IN A LITTLE VILLAGE in Duyun County, Guizhou Province, China, Mrs. Wu sets out bowls of food and drink on the table. It’s not dinner. This food is for her ancestors. The incense burning on the altar fills the room with a smoky sweet scent. She hopes the ancestors will be pleased. Offending your ancestors is a very serious matter indeed.

Mrs. Wu has never met a Christian, has never heard the name of Jesus. The ancestors she worships never heard the good news of God’s grace either. For thousands of years, generations of Gamong people have been passing into the darkness without the Word of hope.

Why Don’t We Pray?

The need to pray for the Gamong, and ten thousand other unreached people groups like them, is clear. Jesus instructed us to make disciples of all nations. He is the Shepherd who is willing to leave the 99 in the open to search for the one lost sheep (Lk. 15:3–7). He is the Lamb who died to purchase people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation (Rev. 7:9).

Why is it then, in view of the need and the aching heart of God for these loved but lost people of the world, that I find myself going months without interceding for them?

Most of us in the West will never trek to the villages in Duyun County to meet Mrs. Wu, or fly to Morocco to chat with a Riffi Berber. To remember them at all is difficult; to care for them stretches the bounds of our self-centeredness. And praying for them consistently? That seems as remote as the Touareg tribe of Timbuktu.

So where do we, who are not super-Christians but merely struggling to be faithful disciples and effective intercessors, begin?

Start Where You Are

Thomas Merton said, “If you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying. . . . You start where you are and you deepen what you already have.”

It doesn’t matter if you have little clue about how to pray. Ask God for a heart of compassion for the lost people of the world. Ask for the gumption to really pray. After all, He is the one who works in us to will and to act according to His good purpose (Phil. 2:13).

Do Some Research

While it is true that the voices of the unreached people groups of the world aren’t shouting in our ears, there is information available.

The Joshua Project website (see sidebar) lists vital statistics about unreached people groups (UPGs) worldwide. It includes the population and location of each group, whether the Bible or other Christian resources are available in the people’s language, and if the group has been targeted by any churches or mission organizations.

To have prayer bulletins about UPGs delivered daily to your email inbox, sign up for the Global Prayer Digest (see sidebar).

Operation China is a resource available in both printed and electronic formats that gives an overview of the status and customs of each of the over 400 unreached people groups in China (see sidebar).

Mission organizations that focus on a particular region (such as the 10/40 window, Muslim countries, or Africa) often have detailed information available to prayer partners. Check with your church’s missions department.

Adopt a People

God’s work of saving the lost peoples of the world requires the whole church. But taking on the burden of praying for all peoples is a shortcut to spiritual burnout. J. O. Fraser, pioneer missionary to the Lisu people of southern China, wrote, “It does not follow that because a thing is the will of God, [God] will necessarily lead you to pray for it.” Ask for God’s guidance to focus on one or two people groups, and seek to bring them consistently before God’s throne.

Get a Little Help from Your Friends

Prayer is hard work. Prayer partners can help keep the fire lit over the long haul. I shared a prayer profile of the Gamong with my husband, and we agreed to remember them in our brief, near-daily prayer trysts. When life’s busyness crowds out my prayer time, and the Gamong are in danger of being squeezed out of my remembrance, those daily moments with my husband hold me faithful.

Prayer and passion can be multiplied when you introduce “your” unreached people group to your family, prayer partners, or small group. When Jill, a college student, and her discipleship group adopted Mongolians for prayer, Jill was spurred to do further research. She corresponded with on-field workers and identified specific needs. The group then shared the joy and excitement of seeing God move in response to their specific prayers. Visas were granted, workers were mobilized, and these college students deepened their involvement in God’s global mission.

If your church has not yet adopted an unreached people group, why not suggest it to the missions committee? One U.S. church adopted the Aimaq people of Afghanistan for prayer after the Taliban had sealed the country from outsiders. Just a few years later, two Aimaq have believed in Christ, and the church is preparing to send its first missionary couple to work fulltime in Afghanistan.

Strap on a Sword

Praying for unreached peoples is a direct attack on the enemy’s territory. It will not go uncontested. From the time they adopted the Aimaq people, the church just mentioned was wracked by internal division and other enemy attacks. I doubt the timing was a coincidence.

Marie Monsen, a missionary to China in the early 20th century, pledged one day to pray until revival came to China. Immediately, as she crossed the room to her place of prayer, she was hindered by a sensation of pressure, as if a boa constrictor were squeezing the life out of her. She cried out the name of Jesus three times, and the pressure faded. Her first thought was, Then prayer means as much as that, and that my promise should be kept means as much as that.

We must pray for spiritual bondage to be broken, spiritual blindness to be removed, and the gospel to penetrate these unreached people groups. Missionary Isobel Kuhn said of the then-unreached Lisu people in China, “They are held under a tyranny of darkness so strong only God is stronger! Only tremendous spiritual forces, working on the ground of the atonement of Calvary, can bring light to such sightless eyes. That spiritual force is the prayer of many.”

Keep Praying

Jesus urged us to pray like the widow who just wouldn’t give up (Lk. 18:1–8). Marie Monsen prayed for 20 years before the first embers of revival began to burn in China. For Western Christians, who are often woefully dependent on instant gratification, faithful prayer year in and year out is a challenge of immense proportions.

The physical as well as spiritual aspects of reaching an unreached people group take time. Learning the language and culture and translating the Bible can take years or decades. As you pray for laborers to be raised up and for the Word of God to be translated, dig your spiritual heels in and be prepared to wait for results.

Making prayer a regular part of your daily routine can help you persist. Someone I affectionately call “Granny Mac” explained her faithfulness in prayer to a missionary couple this way: “I pop you in after Stan and Grace, before my afternoon tea.”

Hold on for the Ride of Your Life

When you pray for the unreached people of the world, you will be changed. Subtly and powerfully, God, through prayer, shapes our hearts, desires, and direction in life. As a graduate student, my husband accepted a challenge to fast and pray for world missions during one lunch a week. Today he is training house church leaders in China. An adventure begins when we get on our knees. It will lead, perhaps through great danger and hardship, to a destination known only to the unpredictable yet gracious heart of God.

Isobel Kuhn recounts how God called three elderly women on farms in the Midwest to intercede for the Lisu people at the precise moment they experienced spiritual breakthrough. Through the faithful prayers of saints in the United States, God led the Lisu to burn their weapons in a dramatic ceremony accompanying their acceptance of the forgiveness of Christ.

Dream Big

Two visions dance tantalizingly in my head. The first is of smashed and burning ancestral altars, destroyed in celebration of freedom in Christ, all over a Gamong village. There are weeping and songs of joy as the people, after centuries of darkness, come into the light.

In the second dream, I see an Asian woman worshiping among the throngs before God’s throne. It is Mrs. Wu. She approaches me with a warm smile and simply says, “Thank you.” Beyond her, beyond the worshipers, I catch a glimpse of another smile. The One who purchased people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation is pleased.

ELISE WINTER, a freelance writer, is writing under a pseudonym in order to protect her husband’s ministry as a trainer of Chinese house church leaders. Shortly after writing this article, she says she had “the wild experience of actually meeting someone from one of the groups I was praying for! About a month after I adopted the Xibe people, I was having coffee with an acquaintance when she said, ‘You’ve probably never heard of them, but I’m Xibe minority.’ I said, ‘Actually I have heard of them,’ and got to share with her the power of prayer, God’s love for her, and a Bible.”