An unreached or least-reached people is a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group without outside assistance. We have in the past done mission trips to reach out to tribes such as the Sea People of Riau Islands and the Kubu tribe of Jambi in Indonesia. Below are a few reports on those mission trips.
Itraveled back to the Riau Islands with a team of four during the last two weeks in November 2020. In all we visited nine islands and ministered in nine services. The main tribe we were trying to reach with the gospel is called the Laut (Sea) tribe. The Laut communities live on stilt houses built on top of the sea. The first place we visited was very familiar because I had spent my Christmas there twelve years ago. Back then there were only a few Christian families. Since then a Church has been planted there by one of the missionaries who joined us on that first trip twelve years ago and she is still ministering there with her husband and two kids. There is also an elementary school that was started up just a few years ago. I was very blessed to see how the Kingdom of God has advanced in the area since my first trip.
God spoke to my heart in 2007 to do ministry in Cambodia. As I continued to pray about it, during that same year, the Lord opened a door for me to go for a short mission trip. I ended up making several more trips. Cambodia has a totally different feel than Indonesia. It is a small nation compared to most other Asian countries with only about 16.5 million people and only a small minority of about 2-3% are professing Christians.
Deep in the jungles of Jambi province located on Sumatra Island, Indonesia live a peculiar tribe known as Kubu or Anak Dalam translated jungle babies. They are hunters and gatherers and they do not claim any of the five official religions of Indonesia. There is about 13,000 of them. As soon as I heard about this tribe I felt a tug in my heart to go and find out more about them.
While traveling and preaching in churches on Riau Islands in Indonesia, my friend Pak Elia told me about a certain least reached tribe called Suku Laut translated as sea people. A few months later we went on a special trip to seek out this tribe in the islands. After a short flight, I met up with Pak Elia and team and we had to change a few boats before we could get to a secluded island where the sea people live.
