My early exposure to the gospel included a healthy dose of information regarding mission efforts all around the world. If someone was talking about evangelism, they would most likely present their thoughts in a context that mirrored the commission in Acts 1:8.

In that passage, Jesus instructed His disciples to take the gospel to Jerusalem first (your home base), then to Judea (near home), Samaria (reaching out around your own country) and then to the utter most parts of the world. It wasn’t an “either or situation,” it was an “all of the above” responsibility.

Unfortunately, though, we haven’t been doing our job very well. K. P. Yohannan (Founder of Gospel for Asia) has correctly noted our failure and remarked, “Believers who have the gospel keep mumbling it over and over to themselves, meanwhile, millions who have never heard it once fall into the flames of eternal hell.”

Here in the US, our people have the opportunity to hear the gospel presented over and over again. It is said that in America during 2025, even those with no church and little exposure to the media will hear the gospel repeated 100 to 500 times!

And yet, nearly a third of the rest of the world has never heard the gospel clearly presented, even once. Those folks have no access to a Bible, no Christian friends and no idea that the God of the universe loves them personally!

Think back to the story in John chapter 6 about a great crowd that came to hear Jesus preach. He was concerned for their well-being and asked Philip “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” The only resource they had was a young boy’s lunch of five small barley loaves and two small fish. But Jesus blessed it, had the people sit down in rows and told the disciples to begin distributing the meal.

The scriptures tell us that everyone ate their fill and there were 12 baskets of food leftover!

Jesus didn’t tell His disciples pass out the food to the front row and then turn around and feed the same row again. If He had, the people sitting in the back rows would have gone hungry! And, they might have gotten angry as the front row folks got seconds while the back rows folks got nothing.

With that story in mind, we might ask, why do millions of people hear the gospel many times, before others get to hear it even once? Bottom line: “Who will feed the back row?”

This week might be a great time for you to investigate ministries that focus on pioneering the gospel. Their ministries concentrate on the unreached. Those organizations need support. And their target audience needs the gospel. Will you help them feed the back row?

(My thanks to Bonnie Sala of Guidelines International Ministries for much of this material.)