What Are Frontier People Groups?
If people groups are distinct in their language, culture and ethnicity, then what are frontier people groups? Here is how the Joshua Project defines them[1]:
The scale of this challenge is staggering. Joshua Project identifies over 3,200 distinct communities—encompassing nearly 1.9 billion souls—who live with fewer than one follower of Christ per 1,000 people. These are the world’s most isolated spiritual frontiers.
- an Unengaged People Group (UPG)
- with virtually no followers of Jesus and
- no known movements to Jesus
- still needing pioneer cross-cultural workers
Understanding the Four Defining Criteria
Frontier people groups don’t know what prayer to God looks like, they’ve never heard the name of Jesus and they have the most barriers between them and the Good News. Joshua Project estimates that half of these groups (nearly 5,000 of them) are actually concentrated in just 35 groups.[2]
What sets frontier groups apart from other unreached people group categories becomes clearer when we examine each criterion. Being unengaged means no missionary effort exists at all—no strategy coordinator, no church planting team, no believers working from within. The second criterion means these groups have less than 0.1 christian adherents. The third reveals no self-sustaining witness that could reach others without outside help.
Research from Global Frontier Missions shows that 284 of these frontier groups have populations exceeding one million, with 36 groups numbering over ten million souls. If breakthrough could happen in these larger communities, the Good News might spread naturally to surrounding groups.
The Critical 0.1 Percent Threshold
Pray 10/40 says this: “Frontier people groups are significant because there is very little church foundation within the people group for outside missionaries to build on, so FPGs still require pioneer cross-cultural missionaries. People groups that are more than 0.1% evangelical Christian have churches that outside workers can work with to help the gospel spread within that people group.”[3]
This threshold matters immensely. When a group crosses the 0.1 percent mark, something shifts—there exists a nucleus, however small, that can begin to carry the message naturally through existing social networks. Below that threshold, Beyond explains, exponential multiplication through movements becomes the only realistic path to reaching the billions in these groups.
Hope for the Unreachable
With all of these challenges, it might be easy to think there is little hope of taking the best news of the world to them. But Jesus would not have commanded us to make disciples of all nations if there were not a way to do so.
History shows that God delights in breaking through the impossible. Documentation from Beyond reveals movements where disciples make disciples and leaders develop leaders, resulting in indigenous churches planting churches that spread rapidly. When churches reproduce consistently to four generations across multiple streams, the work becomes self-sustaining.
How GFA World Removes Barriers
At GFA World, we train, equip and send national missionaries to some of the world’s most impoverished and difficult places. We are well aware of the challenges facing missionaries today. GFA seeks to remove as many barriers as possible between the missionary and the people to whom they are being sent. By training those with a heart for missions who already know the language and culture, the two biggest obstacles are out of the way. This is a very effective model.
Our training centers prepare workers not just to share truth, but to plant confirmed sustained communities of faith that can reach their own. Graduates understand that their work succeeds when believers they disciple can help others come to know Christ without constant outside support. This multiplication principle—disciples who make disciples—creates movements that transform entire regions through God’s grace.
Your Partnership Brings Hope
You can help train up and send missionaries to the places where the Good News is most needed, where it has likely never been heard before. For just $45 each month, you can support a missionary and pray regularly for God’s calling on their life. You can choose a man, woman or family who is ready to be used by God.
You may not be able to go to these remote places yourself. Likely the language, geographical and cultural barriers are extensive for someone in the West. But God has servants right in those countries who want to go and invite people to receive the free gift of salvation only available through Jesus Christ. You can be the sender of the sent, the connection God always intended for the body of Christ.
These workers carry hope to communities that lack access to the gospel entirely—no Bible in their language, no church within reach, no neighbor who knows Christ. Your partnership transforms isolation into opportunity, making it possible for entire villages to hear for the first time that God loves them deeply and has made a way for them to know Him.
Learn how GFA World is making disciples of all nations![1] “Frontier Unreached Peoples.” Joshua Project. Accessed July 30, 2023. https://joshuaproject.net/frontier.
[2] Ibid.
[3] “Frontier People Groups: The Ultimate Guide.” Pray 10/40. Accessed July 30, 2023. https://pray1040.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-frontier-people-groups/.