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God’s spirit is moving in areas of the world where people have never heard the gospel, but the number of new workers remains short of meeting the opportunities.

About two-thirds of the 35 new missionaries appointed September 6 by the Southern Baptist International Mission Board (IMB) are headed to regions where multitudes are dying without ever hearing that God wants to forgive their sins.

Avery Willis, the IMB’s senior vice president for overseas operations, says that God is powerfully using those who are going to the world’s 1.7 billion people who haven’t heard the Good News. He told of one missionary who tried to recruit others to an unreached people group in the Philippines. To represent the people group at a missions fair, the missionary posted a sign at an empty booth: “There is nothing here because there are no missionaries to [this people group].” The response: 78 individuals told him they wanted to help.

A pastor wanted his church to adopt the people group. A young woman decided to go as a missionary to the group. Another decided to pay the new missionary’s living expenses. She went to the group with medical and Bible storying teams. Soon, 30 people gave their hearts to Christ.

She later learned that some had tried to poison her on her first visit. When she didn’t even get sick, they decided she must be a messenger from God. Eleven more have come to Christ and now five missionaries are working among them. “One is the fiancee of a Christian pastor who was murdered in the pulpit,” Willis said. “Another is a former child soldier with a rebel group, whose father tried to kill him when he learned he had become a Christian. The father put his gun to the young man’s head and the gun jammed.

“God is at work in this world to bring [the gospel] to a people who have not known the love of God,” Willis said. “He is multiplying disciples through these countries where they have not had a chance to hear the gospel.”

Another new worker, who will serve in Asia, said God spoke to her while attending a week-long missions event while in college. “That night, I realized for the first time that those who had never heard the name of Jesus would still die and go to hell,” she said. “At that moment, my world became enormous, and I committed to God to go anywhere people did not know him to share the good news of salvation through Jesus.”

One young couple, who will take the gospel to an unreached people group in Southeast Asia/Oceania, said God spoke to their hearts through a college missions professor who “passionately challenged us to make it our ambition, like the apostle Paul’s, to take the gospel where Christ had never been preached,” the husband said. “That was a seed God planted in my heart, and I have never been able to escape that calling.”

IMB president Jerry Rankin said missionaries to unreached people groups in Central Asia are asking for prayer for laborers. “We desperately need someone to come help us. We are beginning to see glimmers of church-planting movements among several people groups, but we are so few among so many. Why don’t more come?”

November 23, 2001