The core of the unreached people of our world live in a rectangular-shaped window! It has often been referred to as the “Resistant Belt”, that extends from West Africa across Asia, between ten degrees north and forty degrees north of the equator.

If we are serious about providing a valid opportunity for every people to experience the love, truth and saving power of Jesus Christ, we cannot ignore the reality that we must concentrate on this region of the world called The 10/40 Window.

The unevangelized are people who have a minimal knowledge of the Gospel, but have had no valid opportunity to respond to it. The unreached are the two billion people who have never heard of Jesus as Savior, and are not within reach of Christians among their own people. There are, in fact, some 2,000 peoples or nationalities in which there is not a vital indigenous church movement.

Why do committed Christians need to focus on The 10/40 Window? First, because of the historical and biblical significance of this part of the world.

It was in The 10/40 Window that we pick up the account of Adam and Eve. God’s plan for man as expressed in Genesis 1:26 had to do with dominion. Man was to “keep” or guard God’s paradise and to have dominion and subdue the earth. In the book of Genesis we read the historical account of the fall of man, when Adam and Eve failed to guard God’s paradise and forfeited the right to rule over the earth. Then came the flood followed by the building of the Tower of Babel which took place in The 10/40 Window. This effort by man to try to rally together in defiance against God resulted in the introduction of different languages, the scattering of the people and the formation of the nations.

It is here in The 10/40 Window that we can observe the truth described in Graham Scroggie’s book The Drama of World Redemption: “A world having turned from God, He left it and chose a man through whom he would ultimately by Christ reach the lost world.” And so, ancient history was worked out in the territory marked by The 10/40 Window, from the cradle of civilization in Mesopotamia across the fertile crescent of Egypt. Ancient empires came and went. The fate of God’s people Israel rose and fell depending on their obedience to the covenant with their God. Here Christ was born, lived his life, died on the cross and rose again. In fact, it was not until the second missionary journey of the Apostle Paul toward the end of the biblical record, that events of divine history occurred outside of the territory identified as The 10/40 Window. For the committed Christian, the fact that so much of God’s dealings with humanity took place on the piece of earth described by The 10/40 Window is a significant reason to focus on it.

Used from Global Mapping International