About
About us
Our story
Since 1845, the International Mission Board, originally the Foreign Mission Board, has faithfully sent nearly 25,000 Southern Baptist missionaries to 185 countries, sustaining a global witness grounded in local church partnerships and long-term presence (imb.org). Through civil war, financial hardship, cultural upheavals, and geopolitical crises, IMB missionaries pioneered fields such as China, Liberia, Nigeria, Argentina, Indonesia, and countless others, planting churches, making disciples, and adapting linguistically and culturally to engage unreached and hidden peoples.
Building on over 180 years of field experience and local partnerships, IMB’s Global Research Department, established in the early 1980s, has become a cornerstone of data integrity and missiological strategy. From the early 1980s, when David Barrett and Bill Shumaker created one of the world’s first global people group databases, until today, the Global Research Department has continued to innovate with tools like GAPP and PPLR to identify communities without the gospel and help guide missionary efforts.
Drawing on insights from active missionary networks, PeopleGroups.org delivers detailed demographics and analytics to inform prayer, deployment, and engagement strategies, helping the harvest force make every outreach as accurate, contextualized, and missionally effective as possible.
Our vision
Our vision is to see the harvest force of the worldwide church making disciples of and planting churches within the harvest fields of lostness that exist in every people group on the planet, in fulfillment of Revelation 7:9.
Our ethos
- Purpose: We exist to serve the Great Commission community with data and research in order to make disciples of all nations.
- Innovation: We creatively deliver innovative solutions to the world’s greatest problem: lostness.
- Empowerment: We strive to give individuals, churches, organizations, and teams the data they need to pray with fervor and go with intentionality to the people groups God is calling them to reach.
- Collaboration: We partner closely with evangelical Christian ministries, agencies, churches, and researchers to provide the most up-to-date and strategic data to spur the harvest force from across the globe to engage the harvest field.
PeopleGroups.org relies on updates from the field and other organizations for much of its data, so if you have any updates, please contact us. For the standards and codes the data uses, see data standards.