CAPE TOWN, South Africa–Two billion people have no access to the Gospel message, a missionary reminded church leaders gathered today at Cape Town 2010: The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization.

Although every country of the world has been penetrated by the Gospel, by no means every culture or people group has, S. Kent Parks told the participants at this afternoon’s Multiplex session.

“Let us call it ‘people blindness,’” said Parks, who has worked in Southeast Asia for two decades with Mission to Unreached Peoples. “There’s a blindness to the existence of separate peoples within countries who are unreached and, in what is possibly the most accurate and unsettling description of all, ‘ignored peoples.’”

These unevangelized people groups are, he said, mostly Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist, with many being urban dwellers. They comprise more than 28 percent of the world’s population.

“In his stories about lost sheep and lost coins, Jesus reminds us that the most natural things to do when something is lost is to go looking for it,” noted Parks.

“Has that truth really gripped us?”

Parks argued that the global Christian community spends most of its resources on itself, is engaged in inward-looking theological battles, and focuses on reaching majority populations similar to it. This means that “many people groups have (still) yet to hear the good news of Jesus Christ in their own language.”

“We are often unwilling to cross cultural barriers because of our conformity to our own culture, or our prejudice against communities who are different from us,” he continued.

Accepting that such communities are often policed both by their own religious establishments, and that governments often sought to prevent Gospel work, Parks also told the Congress that the churches need to be challenged about how they use resources, since Christians give only about 1 percent of their money to the church, and only 1 percent of that giving is given to those reaching unevangelized people groups.

He also urged participants to remember that awareness must not be confused with progress; that knowing something about the church did not mean that these people have had “any chance to hear the Gospel”, particularly when often “Jesus is so hidden in our cultural and theological wrappings, including materialism, pharisaism and denominationalism.”

Parks ended with a call to action: “Most people come to faith through a relationship with someone they know and trust. Yet over eight out of 10 Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists do not personally know a single Christian follower.

“What are we willing to commit ourselves to—individually, organizationally, regionally and collectively? What will it take for us to reallocate the resources available to us?

“These Missing Peoples have yet to follow the one who said, ‘Follow me,’ not because they have rejected His call, but because they have never heard it.

“What will it take for us to make this the last Lausanne Congress where we need to highlight Missing Peoples?”