A disemboweled chicken on his doorstep and a cross painted on the wall of his home. This is what “David,” an Indonesian church planter discovered one morning—a not-so-subtle warning that his purpose for being in the village was no secret.

I recently had the privilege of meeting David and others who shared about their work in Indonesia. These church planters have chosen to follow the model of Kingdom expansion Jesus gave his disciples in Matthew 10. They seek “worthy persons” who can open a community to the witness of the gospel through their hospitality and interest in Christ.

Sometimes church planters find themselves shaking the dust from their feet and leaving in search of more receptive hearts. With thousands of villages unengaged with the gospel and a limited number of workers, they trust the Holy Spirit to use this process to lead them to the places where he is at work.

The gospel is penetrating spiritually dark corners of the world, and cross-cultural workers are seeing pockets of awakening among unreached people groups. However, many cities, regions and even nations have a miniscule percentage of inhabitants who call Jesus Lord.

Unreached nations like Afghanistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh represent some of the largest and fastest-growing population centers on earth. Yet fewer than five percent of cross-cultural workers serve among the challenging “nations, tribes, peoples and languages” scripture has promised will be worshiping around the throne in the New Heavens and New Earth (Revelation 7:9).

The pragmatic human response to this dynamic is to work harder, to pour more resources into the battle, to excoriate those who sit on their hands. But the reality is that, even if everyone gave to the point of poverty and obeyed to the point of death, the results would be fruitless apart from a sovereign work of the Spirit to draw the lost to the Father.

Our response to the plight of the unreached reveals the depth of our view of God. Do we truly believe it is the mission of God to reconcile the nations to himself? And, as counterintuitive as it may seem, do we believe that our proclamation of the gospel is the means that he has ordained to accomplish this?

The Indonesian church planters I met are deeply aware of this truth—and it is what gives them faith when their efforts seem frail in the face of spiritual opposition.

It is what drives them to prayer—the vanguard of all mission activity. As S.D. Gordon writes:
We can do no thing of real power until we have done the prayer thing. Here is a man by my side. I can talk to him. I can bring my personality to bear upon him, that I may win him. But before I can influence his will a jot for God, I must first have won the victory in the secret place. Intercession is winning the victory over the chief, and service is taking the field after the chief is driven off. Such service is limited by the limitation of personality in one place. . . . Prayer puts man into direct dynamic touch with a planet.

Matt Green is Vice President of Communications for Pioneers Missions and Editor of Ministry Magazine. This article first appeared on John Piper’s Desiring God blog and is used with permission.