What are the Differences Between Unreached People Groups and Unreached Language Groups?

What are the differences between Unreached People Groups and Unreached Language Groups?

So one of the things that I think we have to look at is this terminology between unreached people groups and what a lot more organizations are calling unreached language groups. Unreached people groups has become fairly nebulous. In 1974, Ralph Winter at the Luzon conference introduces this idea that it's not to geopolitical nations that the Great Commission is to be carried out, it's that these unreached ethnolinguistic people groups.

But people groups had become watered down. It's become almost anything, and everything today becomes an unreached people group to where there are articles being written about Quebec being the largest unreached people group in North America, or North American hockey players, because there's less than 2% of them that are saved, so we need to have a specific missionary effort going to them. I think that's where unreached people groups has gotten unhelpful, because it's so vague and nebulous.

Unreached language groups, though, brings us back to this categorization that we can see in Genesis 11. How did God separate the nations? He separated them by language. When we see at Pentecost in Acts 2 is the beginnings of the reversal of the Tower of Babel when men from everywhere that were gathered were proclaiming the glories of God in their own language. Revelation 5:9, Revelation 7:9, every tribe, language, people, and nation. Language is in there. Language isn't the totality of the Great Commission, but it is a primary marker that I think does us a much better service than people groups at this stage.