AN OPEN LETTER TO MY UNREACHED NEIGHBOUR ABOUT THE CHURCH

This is an open letter for you and I to read as the Church of Jesus Christ. It is written to exemplify a message sent to an ‘Unreached neighbour’, who represents over two billion people living worldwide that have little or no access to the Gospel, Bibles or churches amongst them. I share with them what they need to know about their spiritual state, and the Church God has raised up for them. I invite you to listen in on a conversation started by myself as a Christian, and open to you to read along and write too.

Dear Unreached neighbour,
You might not know me or my God, but I know you, think of you and have been praying for you. I started hearing about you in 2012 and my life was never the same again. My concern is that, it would not be too late by the time this letter reaches you.

Most of my life I have been of the impression that all people have the knowledge of God’s truth. That surely everyone has a Bible and knows about God’s plan of salvation through Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, and Creator of the Universe. I did not fathom that not only did you not know this, but there are billions of people like you that have little or no access to this truth. I was not aware that your access to God’s word is not sufficient enough to understand and make an informed decision to believe in Jesus Christ as the Sovereign Lord and Saviour of the world.

I want you to understand that there is a problem we all suffer from, and that is our nature of sin, and it condemns us to death and makes us deserving of God’s wrath, except if it be dealt with by God’s grace through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I am aware that you are struggling to understand all I have to say now because you would need me to explain to you ‘who Jesus Christ is’, and what is the beginning of all things. You would need me to show you how God had a rescue mission to send His Son to die such a gruesome death of punishment, yet having done no wrong. I would love to tell you that this Jesus Christ is coming back for those who believe in Him, but I had to remember that you do not even know that He came the first time.

Just like every human being, I believe you have a longing for God’s truth, but you do not have an opportunity or access to hear it. You can be saved, but you have no knowledge of how to be. You are either a devout Traditionalist, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or just live with no regard for spirituality, and yet God’s holy word teaches that you are lost. This means you are already dead in your sins, and are damned for hell because of sin and falling short of God’s standard of righteousness, just like me at some point. I am struggling to say these things because I realize how unfair it is for you, because you are not afforded the opportunity to hear, understand and respond to this life changing message.

So you are probably asking yourself, “if this is the case, why then do you claim this truth but not come and bring this message to us?” Well, the honest truth is our actions say that, “you are too far to reach, to foreign to adapt to, to lowly or highly to live amongst, or too difficult to learn your culture and language to share the message of Christ with you.” However, I wonder if we realize where would we be if those who shared this message with us held those excuses dearly. . .

Myself and all of Jesus’ followers have this knowledge that Jesus Christ is the only Truth, the only Way to God, and the only Life to live and have. However, I am disappointed to say we have not really understood what the implications of that means for you. It means, if you don’t have access to the truth, you are living in a lie of our enemy, the devil. If you are not following Jesus Christ as the way, you are lost and have no direction of how to be right with God and be forgiven of your sins. The painful reality is that you have no access to Bibles to read and understand what God is saying to you. No missionaries or sufficient Jesus followers amongst you to share and model what it means to follow Jesus. You have no churches near you to provide a loving community to understand the word, grow in faith and strengthen your witness to your own people.

I take a moment to pause and think, we seem to have missed something, which I am embarrassed to tell you about. Our biggest concern is how our sports teams are competing against each other, season after season. Our society lures us into monthly commitments of self-preservation, earthly investments, personal credentials, and material comfort. We have our ears tuned in for the latest politics and entertainment, while there are thousands and thousands of you that are dying daily without an opportunity to hear about Jesus Christ even once. So few of our churches are ready to risk it all for the mission of reaching you with this Good News. Thank God for those who are doing their all to reach you. I know they are there, be not dismayed. But they are are not enough according to the need your people have I must confess. It might not be a quest for imbalance, but a reason for restructuring of eternal priority from our side. My friend, “The Good News I am telling you about, will only be good news if it arrives to you in time”. There are so many of you out there, that a few people cannot reach you in the way our Father intends. This is why our Lord told us as His disciples to go into the world in His authority to preach to you. We have retreated into our nice big buildings, were we sit in our nice cushioned chairs and great sound and visual systems.

As followers of Jesus globally, we send less than 0,1% of people to reach you with the Gospel. We invest little resources in seeing more of us go to live amongst you and disciple your communities. We financially give less than 1% of over 45 Trillion Dollars we make yearly as the Church globally towards reaching you. We meet weekly to worship, pray, fellowship and hear the word but we only pray for you annually, or don’t pray at all. We don’t have messages that teach us about you or structures dedicated to reach you. We are told that you might be there somewhere existing, but we don’t know you by name or where your people stay. To top it off, we have designed endless programs that revolve around us and repeat the same cycle, without any plan to involve you in the book our names are written in, ‘the Lamb’s book of life’.

Yes, it seems as though we do not care enough about what happens to you, and maybe we do care. However if do, I believe our actions were supposed to say more. Our Lord taught us to love Him with our everything, and also love our neighbour as we love ourselves. It is not my love for you that I question now, but my love for the Lord God that reflects in my lack of love for you.

I am sorry on behalf of God’s family and I know it will not be like this forever. I want you to know that our Father does not will for you to perish nor supports what we sometimes do, but He desires that all of humanity would come to the opportunity to turn away from their sins and trust in Him. Rest assured, more people want you and your people to believe in Jesus Christ, and come to experience the joy and life we have received in Him. I trust that this letter will reach you sooner, because we would have finally repented and decided to make every effort to reach you sooner, and quicker.

Your fellow neighbour that loves you,
Sibusiso

(It is fair to be cringing as a believer to this letter (I was cringing too), in concern of such knowledge to be in the hands of our ‘unreached neighbours’, but unfortunately this letter might not make it to its intended recipient because of lack of Christian labourers/missionaries, directed funds, or intentionality to know and relate to them with Gospel truth)