‘Reaching the Rest’ with the Gospel
The ministry to unreached people groups strategically empowers indigenous leaders in areas like India, Southeast Asia, and Africa to reach their own people with the Gospel.
Christians make up about 2.3% of India’s population, according to the Department of State. As a religious minority, Christians are suppressed by the national government and often persecuted.
However, Reach the Rest, through its network of local ministry partners, is seeing growth among Christians in Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha in northeastern India.
Mike Jackson is the CEO of Reach The Rest. He said that during the first six months of this year, approximately 1,873 people were baptized from these three states. He said over 100-125 house churches are established each month as well.
“We try to reach the rest,” Jackson said of the name and mission of Reach the Rest, a missions organization focused on taking the Gospel to the least reached people groups around the world.
Reach the Rest is part of a so-called “new paradigm” in missions work that focuses less on sending American missionaries and more on empowering Christians already in those countries.
The ministry has a three-prong strategy for its work: find the people groups who need to be reached, connect to and equip a local team, and then help that team reach the lost.
To locate the unreached Reach the Rest coordinates data with other groups who are on the same mission. They input data into a software program known as GAPP, which stands for Gospel to All People and Places. This allows the groups to work together, coordinate resources, and prevent too much overlap in efforts.
After the target areas are identified, Reach the Rest networks with its other practitioners to find local leaders who are eager to have their efforts multiplied. The group endeavors to find local partners who are “S.M.A.R.T.”: spiritually discerning and strategically placed, mature in faith, accountable to authority, reproducing believers, and trained and teachable.
Reach the Rest has relationships with about 2,500 practitioners—Jackson’s term for the local partners it trains and empowers to help grow God’s Kingdom. They are more effective because they are better received culturally, already speak the language, and can be empowered at a lower cost than if the group sent North American missionaries, he explained. According to its website, Reach the Rest needs only $300 to plant a church through its local partners.
Jackson said the vetting process for local ministry partners is very slow and develops over time as Reach the Rest and the local partner learn to be open and trust one another.
The partners are given basic training and simple, Biblical, reproducible tools, Jackson said.
“We try to assist them in some way. We pump training, but downplay money because the work has to survive in the local economy,” Jackson told MinistryWatch.
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Jackson said Reach the Rest provides regular financial support to less than 100 of its practitioners, based on one-year covenants.
Zeke is a 57-year-old Indonesian man who is one of Reach the Rest’s ministry partners. He grew up in a Christian home but went astray. He was converted to Christ and began sharing the Gospel with others. Reach the Rest partnered with him four or five years ago, Jackson said, and today his work has resulted in 25,000 house churches and 250,000 believers.
When 10% of a population group is “living out their faith and in a healthy, reproducing church,” it is considered reached. At that point, Reach the Rest may stop being actively involved with training and other tools, but it will continue to pray for them, Jackson said.
Reach the Rest was founded in 2001 as Epic by Roscoe Brewer, who was also part of starting Liberty University with Jerry Falwell. The work began in northern India, but has grown to include the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and both West and East Africa.
Jackson became involved in 2005 and took the reins in October 2013. The ministry was struggling after Brewer’s death in 2010, and during its revamping, a fundraising coach encouraged the ministry to reflect its mission to reach the rest in its name. In addition to changing its name to Reach the Rest, Jackson said the Lord opened doors for him to meet funders and other strategic people that year that helped the ministry grow.
Over the last 10 years, the ministry has raised $25 million, but Jackson says he “never sought it out.” He credits the Lord because supporters have introduced him to others who might be interested in the work of Reach the Rest. “This has everything to do with King Jesus,” Jackson said.
In the MinistryWatch database, Reach the Rest has an A transparency grade, a four-star financial efficiency rating, and a donor confidence score of 97. These are among MinistryWatch’s highest ratings. It is a member of the Evangelical Council of Financial Accountability.
Jackson said it keeps overhead to about 13% of its annual budget so 87 cents of every dollar contributed goes to work on the field.
Reach the Rest plans to continue working in the areas of the world that are unreached, but hopes to “go deeper” in the hardest places, including the Middle East, Somalia, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
