Jesus once said, “The Gospel must first be preached to all nations…” (Mark 13:10). With prophetic eyes, John was able to see these words of Jesus become reality as he wrote, “I looked and there was before me a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language standing before me… and they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb’…” (Rev. 7:9-10).

As we gather in Southern CA in 2010, we can see this divine mission in process. There are 7 billion people in the world. Of those, over 2.3 billion call themselves "Christians." God alone knows the real count, but let’s say that there are 1 billion "committed Christians" in a world of 7 billion people.

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From one point of view, even that lower number is quite encouraging. It means that there are nine times as many "committed Christians" in the world today as constituted the entire population of the world in the day of Jesus. It means that there is one committed Christian for every 7 non-Christians, as compared to the 1 to every 200 at the end of the first century. In fact, that ratio of committed Christians to non‑Christians has been steadily improving over the last several hundred years.

But there is another side to the story. According to the Joshua Project, today there are 6,552 unreached people groups in the world out of a total of 16,309 ethno-linguistic peoples. There is a huge and glorious work yet to be done, and it will take the whole church, not just part of it, to get it done. At LAC, we long to play our part in God’s global mission.

To His glory,

Dr. Greg Waybright
Senior Pastor