The International Mission Board (or IMB, formerly the Foreign Mission Board) is a missionary sending agency affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) which operates in virtually every nation except the United States and Canada (these nations are serviced by the SBC's North American Mission Board).

The IMB receives most of its funding through the SBC's Cooperative Program and the annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering taken up in Southern Baptist congregations.

In Christianity, an unreached people group refers to an ethnic group without an indigenous, self-propagating Christian church movement.

Any ethnic or ethnolinguistic nation without enough Christians to evangelize the rest of the nation is an "unreached people group".

It is a missiological term used by Evangelical Christians.

A missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to proselytize and/or perform ministries of service, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.

The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin missionem (nom.

missio), meaning "act of sending" or mittere, meaning "to send".

The word was used in light of its biblical usage; in the Latin translation of the Bible, Christ uses the word when sending the disciples to preach in his name.

The term is most commonly used for Christian missions, but can be used for any creed or ideology.

In Christianity, the term disciple primarily refers to students of Jesus and is found in the New Testament only in the Gospels and Acts.

The New Testament records many followers of Jesus during his ministry, but only some became disciples.

Some disciples were given a mission, such as the Little Commission, the commission of the 70 in Luke's gospel, the Great Commission after the resurrection of Jesus, or the conversion of Paul, making them Apostles, charged with proclaiming the gospel (the Good News) to the world.

Jesus emphasised that being his disciples would be costly.