A National Mission Trip

On Tuesday nights in college I went to a weekly worship service at a Presbyterian church down the street. The Inn, as it’s named, puts together mission trips for Spring Break. Since April has come to a close, I decided to check out their website (www.theinnministries.org) to see where they went. Four out of the five trips were within the U.S. National mission trips! Ministry to one’s own countrymen. An outreach within. Kind of surprising.

One of my statistics-happy amigos told me that the U.S. is one of the least evangelized countries in the world. Kind of ironic since for my whole life I’ve heard that the U.S. sends out more missionaries than any other country in the world.

According to Patrick Johnstone and Jason Mandryk in their book Operation World, almost 85 percent of the U.S. claims to be Christian. However, aside from the fact that this claim is grossly inflated, there are large groups of unreached peoples within the United States who do not make this claim. They outline six distinct groups:

1. 5.4 million Jews—“the largest concentration of Jews in the world”
2. Sects—Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the like (2,500 in total)
3. Muslims—“nearly 8 million with more than 1,500 mosques”
4. South Asians—quite wealthy with few Christians
5. Prison Population—1.8 million in jail

Good for The Inn for addressing the need. May there be more national mission trips—in every country.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Short Term Missions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.