but Antarctica, aren't you?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I would say we're on five continents. We're technically in 52 countries right now, and that ebbs and flows, depending on certain situations, geopolitical and such.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, and about how many teams do we have in the field?
SPEAKER_00:So we have about 220 missionaries.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Uh, and those are individuals that are committed long term to going to the field. Some reside permanently in the nation where they're serving, others are based in the U.S. and travel extensively to those nations. And then we send about a thousand short-term trip participants per year to the field. Uh, so we have about 20 nations where we get to send our short-term teams right now.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, wonderful. So if I'm listening to the pod and I'm feeling a call on my life to get more involved in missions or possibly completely go all in and give my life to this, because what greater calling could we find to give our lives to than this? How would someone engage with East West and what would that journey look like from, you know, a business person or lay person in America to the field?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's a great question. So there are lots of ways to get involved. I think the first just principle that we talk about often is the word of God. 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. And so as we look at that scripture, we're inviting people to consider how the spirit might be leading them to be laborers into the harvest. So we do have short-term opportunities. That's really a great way just to see what is the Lord up to in different parts of the world? How is he at work? Let me boldly step into an opportunity to see that firsthand. And so, as I mentioned, we have about 20 nations where we're sending those short-term teams. So you can go with a little bit of an easier experience and maybe start somewhere in our current time zone, or you can consider going on what we would call an extreme trip where you're literally strapping on a backpack that has everything that you need for 10 days, hiking into the Himalayas, into areas where there are no roads. Thereby, there are no way to get to these people other than hiking in. You're taking in the tent that you need to sleep in, your sleeping bag, and everything else. Uh, and you're literally sharing the gospel along the way as you go. And so these people are seeing not only outsiders, foreigners for the very first time, but they're also oftentimes hearing the name of Jesus for the very first time. Uh, so if you're really bold, that's a great opportunity to step into.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that one will change you. So, Kurt, after we get somebody kind of interested in going, uh, maybe they take a short-term trip and now they say, I want to give my life to this. What do they expect next in terms of of training and preparation and kind of how they figure out where they're gonna go, et cetera?
SPEAKER_01:Great question. One thing I love about our short-term teams, we'll probably take about 1,200 people to the field this year on uh one week to 10-day short-term mission teams. But one thing I love about them is that they are all evangelistic in nature. We are engaging uh people, the local people uh with interpreters and local guides with the gospel. And uh, you know, that scares some people away, but I like to remind people that we will train you, we will equip you, not only in terms of how to pack your backpack if you're going on an extreme team, but but how to share the gospel. So we do uh evangelism training before the trip and uh refreshing during the trip just to make sure people are uh adequately equipped to share the gospel, and uh and we find that it in and of itself uh destined to be transformative. A lot of a lot of people that we take have never led someone to Christ in their lifetime. God gives them the opportunity to do so, often multiple people in the course of a week. In some areas we uh take teams, they might see 30 or 40 people come to Christ in a week. And if if that doesn't change your life, nothing will.
SPEAKER_02:That's the most intoxicating experience on the planet.
SPEAKER_01:It it is. There's a verse in Philemon 6, uh, one translation uh is uh Paul writes to Philemon and he says, Be active in sharing your faith, for in so doing, you will be reminded of all the riches you have in Christ Jesus. And so when we share our share the gospel and we see someone come to Christ, it's like we're looking in a mirror and reminding ourselves of how our lives have been transformed by the power and the simplicity of the gospel. So we are very, very committed to uh to evangelism on our short-term teams. Um, we often ask people at the end of a team, uh end of a trip, is you know, is God leading you to take the next step? And we welcome investigation into other opportunities with East West, whether they be uh more short-term or midterm or long term.
SPEAKER_02:Maybe the right next step for somebody listening today is go on East West website and sign up for a short-term trip. You know, a lot of times the heart can't feel what the eye hadn't seen. So go see what it's like, go experience that and go, you know, prayerfully with an open heart and open hands, consider that God may be calling you into something different with your life. And it could be in a lot of different roles.
SPEAKER_00:I love how you talked about you really can't know what you haven't experienced. Um, you can't feel that. It reminds me of the passage that where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. So it's treasure first, and then your heart follows that. And so if you're on the fence and think about what is this whole Great Commission thing, and you know, is the Lord really up to something that we're not able to see and experience here? Um, make a gift, invest your resources and see how the Lord might bring your heart along in that. We have innumerable stories of people who give by faith, not knowing what the Lord might do with that step of faith to give generously. And then seeing not only incredible things happen among the nations of people being reached with the gospel and churches being granted, but also the life of that person who gave being transformed as well, because of uh the way by which the Lord uses generosity uh to help people understand his own heart of generosity. That's giving is a great opportunity.
SPEAKER_02:Certainly not a one-way street. Say, say someone goes in and decides to partner with you and support a team. How would they expect to be kept up to date with opportunities for prayer and for connection with the with the team in the field?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so we send out regular prayer emails for those who sign up for our prayer emails. And so you get weekly opportunities for what to pray for, what's happening in the field. And then depending on what you decide to support financially, we have missionaries that are raising their support to be a part of full-time ministry. Great opportunity to come alongside our longtime worker, long-term workers. Uh, we also have a number of different projects in the field, ranging from evangelism projects to training opportunities to unique ways by which we're trying to get the gospel into hard-to-reach places. And so if you sign up for one of those projects, then you'll get updates along the way as to how those projects are progressing. And so it really is a partnership. We're not looking for someone to make a gift and hope that things go well, but rather invest your resources in what God's doing. Let's journey in this together.
SPEAKER_02:Kurt, tell us about uh some of the impactful, you know, frontline stories that are happening around the world, or maybe something from your own experience.
SPEAKER_01:I'll tell one from just my short-term team involvement uh without naming a country um we'll talk about somewhere in the Caribbean that's been uh hard-to-reach place for our country for many, many years. Um, one of the thrilling things to me is to see uh what I call long-term fruit from short-term trips. And so uh about golly, about 20 some years ago, I shared the gospel with a 16-year-old boy. His grandmother had made the appointment uh for me to come and see him. He really didn't want to have this appointment to hear the gospel because he he was not a believer, and his grandmother kind of made him do this. What was interesting though is we shared the gospel and he listened politely, but he said as he prayed the prayer with me uh to invite Christ into his life, he said later he told me, he said, I felt something change within me. Uh I kept coming back to his little town every couple of years with other short-term teams. Within uh two years, I came back and his pastor ran up to me and said he's very active in the youth group. Uh, then I came back back two years later. He's he's dating a girl in the youth group, uh, he's engaged to a girl in the youth group, and then uh he went to seminary. And uh now for about five years, he's been uh pastoring a church uh in another little town, and his church is just growing. His he's incredible gift at developing leaders, uh, sharing the gospel in their community. And uh one of the things I've said is I've said, you know what, if if that was the only fruit of my life, to see this young man whose whose life was transformed by a simple knock on the door gospel presentation, and God called him into a fruitful ministry where he's uh he's reproducing 30, 60, and 100fold what was sown into his life. It's like that is the most satisfying thing in the world. And that happened on a short-term team. Amen.
SPEAKER_02:How cool is that! I mean, you can make a big difference planting planting seeds, right?
SPEAKER_01:You really can. One of one of our phrases we use a lot is lasting fruit in the spiritually darkest places. So uh John 15, Jesus talks about fruit, more fruit, much fruit, fruit that remains. And we are all about lasting fruit. We want to see disciples multiplied, churches multiplied. You know, that's that we think the Great Commission uh ultimately is about disciples and churches being multiplied and and filling the earth.
SPEAKER_02:What I'm seeing happen, if we if we look at the, I'm gonna say macro again, but the macro environment of the task remaining, we're seeing I don't want to call it a division, but you're seeing this like we've got to do it on the wings of business and we've got to do it on the wings of traditional missions, and it's almost like there's these two camps forming, and I don't want it, I don't want there to be two camps forming. I I think it's we need all the methods, right? And we need to be excited about all the methods, because in some parts of the world, sure, you need to you know to get in and be welcomed in and not be kind of hiding. You know, running a profitable business gives you that audience with the government and and you know, with the local leaders. And that's fine. That's a great method for that area. But short-term trips and traditional missions are still working very well in a lot of areas, right? And and you're you're giving an example of that long-term fruit from a short-term trip. Love that. That might that might almost even title the episode right there. Kristen, how about a story from your side?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that has been most impactful for me in working at a place like East West, where all of our work is happening in what we call the spiritually darkest places. I think so often from where we sit here in the US, we don't have a good frame of reference for what spiritual darkness actually looks like in different parts of the world. And one of the ways that that manifests is through persecution. And in so many places where we have the opportunity to work, persecution is a daily reality for many of our workers. So I'll tell a story of one of our teams in India. As we know, there are lots of things happening in that part of the world where it's illegal to share the gospel. It's illegal to uh convert people to Christianity. When we think about the cost of that, then it's a it's just a whole different ballgame of how our brothers and sisters in that part of the world are considering the cost of sharing the gospel. In certain states in India right now, there are bills being passed that are changing the consequences, let's say, for those who are caught proselytizing or caught with what they would call illegal conversions, uh, people converting to Christianity. And so in the past, the punishment for illegal conversions was 10 years in prison. And here recently, that has been upped from 10 years in prison to life in prison without bail. And so, as you think about what does it cost us here in the US to share the gospel? Not much, right? Maybe a little embarrassment or fear of rejection if someone does say no to what we're talking about. But in other parts of the world, like India, it's costing some the threat of life in prison if they're caught sharing the gospel and seeing someone say yes to Jesus. And so in one of the states in India where one of these new bills was passed just this past year, about three weeks after the bill was passed, we had a group of brothers and sisters that were gathering in a home and having house church. And some neighbors came into the home, attacked the believers that were in that house church, held them until the police came, whom they had called before they entered. The police came, they filed charges against them for sharing the gospel with others in their community. And 13 of them were arrested that evening and taken to jail with the new bill having just been put in place three weeks prior. And so they go to prison knowing that they may be spending the rest of their lives in prison. And so, fortunately, through a series of events and uh just opportunities that we've been able to help be a part of, we've seen all 13 be released. Uh, but that was a true miracle. Uh, they should not have been released because they were indeed participating in the very activities that those new bills are saying are illegal and should cost them life in prison. And so as you think about the work that's happening in these other parts of the world, pray for our brothers and sisters who are daily facing these life-term sentences for the simple act of proclaiming the message of Jesus to someone else.
SPEAKER_01:I'd love to share a long-term story that is really about our frontline workers. Our frontline workers are not North Americans, they are our indigenous uh local, national partners. And um, I think that's important, by the way.
SPEAKER_02:I think that's a really important caveat to say that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I always like to say that they are insiders to the culture, they're insiders to the religious context, uh, they're insiders uh really to the political, geopolitical context, and and the language. They are the ones that really should be reaching their own people and reaching reaching their neighboring peoples. And the the role of missions has shifted in in the last decade or or longer, where the North American missionary is much more in a support role, in an encouraging role, in a behind-the-scenes role, uh, and really lifting up uh the locals and resourcing them in whatever ways they need to be resourced uh to reach their own Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria. Uh but we uh we had a guy uh who was a Burmese freedom fighter. He was uh fighting for Myanmar, Burmese freedom fighter. So he was a pretty radical guy, uh and and almost like the Apostle Paul, like Saul being converted. Uh he was converted to Christ and then reached out and said, I I want I want some training, I want to go to Bible school. So a couple of us invested a very modest amount of money. It really wasn't Whole lot of money to send him to Bible school for two years. And then following that, probably more critically, we helped him receive training in how to um how to support church planting movements, the multiplication of church movements, indigenous movements. And uh then he trained another guy uh that will go unnamed, but uh, and then that guy planted 11 churches. And over the next four years, those 11, and these are house churches in most of the world, the context in which we work with persecution that Kristen alluded to, uh, you really don't want buildings. Uh, we don't spend any money, no money on bricks and mortar. House churches are harder to discover, much harder to persecute, and and work well in a context of persecution. So he planted 11 house churches, uh, but he kept training those 11 house church leaders. And over the next four years, they planted over 2,400 more house churches. And it was uh it's a multiplication process as churches planting churches, planting churches that's into the DNA. Um, and that was 17 generations. So from the first 11 he planted, it went down 17 daughter church, granddaughter, church, great-granddaughter church. And then uh they were sharing Christ uh after four years, those over 2,400 churches were sharing the gospel with about 600,000 people each quarter. And so that's all an indigenous work uh with us keeping our hands off of it, other than to pray, pray, and resource the work. And then Kristen, where where is that work today?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so today the 2,400 churches that Kurt reference, it's now extending into 8,300 churches in that network. Uh, and it goes 27 generations deep. So the work is only continuing to grow as a result of just one simple step of obedience, one step after another.
SPEAKER_02:That's incredible. That's but I mean, you know, it's funny, we hear these stories and we're we're shocked and awed, but it's God. So, like at the same time, we're shocked and awed, we shouldn't be. Um, but I but I I don't want the le the listener to miss the very, very significant points that Kurt just made. One being this is not West to the rest. They've seen that shift, they've made that shift, and I think that's incredibly important. We can be background players, we can be funders, we can help solve problems, we can help provide translation, we can help provide resources in terms of you know, uh supportive uh sermon material and how to teach the Bible and discovery Bible study methods and things like that, but we don't we don't have to be the you know, the quote Western white guy or whatever that goes into another context and completely has to take years and years to learn the culture and establish trust and all that. I mean in a lot of these places there are there are believers and they are ready to be better resourced and better equipped. And if we can come in and ask them what's the best way to go about this in your culture, what's the best way to support you in your system, look at the fruit. Like look at the branch on branch on branch off the vine that's happening. And I I just I want to highlight that so seriously because that is such a critical change that y'all have seen and you've made that change. The result of that change I think gives it gives a lot of encouragement, but it's a deeper word than that to what the West's role is going forward. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I think one of the ways that we would frame that, Dustin, is what we call local ownership of the missionary task. So if you look in the book of Acts, Acts 13 and 14 specifically, you see how the church grew in the early days when the church was established. And so we're essentially seeking to replicate what we see in the book of Acts. So it's nothing new, nothing unique, no big secret, but rather how did the church grow and expand in the early days? And then how can we seek to replicate those principles today? And the ultimate objective is local ownership of that task. And so while yes, there is a role for the outsider to come in and bring the gospel and be that spark to an unreached place, we're ultimately saying the reason for why we're doing that is to see local believers come to know Jesus, take on that mantle of the great commission that the Lord has also then given to them because they follow Jesus, and then live that out in their own community to start with. But then how can they grow and expand beyond that and take the gospel to be at proximate villages or even proximate nations or even to the ends of the earth? And so we want to be a part of a work in which we can help be a catalyst for igniting that concept of local ownership of what the Lord has asked of the church.
SPEAKER_02:You're just replicating the biblical model, right? I mean, that that why do we have to make it more complicated than that? It worked. It's God's example, it's how he showed us to do it. And East West, y'all are being faithful to doing it in that way. I love that. So I think one of the kind of big movements we're seeing right now is there's a lot of collaboration between different sending orgs, between different churches, between different businesses, et cetera. Like a lot of people are coming together. Where are you going? Who do you know there? How can we piggyback? How can we help? Kristen, maybe give us some kind of an up-to-date view on how you're seeing the collaborative effort take shape.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you know, I think we're at a unique time in history where there is this growing sense of desire for collaboration, not because collaboration for collaboration's sake, but because we know that we can't accomplish the task on our own. And so, how might we figure out how to accelerate the fulfillment of the Great Commission by locking arms with others and doing this together? And so there's actually a group called Coalition of the Willing. It's currently made up of 30 global church planting organizations who have said, we're better together by sharing our data with one another and really determining where is the remaining task? Where is the church today and where is it not yet? And then how do we collaborate together in order to get the church to those places where it's not yet been established? And so these 30 organizations have created essentially a shared map that details to the village level how many different uh villages have the church and don't have the church. And so today there's an estimated 5 million villages in the world that have not yet been reached with the church, a church presence. And so these 30 organizations have come together and said, how do we collaborate with one another and see a church established in these five million places? And so it's an incredible effort of not only sharing data with one another, but really kind of forcing those conversations of is your way better or is my way better? Or maybe there's a different way that we need to discover together. And so the posture of humility that's being brought to the table is incredibly beautiful to say, I might not know the best way and I'm willing to learn what that best way might be. That's a big deal in a church planting space where everyone wants to think that their strategy is the best strategy. Otherwise, we wouldn't be using strategy, right? But how do we come together and say, let's discern together in the spirit what might be the best approach in some of these places where we've not seen the church be established yet? And why might that be? And so let's let's learn that together.
SPEAKER_02:Kurt, tell me about your experience with this group and what are you seeing in terms of the trends going forward?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I had a sabbatical about two years ago. That was when Kristen was uh appointed president, and in addition to that, they asked me to take on the role of the directing a this uh unreached island in the Caribbean that worked there recently, actually about a year ago, uh, this coalition of the willing, three of the member orgs uh came together and said, let's go cast a vision for all the denominations on this island to see if they will work together. And so we cast a vision and it started with five, these these denominations have never cooperated in in history. Never. They've never worked together. And so uh about a year ago, they came back from the challenge and the encouragement and the vision, and five of them locked arms and said, We're gonna do this together. And then that has now grown to 10. And they wrote their own uh vision statement, which is um a healthy church within walking distance of everyone on our island. Uh, and walking distance is critical because transportation is non-existent. So uh, but but they have locked arms and uh and I have never been more excited. I've been working there for 30 years. I've never been more excited that the task is going to be finished in the very, very near future because all the local leaders have locked arms and said, we can do this, and we can do this together. They've they've never thought that way. So it's a fresh vision, it's a fresh wind, it's a fresh fire, and it's just thrilling because I know the Holy Spirit is is empowering that movement.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, so you're saying this isn't just a coalition of sending orgs coming together and saying we're not gonna run in parallel, but we're gonna lock arms, but this is a coalition of denominations also opening up and working together.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yes. So in the U.S., it would be both denominations and sending orgs uh both uh on the field. Uh it can be obviously any number of entities uh that have that have, again, heretofore not really cooperated together and they're they're cat catching the vision and uh embracing the vision and committing to work together to finish the task.
SPEAKER_02:Is this getting fun or what? So E10 and Illuminations have this shared goal of 2033 completing translation. What are y'all's y'all's thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_00:We love a big goal. So the the in fact, I would say the Lord has used Illuminations and E10 and just the the big vision that he has implanted within the hearts of those leaders to really challenge leaders in other spaces like the church planting space to say what might we believe the Lord for by 2033. And so our our group has said, hey, what if we were to see a church in every village everywhere by 2033? So if I can just be completely honest and transparent from a human perspective, that's actually impossible. And if I try to map out a plan for how we would get there, it's gonna take well beyond 2033. But I think that's part of the beauty of the illumination story is they were able to accelerate that timeline incredibly significantly because of being challenged with how do we think differently about this in order to see a more accelerated timeline for accomplishing this. And that's where we find ourselves today is how might we think about things differently and come to the table with a different posture and learn from one another and believe the Lord for something that truly cannot be accomplished in our own might. And so we must depend on the spirit. We know that, but to accomplish something like what we've set out to accomplish can only be accomplished by the spirit.
SPEAKER_02:The role of technology, obviously, in this is incredibly supportive in how we can do things over Zoom and how we can uh obviously everybody has a different feeling on AI, but AI has a role to play in this. So we're taking some of some things that maybe we wouldn't think are redemptive in and of themselves, but we're using them for redemptive purposes.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I mean, we're even very much leveraging AI to figure out where are these remaining villages. There so there is no global data set that tells us all villages in the world. So it's not like we can just go to some website and acquire that information. So we're actually having to figure out where are all of the villages in the world today. And we're using AI to help inform that. Uh, beyond that, we're of course using technology. So the global map that we have is all a technology system where we can input data and then visualize data to say this is where we see east-west contribution of where the church is and where believers are in a certain geographical area. But then we can overlay that with data from other organizations and gain a much clearer view of the state of the church in those places thanks to technology. And so the Lord is using some incredible tools that we have at our fingertips today to enable the strategies for how we can go about being more effective with the work.
SPEAKER_02:I love it. All right, so we have 2026 faith goals on the East West website. Let's walk through each of these for the listener and maybe give us all ways that we could be supporting and praying East West to see these goals fulfilled. So the first goal, share the gospel with 7.4 million people. Somebody break that down for me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So let me first start out by making sure we understand what we mean by faith goals. So, in the same way that a lot of faith is required to accomplish this vision for a church in every village everywhere by 2033, these goals that have been established can only be accomplished by the work of the spirit. So we have the faith to believe that God will accomplish these things. And so the first one is we look at 7.4 million people being reached with the gospel, we're really saying, how do we get the gospel in front of 7.4 million people with a clear presentation of the gospel as well as an opportunity for someone to respond? And so a lot of that is happening in a one-to-one context. There are also plenty of opportunities where we're leveraging different media uh platforms to share the gospel as well as distribution of scripture. So lots of different strategies, but ultimately to say how can they hear the gospel and respond to the gospel.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. And you're not pulling that number out of thin air. This number is generated based on the works you've been doing, the trend lines you see, the type of growth that you're seeing. And so you're you probably have a realistic, I could set that bar at six million and hit that pretty easy, but I wanted to stretch it with the faith component and so you added 20% or something like that, and you got to the 7.4. The next one's 150,000 disciples.
SPEAKER_01:Some of our goals come out of our uh mission statement, uh, which is about evangelizing the lost, uh, mobilizing the body, evangelizing the lost, equipping local leaders, and multiplying churches and disciples. This particular goal really comes out of our vision that I quoted earlier, which is that we exist to glorify God by multiplying followers of Jesus. So by that we mean disciples, uh, multiplying uh disciples of Jesus in the spiritually darkest areas of the world. So um, one thing is that we have to define a disciple of clearly and simply, if we're going to count that in uh 50 spiritually dark nations all around the world, with about 14,500 uh indigenous partners who are reporting that information up to us. So we define a disciple as someone who trusts Christ, uh they hear the gospel and they trust Christ for the first time. Uh, they go public with their profession of faith, which is often dangerous in the context that we work in. So they go public by being baptized. And again, you you know the risk of that in in some contexts. No doubt. That's risky in many of the contexts where we work. And then third, they they join a local church, again, in this case, a house church where they are being discipled and where they begin to make disciples. So it's here uh hear the gospel and believe, go public with baptism, and then join a local assembly, a local church body where they are being discipled and beginning to disciple others.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. No, thank you for defining that. That's very helpful. The next one is 42,500 new leaders trained. And so does that does that mean sending them to some sort of a Bible school or college or having them do some coursework with you with your your teams, or how does that how does that play out?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, great question. So all of our training is done in a way that we would consider to be simple and reproducible. That's kind of the philosophy of all of our training. Think Book of Acts. We're trying to help these believers understand what it looks like to reproduce healthy disciples and healthy churches. And so that's the kind of total framework of our training and then lots of different types of trainings throughout that framework. But a leader that's been trained is someone who not only receives that training, but then they go and offer that training to someone else. And so we really see our leaders as those who are reproducing what they're learning. So it's one thing to receive knowledge, it's another to receive that knowledge and then act in obedience to God's word and share that knowledge with others. And so that's really what we're tracking with these 42,500 leaders.
SPEAKER_02:Second Timothy 2,2. You've heard these truths. Now pass them on to others so they can pass them on to others. That's their life first for our discipleship groups right there. Okay, 21,000 new church plants. And again, I want to say that's a that's a big number, but that number is indicative of the generational growth of the current church movement that you have. So the way I envision this, tell me if I'm missing it, is somebody attends a house church, that house church grows, they're busting at the seams, they break out, they start another house church, now that one grows, and so on. And that's how you get that generational growth.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and that's by design. Uh, so it's not kind of accidental, like, hey, we run out of space, uh, so we need to somebody needs to go somewhere else. We actually build into the DNA, our national partners build into the DNA of each church plant to multiply, to replicate. So from the very beginning, when a house church is planted, uh, it knows that its ultimate mission is to plant churches that plant churches that plant churches.
SPEAKER_02:So I love how you say that's in the DNA. You're telling them on the front end, the purpose of this is to reproduce this. It is not for your consummation only. 1,225 new workers. That means somebody listening today is going to be part of that 1,225 new workers. Tell us about that goal.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, we're ready for them. Come on, sign up. So the 1,225 is a combination of both our short-term workers that we're sending. And so that would represent about 1,200. And then 25 long-term workers is the specific goal assigned to our those that we hope to deploy and live and serve overseas long-term.
SPEAKER_02:I love that. I love it. And a lot of times in the West context, like that might mean that they're in a central city or a hub supporting a bunch of the field workers around them, right?
SPEAKER_00:That's it.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. And then 70 new UPGs, 70 new unreached people groups engaged in 2026.
SPEAKER_01:There are about 17,000 unique people groups in the world. Uh, I was sharing that with an audience the other day, and they were they couldn't really believe that. Uh, 17,000 different ethno-linguistic people groups. So they speak a certain language, they're of a certain ethnicity, and they're in a certain location. About 7,000 of those are classified as unreached. And EastWest is very focused and targeting uh our work to go again where the gospel has never been uh proclaimed in 2,000 years. An interesting statistic is about 3.4 billion people of the 8 billion people in the world are unreached. They've never heard the gospel, they've never heard of Jesus. If they've heard the name Jesus, they don't know who he is, why he came or the message of salvation that he offers. So we are very focused on reaching into new unreached people groups, again, into those 7,000 or so that are as yet unreached. And so our national partners each year are uh very intentional about saying where can we go carry the gospel where it has not been proclaimed in 2,000 years. Uh, another thing about unreached peoples is I mean, we have everything here in the West, right? We've got podcasts, we've got churches, we've got books, libraries, you you name it. Everything's accessible to us, near neighbors who are believers, church on every street corner. An unreached people has uh no church in their community, no Bibles available to them, and no near neighbors who are believers who could lead them to Christ if they wanted to. And so uh an unreached people group actually requires somebody to cross a cultural or a language or a geographical barrier to come bring the gospel to them for the first time.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you. Thank you for being faithful. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Um, to the East West folks that hear this, just uh what a great group you've got to support. We're very encouraged. Uh, we look forward to be being a partner with you, whoever that listener is that engages with East West and goes, we want to have you on in a year and tell the story of what's happened and let that word get out. How about that?
SPEAKER_00:Let it that's great.
SPEAKER_02:Sounds great. Okay, somebody's got to close us in prayer. Who wants it?
SPEAKER_00:I'd be happy to.
SPEAKER_02:All right, Kristen, take it away.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, uh, Father, thank you for the gift of Jesus and for the privilege that we have of not only knowing you, but getting to share about you with others. Uh Lord, we long for the nations to know you. And so, Father, for those listening, would you just do a work in their hearts? Lord, would you draw them near to you in a way that would allow them to be convicted and compelled to take that next step of faith to get involved with your Great Commission work. Father, it can be scary and intimidating, but Lord, would you just give boldness and joy as we all seek to be obedient to what you're asking of us? And so, Father, lead us in obedience to be about your work in such a way that not only more people get to hear about you and by your grace more people will get to follow you, but ultimately, Lord, that we may bring you glory. So, Father, we love you. For this time, we ask these things in your son's name. Amen.
SPEAKER_02:Amen. Thank you for listening to Unreached. Our sincere desire is that what you've heard today will cause you to see the mission of God differently and your role in it more clearly. If this adds value for you, and we hope it does, would you please rate and review the podcast wherever you listen? Also share with your family, your friends, your church, your life group, small group, D group, wherever you do life. And if you want to connect with us, find us on Instagram at Unreach Podcast or email us at unreach podcast at gmail dot com.
