Jesus told us to go and make disciples of all the nations. Join me in a little thought experiment around this.

If we use 3.37 billion as the number of people without access to the gospel, and 430,000 as the number of missionaries serving in other countries, that’s roughly 8,000 people for each missionary, or 16,000 people per couple. Challenging ratios.

Seems like we need more missionaries. Twice as many? Would that do it? What if there were 100x as many missionaries? That would be 80 people for each missionary, or 160 people per couple, which almost sounds doable.

Could our current models scale up to support 43 million missionaries? Like, could we raise 100x as much financial support to send out long term missionaries? Would there be enough people left at home to support them?

(Now you’re thinking, do we really want it to be all about the missionaries? Or should we let the local people start their own movements? OK, good point. Let’s imagine the missionaries leave once the movement takes root, supporting the new believers from a distance. So we’ll drop the concept that “long term missionary” means they have to stay in the country.)

Where would we find 43 million missionaries that we don’t need to fund? What about the people who are already living somewhere else? There are about 281 million migrants in the world. So if 1 in 6 of those were Christian, and we equipped and coached them like we do for paid missionaries…. well, of course it’s not that simple.

The biggest problem is that most of the countries who have opened their doors to migrants are not the same ones that need the gospel.

Maybe visiting the countries and depositing the gospel is more of a possibility. China let in 65 million tourists last year, India hosted 18 million and Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia were all around 10 million. We could equip people travelling anyways to bring the gospel where they go. But without language, relational connections or very much time or a way to follow up, that hasn’t historically worked very well.

It looks like we are back to what you were thinking about the locals leading their own movements. There are already Christians in every country (only Tunisia is listed as 0%, but I know Tunisian Christians there). How do we encourage them to make disciples of their own people?

This is a different way of thinking about the need for missionaries. Maybe we don’t need 100 times as many. Maybe we need all the ones we have focussing on helping the locals multiply disciples.