Thursday Afternoon Heresy

I was reading a piece of PR from a mission agency where the director stated that he was thankful:

For the privilege of sending teams to least reached regions of the world to plant churches and impact communities.

What, in God's green earth, does "least reached regions" mean.  Well, in technical evangelical missionary dialog it means:

[A region where] there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group. (From the website "The Joshua Project")

I have an objection to this terminology, not least of which is because it is so deeply embedded in the culture of marketing and franchising, where the goal is to get our product out to the "least reached regions."  Beyond that, I wonder about what exactly the following passage means in light of this remark:

John 1.29:The next day he saw Jesus coming towards him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

I take the implication of this, and similar passages, to mean that there is no such thing as an "unreached person."  Jesus Christ has reached out and granted salvation to the entire world.  Our task is not to bring this salvation.  Let me say that again, humans are not the agents of salvation; nor is the church, strictly speaking, the agent of salvation.  Rather, Jesus Christ, the Word of the Father, sent from heaven at one moment in history, is in fact the agent of salvation.

I am personally tired of evangelical rhetoric that blurs the important human-divine distinction between who is actually doing the saving.  A blurred line between the two can quickly lead to neo-colonial and triumphalistic mission efforts, where we are seen to have the "goods" that those "walking in darkness" lack.