#115: Church Planting Movements and the Unreached World: A Conversation with David Garrison

At eight years old, in a small Baptist church in southern Arkansas, David Garrison heard the story of the Ethiopian eunuch and asked his parents what was stopping him from being baptized. He couldn't have known then that decades later he'd spend his life chasing that same question — what's stopping the gospel from reaching the people who've never heard it — across more than a hundred countries. In this episode of Missions Pulse, David, author of Church Planting Movements and Wind in the House of Islam and a 31-year veteran of the International Mission Board, joins us for a conversation about what he's seen when the gospel moves fast, and why it so rarely looks the way we expect.

David traces his call back to a single afternoon in a conference room, where a mentor drew a circle on a whiteboard and split it into three parts: the Christian world, the reached-but-not-Christian world, and — at the top — the unreached. That diagram never let him go. It sent him and his family to Egypt, Tunisia, India, Hong Kong, and beyond, documenting what he calls church planting movements: seasons when new believers, often with no missionary in sight, start multiplying churches faster than anyone can track. His first booklet on the subject was meant for a small audience. Instead it spread into 44 languages, and David found himself trying to explain something that had genuinely surprised him — an indigenous momentum he hadn't engineered and couldn't take credit for.

The conversation doesn't stay comfortable for long. David tells the story of Amal, a young Egyptian woman disowned and hunted by her own family after coming to faith, who found peace not in safety but in reading Matthew 10 and realizing Jesus had warned her this would happen. He recounts the death of Mejhanur, a Bangladeshi convert tortured for refusing to recant — and the stranger turn that followed, when two of his killers later showed up at his widow's door, having themselves come to faith, asking to serve the family they'd wronged. These aren't stories offered for shock value; they're the pattern David has watched repeat itself for three decades — persecution as the soil movements often grow in, not the thing that stops them.

The episode also turns to what's happening right now in Iran, where David estimates the number of underground believers is climbing into the hundreds of thousands, largely propelled by women. And running underneath all of it is a challenge to comfort itself — David's own reflection on what he calls "cul-de-sac syndrome," watching his kids invent their own risks in a safe American suburb, and choosing instead to move his family toward difficulty on purpose.

This episode is a reminder that the fastest-growing seasons of the church have rarely been the safest ones — and that the invitation to join what God is doing usually starts, as David puts it, with a simple yes.