Why Taiwan
Twenty-one million people who have not heard.
Taiwan is a free, wealthy, well-educated democracy of 23 million people. It is also a place where the church has never taken hold. Most Taiwanese people have never heard the gospel from anyone who believes it.
The numbers
Where Taiwan actually stands
6.4%
of Taiwanese people identify as Christian of any kind — Protestant, Catholic, anything. Fewer than one person in fifteen.
3.3%
are evangelical believers. About one person in thirty, on an island of 23 million.
21m
people in Taiwan are not Christians. That is the number this work exists for.
The Hakka
Four million people, and almost no church
Taiwan has 32 distinct people groups. Seven of them are classified as unreached, and one of those seven accounts for almost all of it: the Hakka, 4.1 million people, fewer than two in a hundred of them evangelical believers.
The Hakka have been in Taiwan for centuries. Their name means guest families. A complete Bible exists in Hakka and the Jesus Film has been dubbed into it, so this is not a translation problem. The gospel has simply not travelled along the lines that Hakka families live on — and the older generation still lives in rural towns while the young leave for the cities.
Across Taiwan, 4.3 million people live inside a people group where the church is effectively absent.
Why it stays that way
Nobody is stopping us. That is the hard part.
There is no persecution here. Taiwan has real religious freedom, missionaries can get visas, churches can own buildings and Bibles are sold openly. A country like this is supposed to be easy.
What holds people back is not hostility but the weight of family. Taiwanese folk religion is woven into ancestor veneration, and ancestor veneration is woven into being a son or a daughter. To follow Jesus can look, to a Taiwanese family, like abandoning your own grandparents. That is a far harder thing to ask of an adult with a family than of a child who is still being formed.
It also means the gospel is rarely refused outright. It is simply never encountered. Most Taiwanese people have never had a single conversation about Jesus with someone who actually believes in him.
Where we fit
We go to the children
Taiwanese people who come to faith usually do so at university age or later. But the adults who make that decision have almost always heard the story before, years earlier, as children. Hearing it once is what makes it something they can come back to.
So we run camps in Taiwanese schools, in English, with native English-speaking teams. The sport is why the children come. The English is why the parents say yes. And for a week, children who would otherwise never meet a Christian spend every day with one.
If these numbers move you, the first thing we ask for is not money. It is prayer.
Population, people group and religious adherence figures on this page are from Joshua Project, accessed September 2026. Joshua Project counts a people group as unreached where evangelical believers are under 2% and Christian adherents under 5%. Taiwan as a whole sits at level 4 on their progress scale, “partially reached”.
撒種行動協會 The Sowers Movement 