The point is that we need to align the way we talk about the world and its peoples with how Scripture speaks of them. We should define our missionary expectations by the Bible, not going beyond what it has said. And we must ground our endeavors and formulate strategies in ways primarily driven by God’s Word. This involves sending missionaries to places where the gospel has never been heard. But it can also include encouraging them to stay long after churches are established.

You may have heard of them. In 1974, the strategy of nearly every mission organization in the West changed over three Greek words—panta ta ethne. They’re found most famously in Matthew 24:14 and 28:19:

And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations (pasin tois ethnesin), and then the end will come.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations (panta ta ethne), baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

At the Lausanne Conference in 1974, Ralph Winter and Donald MacGavern introduced the term “hidden peoples.” Winter estimated there were more than 16,000 hidden peoples (he’d later say 17,000) walled off by linguistic and cultural barriers to missionary work. He challenged those in attendance to think of the world not in terms of countries, but rather thousands of unique ethnicities, called “people groups.” Winter would eventually write:

By the phrase “all the nations,” Jesus was not referring at all to countries or nation-states. The wording he chose (the Greek word ethne) instead points to the ethnicities, the languages, and the extended families which constitute the peoples of the earth.

And so the modern missions movement was transformed. More recently, the ministries of men like John Piper and David Platt have emphasized the need to bring the gospel to unreached peoples, appealing in part to panta ta ethne for theological grounding. The subsequent strategic primacy of reaching every ethnolinguistic people group now shapes evangelicalism’s global missionary enterprise.

Along with that understanding comes the common expectation that all (as in, each and every) of these groups will be reached with the gospel (in some manner) before the final day. Such an expectation has produced a unique missionary mandate to “finish the task” by identifying each ethnolinguistic people group and taking the gospel to them. In this interpretation, the church is often said to either usher in the kingdom or at least remove this final obstacle before Christ’s return. This understanding has also prompted the need to define when a people group is reached. A recent article in Christianity Today highlighted some of the implications of this approach for the work of many missions organizations.

We believe the theological grounding for this prevailing interpretation of panta ta ethne is unsubstantiated.

Biblically Inconsistent

The most significant issue with defining panta ta ethne as “ethnolinguistic people groups” is simple: to do so adopts a modern anthropological definition over a biblical-theological one. Fifty years ago, missiologists like MacGavern and Winter rightly reacted to a purely geographic and nationalistic understanding of ethne. The problem is, they swapped that definition for a modern, socio-scientific one.

While the authors of Scripture could conceive of nations in geographic, cultural, or linguistic categories, we believe they weren’t first and foremost thinking of ethne in terms of a 20th-century designation of either nation-states or people groups. Instead, the first-century Jewish followers of Jesus would have operated primarily with a biblical-theological understanding of ethne, derived from Scripture itself.

When Jesus spoke of the nations, his Jewish hearers would have understood him to be referring to the pagan nations surrounding Israel. Of course, first-century Jews and their contemporaries were capable of making distinctions along sociological and geo-political lines. But to a Jew, the ethne were first a religious category. They were most basically the non-Jewish peoples of the world, separated from God and strangers to his promise (Eph. 2:11–12; see Mark 11:17 where pasin tois ethnesin [“all the nations”] are non-Jews). When Jesus said his gospel was for the ethne, he wasn’t primarily addressing linguistic or socio-scientific demographics. The phrase was deeply biblical; it hearkened back to Old Testament categories and expectations for the Gentiles (see Isa. 66:18–19).

Read More