LEXINGTON, Ky. — Explosive church growth in as many as 49 places around the world resulted from a shift in missions strategy by the Southern Baptist International Mission Board (IMB) that also more than doubled the number of people groups hearing the Gospel.

According to Baptist Press, IMB trustees at a Nov. 10-12 meeting heard a five-year evaluation of the "Strategic Directions for the 21st Century"  strategy that shifted the board's missions focus from geographical countries to ethno-linguistic people groups.

The emphasis sparked church planting and organized missionaries into teams focused on specific people groups, with a goal of taking the Gospel to people previously neglected by Christian missions efforts.

Among the survey findings:

• The number of people groups engaged by IMB personnel has more than doubled to 1,371.
• Seven church-planting movements were confirmed and another 42 reported. Previously unreached people groups are generating more new believers and new congregations than traditional "harvest field" countries like Nigeria and Brazil.
• A 29 percent growth in the IMB missionary force over the last five years is the greatest in board history.
• IMB missionaries are starting churches with a clear Baptist identity in terms of both doctrine and organization.
• In five years, there was an increase of almost 71 percent in the number of churches worldwide, a 95 percent increase in the number of outreach groups and 1.8 million new believers were baptized.

The survey revealed several areas of need as well. Among them are to improve supervision and training of strategy coordinators; to more closely match strategy coordinators and field needs; and to provide more comprehensive training about the "nuts and bolts" of starting churches and church-planting movements.

"The challenge today is greater than five years ago," researchers noted in the report. "It will take a more determined effort to reach all the people groups who are still unreached, initiate church-planting movements in more people groups (and) equip indigenous believers to be missionaries and be Kingdom-focused catalysts for accomplishing the Great Commission in our generation.

"We are not positioned to do this with missionaries passionate to reach their peoples, newly discovered ways to work, time-tested missiological principles and a biblically sound foundation," the researchers wrote.