I passed a sign on the road the other day, it read: "Adopt-a-Highway." I chucked to myself... how stupid!... adopt a highway...next they'll want me to fill in the pot holes!

As I mused on that sign I wondered just how many Americans really felt the least bit of pity for our poor little highways. We Americans are adopt-a-holics. We plead with people over every imaginable cause: adopt-a-highway, hug a tree, save the whales, rescue the spotted owl. We have become cause numb, or as has been observed, Americans are experiencing "compassion fatigue." Who cares anyway? Whose got the time? I know I don't! Look around us the disintegration of family, deciduous marriages are shedding partners like fall leaves, sexual misuse, abuse, perversions, and diversions ad nauseum. Immorality is suffocating us, even in the church. With such close to home survival issues tearing apart the church and the family who cares about another Adopt-A-Something program?

Many pastors are white knuckled just hanging on in life and death issues in their own back yards. Adopt-a-what, you say? A UPG? What's that another endangered species? We a haven't seriously adopted our own unreached neighborhoods, let alone care significantly about people we've never seen, never met, and never will. "Within Our Reach," you say, "Stay out of my reach fella, I've got enough problems without another program." Did you ever feel that way?

The truth is God has not called us to adopt highways, halibut, or hoot-owls. There are greater things at stake. He has asked us to lift up our already tired and preoccupied eyes to see the fields that are already ripe for harvest. God calls each one of us to see the world as he sees it, to look through the spectacles of God. God sees people, all people everywhere. He weeps over them as Jesus wept over Jerusalem, because they are like sheep without a shepherd and headed for the slaughter. He calls us up to sit on his lap, high above the noise of our daily routine and get a eternal perspective. He points to the multiplied millions, now billions, of lost people for whom Christ died. They have no one to tell them of Jesus love, no one to show them the way. Then He points in the direction of dark clustered pockets in hard to reach people, in places where for eons, not one of their number has ever responded to God's love. They would, they just never had even one to tell them. These are Unreached People Groups. God invites us to feel his heart, see his tears, hear his passion.

Why should we care? Because God cares. Why should we adopt, or sponsor the reaching of those unreached? Because God is longing, looking, and leading someone to go and tell them. Isaiah heard his voice, "Whom shall I send and who will go for us?" Ezekiel heard his voice, "And I looked for a man among them that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap for the people...and I found none.

God is not looking for masses of people to make a difference. He is looking for one. One can make a difference. One man, one church, one denomination.

What does it mean to adopt (or sponsor) an Unreached People Group? It means to take them into your heart and life. It means you do everything in your power to affect the reaching of them with the gospel before Jesus returns. It may mean a new prayer discipline, buying a Jesus film to help reach them, sponsoring the translation of the Bible into their language, or encouraging and supporting a missionary who has gone, or will go to them. For others it will mean prayer and fasting, prayer journeys, research and study of their culture, and championing them before others in your congregation, and even going regularly on overseas projects to assist in reaching them. Yes, ONE can make a difference!

On the practical side, adopting an Unreached People group will help the pastor take his myopic eyes off the immediate pressing problems of local significance, and see the big picture. It will help the people of the congregation to get their eyes off of themselves. It will give our young people the sense that missions is not dead, the task is far from finished, and there is something worth giving ones life for. It will give the church a challenge of a lifetime, something to work for, to give for, to pray for, and to go for. It will bring the missionary and church into a closer harmony, after all they both love, study, pray and work to reach the same people.

It is not a question whether the pastor has a vision for missions or not. It is not an issue of whether the denomination has the right strategy or enough money. It is simply a question of the heart of God. What does God say? What does God feel? What does God want? Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision, said it well, prayed it well: