Unreached peoples

In Christianity, an unreached people group refers to an ethnic group without an indigenous, self-propagating Christian church movement. Any ethnic or ethnolinguistic nation without enough Christians to evangelize the rest of the nation is an "unreached people group". It is a missiological term used by Evangelical Protestants. The Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization defines a people group as "the largest group within which the gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance." "Nation" is sometimes used interchangeably for "people group". The term is sometimes applied to ethnic groups in which less than 2% of the population is Evangelical Protestant Christian, Including nations where other forms of Christianity are prevalent such as Western Catholicism, Eastern Christianity or Lutheranism.

There is continuing confusion over what constitutes an unreached ethno-linguistic group. The coalition AD2000 estimates that there are around 2,500 such groups having populations in excess of 10,000. But such groups have also been interpreted as being whole nations of who are not Christian believers.