Can diaspora ministry be used to bring the gospel to unreached people groups?

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When we first moved to our host country, we moved to a large city of a couple million people, as there was a language center there that gave us a student visa to begin learning the national language. While living there for a few years, I encountered some other workers from Europe and from North America that were there doing what we call diaspora ministries.

And so they were trying to gather with people from around the country that had come to this larger city where there were universities, as college students, to try to evangelize and reach language groups from around the country in a metropolis, in an urban center, with the hope of reaching the entire language group by seeing conversions in the city and then having those people return back to their area and evangelize their people.

One of the challenges, and I think one of the hardships of this, is that generally people who can afford to send their children to university want their children to stay in the big city and make a bunch of money and send it back to them. So if they come there and get a college education, there's not a lot of job opportunities for them to take that education and go back to the area they're in, outside of maybe government work, and bring that economic blessing to the family. And so as these people leave their region and go to the metropolises, go to the urban centers, they tend to stay there. And so while there might be fruit in the evangelism and you might see people come to Christ, there's not effectual reaching of language groups through that ministry as often as I think people would endeavor to see, because usually the people do not return back to those areas to do ministry in those areas.

So for us, where we are, we're in a very remote area of our country, and the people that leave generally return pretty quick to the area that we're in, and that's where they raise their family. And that's where, as part of Islam, even in our host country, you're required to return back during certain holidays and honor your ancestors, honor your elderly family members. And so it would be hard for me to imagine anyone reaching the language group that we are working among and endeavoring to see a church planted through diaspora ministries, because they're just not going to go back and reach their people in that manner.

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