Prayer

Mobilizing Prayer for the Least-Reached Peoples of the World

The Global Great Commission Network exists to encourage and facilitate prayer for Great Commission activity, and especially for the world’s least-reached peoples. This page gathers a current picture of the task, a biblical vision for prayer, and trusted networks and resources to help you and your church pray with knowledge and faith.

“Look at the nations and watch—and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.” — Habakkuk 1:5

The Need: The Forgotten Fourth World

Two thousand years ago, Jesus commanded His disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19)—using the word ethnê, meaning tribes, ethnic groups, or peoples. Today a large share of those peoples still have no indigenous community of believers with the numbers and resources to reach their own people. Simply stated, roughly over one in four people remain without reasonable access to the gospel—the “Forgotten Fourth World.”

According to Joshua Project, which catalogs the world’s peoples by gospel access:

  • More than 7,000 people groups—over 40% of the world’s people groups, and over 42% of the world’s population—are considered unreached, meaning less than 2% evangelical Christian and less than 5% professing Christian.
  • Over 3,200 frontier people groups—nearly 1.9 billion people—live with almost no response to the gospel (under 0.1% Christian of any kind). These are the highest-priority gaps, needing pioneer workers.
  • The greatest concentrations remain in South Asia (especially India), the Muslim world, and parts of East and Southeast Asia— largely within the 10/40 Window, though least-reached peoples, including diaspora, are found in every region.

These figures shift as research is updated; for the current numbers and to find the least-reached peoples in any nation, see Joshua Project and its interactive Light the Nations prayer map.

Why are they still least-reached?

  • Geographic barriers—remote, harsh climate, difficult access, or nomadic.
  • Linguistic barriers—no Scripture in their language, unwritten languages, low literacy.
  • Political barriers—restricted access, evangelism forbidden, hostile or war-torn settings.
  • Cultural barriers—persecution, resistance to change, the gospel seen as “foreign.”
  • Unrecognized—believers unaware of the group, small in size, isolated, or hidden by prejudice.

A Largely Overlooked People: The Deaf

One of the largest yet most overlooked unreached peoples cannot be found on a map, because they live in every nation: the global Deaf. Estimates put the world’s Deaf population at roughly 70 million or more, and by most accounts fewer than 2% follow Christ—leading organizations such as Wycliffe Bible Translators now describe the global Deaf as the largest unreached people group in the world.

The barrier is language, not disability. Deaf communities have their own rich sign languages—nearly 400 are known—yet the great majority of Deaf people have no access to Scripture in the language they understand. To date, only one full Bible exists in any sign language. Because most Deaf people do not read a spoken language fluently, printed Bibles and tracts do not reach them; Scripture and discipleship must come in sign language, Deaf to Deaf. This makes the training of Deaf believers and leaders essential—the best person to reach a Deaf person is another Deaf person.

Ministries pioneering this work include Deaf Bible Society, DOOR International, and Biglife, whose disciple-making movements include a dedicated Deaf engagement initiative bringing the gospel to Deaf communities and empowering them to reach their own. Please pray for Deaf believers, for sign-language Scripture translation, and for Deaf leaders raised up to disciple their communities.

What God Is Doing: A State of the World

The task is urgent, but the story of the last two decades is one of remarkable movement. Where fewer than 200 movements to Christ were known in 2010, researchers now track a rapidly multiplying global harvest, especially in parts of Asia and Africa and increasingly among Muslim, Hindu, and some Buddhist peoples.

The most widely cited public snapshot is the Global Movement Dashboard compiled by Justin Long (research director at Beyond) through the 24:14 coalition. As of its December 2022 edition, it documented:

  • More than 1,850 movements to Christ worldwide, encompassing over 99.9 million believers in some 6.8 million (mostly small, house-church) congregations—more than 1% of the world’s population in these rapidly growing movements.
  • Researchers stress these are a conservative “floor, not a ceiling”—the true numbers are certainly higher.
  • Growth is strongest in Africa and Southern Asia, with notable multiplication among Muslim and Hindu peoples. In a later (2024) update, Long noted eight movement families each exceeding one million believers, an average movement size around 56,000, and roughly 190 of the world’s ~240 countries considered engaged.

Long’s major public dashboard dates to December 2022, with a further update anticipated; his weekly Roundup at justinlong.org offers an ongoing, research-driven “state of the world.” Another excellent resources is Long’s weekly “Deomai”, 7 Days of Prayer for the Unreached at justinlong.org/prayweekly.

Out of 106 unreached clusters listed at justinlong.org/pray/ as of July 2026, 41 are not “prayed for” (they lack a prayer campaign, guide, or initiative.)

Networks report continued growth since then. According to Finishing the Task’s 2025 Breakthrough Prayer Coalition update, house-church networks connected to these coordinated prayer efforts have grown to roughly 8.4 million churches and over 150 million believers across 190 nations, and 105 of the 110 largest unreached cities are now engaged with prayer and mission teams. (These are one coalition’s reported figures rather than a neutral census, but they point to the scale of what God is doing.)

Challenges remain real—persecution, restricted access, population growth outpacing outreach in some regions, and the limits of data in sensitive places. Yet the pattern is unmistakable: non-Western leadership is central, and movements are increasingly birthed by other movements. As one researcher put it, prayer is the first domino to fall.

A Rising Tide of United Prayer

Alongside the growth of movements to Christ has come a remarkable swell of united prayer. What began in scattered prayer rooms has become something like a global canopy. International Prayer Connect has worked to unite 1 billion people to walk with God in prayer as a network of over 5,000 prayer networks. 24-7 Prayer International has sustained non-stop prayer since 1999, now in more than half the world’s countries. 110 Cities mobilizes the global Church for focused days of prayer and daily intercession for workers in the least-reached cities. 10 Days calls believers to stop their cities each year for united prayer and repentance, and the Global Family Online 24/7 Prayer Room has hosted continuous worship-saturated virtual prayer around the clock since 2021. Beyond these, in places where the Church cannot gather openly, believers are taking up rhythms of continuous prayer in their own homes and heart languages—a hidden and vast company praying day and night. Around the throne, around the clock, and around the globe.

Still, gaps in prayer remain.  An excellent source of prayer guides is also tracked by Justin Long at justinlong.org/pray.

Prayer and Mission Converging

Perhaps the most significant development of the past two decades is not prayer or mission alone, but the deliberate convergence of the two. For much of the modern era these ran as parallel streams—intercessors praying, strategists sending—with limited connection between them. That is changing. Prayer movements increasingly organize around the specific gaps that mission research identifies, and mission networks increasingly build prayer into strategy rather than appending it.

The Global Days of Prayer coordinated through 110 Cities show what this looks like in practice. The cities themselves were selected with the 24:14 coalition of church-planting movements—mission research setting the prayer agenda. The days are then carried by an unusually broad partnership: global alliances and denominations, houses of prayer, evangelism and church-planting agencies, national movements, and children’s ministries. Five Global Days of Prayer now run each year—for Buddhist peoples at Chinese New Year, Muslim peoples during Ramadan, Israel and the Jewish peoples at the Day of Atonement, Hindu peoples at Diwali, and, at Pentecost, for the Church herself, that she would be freshly empowered by the Spirit for bold witness. Prayer guides are produced for adults and children alike, in dozens of languages, so that whole churches and families can pray the same thing at the same time.

This is the pattern we long to see multiplied: intercession informed by the best available research, and strategy shaped in the place of prayer.

Stirrings in the Sending Church

The fifth Global Day of Prayer is worth pausing over. Four of these days ask God to move among peoples who do not yet know Him; the fifth asks Him to move among those who do. It is a recognition that the Church’s own need for awakening is part of the unfinished task—we cannot carry to the nations what we have not first received ourselves.

There are documented signs of such stirring in the older sending churches of the West, where the story has long been one of decline. In the United States, the American Bible Society’s State of the Bible report (surveyed by NORC at the University of Chicago) found that after three years of decline, Bible use rose in 2025—about 10 million more adults reading Scripture outside of church than the year before—with the increase driven by the youngest generations and by men, whose engagement had been the weakest. Barna Group, drawing on twenty-five years of tracking data, reports a parallel and unexpected finding: Gen Z and Millennial churchgoers now attend more frequently than their parents and grandparents—the highest levels Barna has recorded among young adults—even as attendance among older generations continues to fall.

These are early indicators, not a finished revival, and researchers rightly caution against reading too much into a single year. Overall affiliation remains well below where it stood a generation ago. But the direction is unexpected, and it is the kind of thing the Church has long prayed for: a rising hunger for Scripture and for gathered worship among the young. Pray that it deepens into genuine awakening—and that a Church freshly filled with the Spirit would carry the gospel to the peoples still waiting to hear.

Why Pray? Prayer as God’s Strategy

Jesus’ own answer to a plentiful harvest with too few workers was prayer:

“The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” — Luke 10:2

The Bible tells us that prayer changes things. Prayer…

  • ushers us into God’s presence, which changes us;
  • reveals God’s plans so we can cooperate with them;
  • obeys Jesus’ command to ask the Lord of the harvest for workers;
  • removes hindrances to the gospel and prepares hearts to respond;
  • releases resources, protection, and spiritual power for the task;
  • exercises God’s delegated authority to change situations and people.

Prayer is the battle, and prayer maintains the victory.

Five simple prayers to begin

  • SEE—that believers would see the hearts ready to respond among every least-reached people (John 4:35).
  • SEND—that the Lord of the harvest would send laborers among these “no-choice” peoples (Luke 10:2).
  • UNITY—that the Body of Christ would be one, as Jesus prayed, “so that the world may believe” (John 17:21), laboring together in the unity of the Spirit to bring good news where it has never been heard (1 Cor. 3:9).
  • SUPPLY—that God would supply and multiply the resources needed to support His workers (2 Cor. 9:8–11).
  • SUCCESS—for lasting, hundred-fold fruit that transforms each people group for God’s glory (Matt. 13:23).

How to Pray: Ways to Engage Now

You don’t have to pray alone. A growing family of prayer movements makes it simple to join focused, informed prayer for the unreached—daily, monthly, or on strategic global days.

Global Days of Prayer for the Major Unreached Peoples

Through International Prayer Connect (IPC) and its 110 Cities initiative, the global Church is invited to five Global Days of Prayer each year: for Buddhist peoples (around Chinese New Year), Muslim peoples (during Ramadan / the Night of Power), the Church herself (at Pentecost, for fresh empowering of the Holy Spirit and bold witness), Israel and the Jewish people (around the Day of Atonement), and Hindu peoples (around Diwali). Prayer guides are provided for each—7-day, 10-day, 15-day, and 24-hour formats, plus guides written for children—in dozens of languages. Current dates and materials are posted each year at 110cities.com.

A 365-Day Great Commission Prayer Plan

IPC has launched a yearlong 365-day prayer plan on the YouVersion Bible App Kingdom Come: A Year of Breakthrough, guiding daily Scripture-based intercession for frontline workers, church planters, and Bible translators serving in 110 gateway cities across the least-reached regions—where a large share of the remaining unreached peoples live. These 110 cities were selected with the 24:14 coalition of church-planting movements. Search for the plan in the YouVersion Bible App or find it via 110cities.com.

Stand With Frontline Disciple-Makers

Beyond praying broadly, you can pray for specific workers on the front lines. Biglife, which has catalyzed disciple-making movements among unreached and persecuted peoples since 2001—including its Deaf engagement work—invites believers to join its prayer-support team to receive field updates and urgent prayer requests from disciple-makers on the ground. IPC’s 365-day plan (above) is another way to pray for frontline workers by name.

Pray Daily for a People Group

Joshua Project’s Unreached of the Day (which absorbed the former Global Prayer Digest in 2021) provides a different least-reached people group to pray for each day—by web, email, podcast, printable bulletin insert, or mobile app, in several languages. Start at joshuaproject.net.

Unite Your City in Prayer & Repentance

Each year during the Days of Awe (the ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur), 10 Days calls the Body of Christ to “stop” cities for united prayer, worship, and repentance—a “global upper room” and a tangible step of obedience toward the answer to Jesus’ prayer in John 17:21, “that they may be one as We are one.” In a recent year, more than 600 gatherings were held across 70+ nations. Out of that pursuit of unity flow the themes of each of the ten days: repentance and humility, praying God’s promises, mourning for the state of our world, longing for the return of Jesus, and daily prayer for a region of the world and its least-reached
peoples. The season closes on the Day of Atonement with the Global Day of Prayer for the Jewish people. You can register or join a gathering in your city, or start one, at 10days.net.

Join an Always-Open Prayer Room

For prayer any hour of any day, the Global Family Online 24/7 Prayer Room (run under International Prayer Connect) has hosted continuous, worship-saturated prayer “around the throne, around the clock, and around the globe” since January 2021. Weekly prayer-leader teams cover all 168 hours of the week, praying together across nations, denominations, and generations in many languages. You can enter the room to worship and pray anytime, or sign up to lead an hour, at globalfamily24-7prayer.org.

Pray Year-Round Through Seasonal Campaigns

Each Global Day of Prayer is preceded by a season of focused prayer, so the whole year can be shaped by
intercession for the peoples still waiting:

  • 30 Days of Prayer for the Muslim World—during Ramadan each year, closing with the Global Day of Prayer for Muslim peoples; guides for adults and children.
  • 15 Days of Prayer for the Hindu World—leading up to the Global Day of Prayer for Hindu peoples around Diwali.
  • Prayer for the Buddhist World—a 7-day guide and 24-hour global day around Chinese New Year.
  • Global Day of Prayer for the Jewish People—on the Day of Atonement, closing the 10 Days season (see above) with 24 hours of worship and prayer for the peace of Jerusalem, for the Jewish people worldwide, and for the healing of historic wounds that have long stood as barriers to the gospel. A 10-day prayer guide for the Jewish people is available alongside the wider 10 Days materials.
  • Power from Above—ten days of prayer for the Church herself, from Ascension to Pentecost, closing with a 24-hour Global Day of Prayer for a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit and bold witness. A children’s guide, Champions on Fire, is also provided.
  • 24-7 Prayer—non-stop prayer rooms and a global week of prayer; apps such as Lectio 365.

Trusted Networks & Resources

The following networks help mobilize, equip, and connect prayer for the least-reached. Together they represent much of the global infrastructure of united prayer for the Great Commission.

Prayer Mobilization & Coalitions

  • International Prayer Connect (IPC)—a coalition of worldwide intercessors, houses of prayer, ministries, and networks in more than 150 nations, mobilizing united prayer for the blessing, healing, and transformation of the nations.
  • 2BC—aims to see the 2 billion children everywhere hear the voice of their Heavenly Father, know their identity in Christ and be empowered by God’s Spirit to share His love!.
  • Fellowship of Prayer Strategists (FPS)—a peer community of 400+ leaders serving churches, networks, and organizations as “prayer strategists,” organized around 19 prayer strategies under the acronym P-R-A-Y (Prepare, Restore, Advance, Yearn) serving teams, networks and organizations worldwide.
  • Finishing the Task and the 24:14 Coalition—grassroots collaborations pursuing church-planting-movement engagement in every people and place.
  • Global Prayer Resource Network—resourcing and connecting global prayer for the unreached.

Information to Fuel Intercession

Learning to Pray Effectively

Other Resources

Join Hands in Prayer

From the rising of the sun to its going down, the name of the Lord is to be praised. The prayers of God’s people avail much. Whether you pray alone, with your family, or with your church—daily for a people group, monthly for a region, or on a global day of prayer—you are joining hands with believers around the world to glorify God among all peoples… ethnê to ethnê.

“This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” — Matthew 24:14

To connect with GGCN’s prayer efforts or to share a prayer network or resource for this page, please reach out through the Global Great Commission Network. Together, let’s raise the waterline of prayer for the least-reached.

Note: Statistics on this page are drawn from Joshua Project, the 24:14 / Beyond Global Movement Dashboard (Dec. 2022), Justin Long, and Finishing the Task / International Prayer Connect, and reflect the best available figures at the time of writing. Because research is continually updated—and some figures represent a single network’s reporting rather than a neutral census—please consult the linked sources for current numbers.