In a word: South. In two words: South and East. Jason Mandryk from Operation World has put together a couple interesting graphs (taken from a powerpoint on their website) to visually show where Christianity is headed.
If you change the definition of Christianity to be the subset of Evangelical Christianity, the graph is even more telling:
And if you ever wanted to be a missionary when you grew up, you’d better get on with it because pretty soon there won’t be enough Christians around in the west to send you. The time for the white bwana missionary is nearly over; believers from the south and the east are taking over the foreign missionary job.
Missionaries from the South and the East are already re-evangelizing the West. Here is an example from Denmark.
Perhaps the best known prophet of the idea that center of gravity of Christianity is moving south is Philip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom: the coming of Global Christianity. (I’d give a full review, but I’m just starting the book.) A summary of his first chapter: Regardless how Christianity is doing in the US or Europe, Christianity is alive and well in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The cities of Christianity have gone from Rome and Geneva to Kinshasa and Seoul. And the new Christianity is conservative, Bible-believing, and pentecostal.
Interesting… guess this is shown in the fall of the Anglican church… more people attend Anglican churches in Nigeria each Sunday than attend them in all of North America and Europe combined. And even in this country, many Anglicans are African transplants. Just a couple miles from my house is an Episcopalian church, and it has a congregation of African immigrants. A good portion of this is due to the white Anglican church leaving solid biblical foundations for pluralistic wishy-washiness… as Chesterton said, when people stop believing in God, they’ll believe in anything.
Many countries in Europe are about as spiritually dead as a South Pacific island in 1850. It is amazing, and very sad, how post-Christian the Continent has become.
Since most people in Europe and North America still identify as Christian, what it mostly shows is the difference in birth rates between the West and most of the rest of the world. Also worth mentioning is that any statistic for the number of Christians in Asia is a wild guess because of the situation in China.
Unfortunately, we’re now busy turning many of the “majority world” believers in the wealth gospel believers.
more people attend Anglican churches in Nigeria each Sunday than attend them in all of North America and Europe combined.
I haven’t been able to easily locate a source, but I’ve heard that the United Methodists and Free Methodists are also now of greater numbers in Africa than in North America.
Christianity will survive and many will come to know and understand God through it than all the other religions combined, where brutality and cruelity is supposed to mean believers are fighting for God. And so they end up terrorising the innocent in the namer of their false religions. Christianity the message of love and peace is the one leading people to that eternal life here after.
The world can be a good home to live in only if Christains all over the world stand together so that they rescue the rest from the hands of the wild and brutal prophets of the other religions who are now a terror to the world in the name of their false religions and cults.
Therefore ‘Christians’ it is time you stand firm and solid as a body of believers to help remedy the situation from the hands of the vampires; it is written: ‘You are my witness… go ye therefore into the world and make disciples….’The world need Christians to lead.
I’d be interested to know how the statistics are affected if you compare traditional church-supported missionaries vs independent tent-makers. Althought I wholeheartedly agree with the fact that Christianity & missions has decreased in the US while increasing overseas, I also feel that there has probably been a move away from the typical missions organization.
I wish to support the above article and the comments following. God is doing marvelous work in Africa, in Latin America and in Asia (especially South Korea and China). In Nigeria for example, there are more than 5500 missionaries working in 56 nations according to Nigerian Evangelical Missions Associations- NEMA. My estimate is that the number could be 10 times more. Many of them are serving God as Christian leaders in their various professions without necessarily being called “missionaries”.
There is a new emerging paradigm about missions. It has little to do with missions agencies and ministries. It has all to do with self supporting tent making missions- in academics, business, politics, media etc, connected in relational networks for support and accountability.
I also believe that we need a new partnership between the these emerging missions resource fields and the western world. We have a lot to learn from each other. God has called us to be a support to each other. We can help re-kindle passion and Gos’s love. It is His grace and it’s all about HIM!
John Abraham Godson
International facilitator
Network of Nigerian Missionaries- NNM
(Serving God as a missionary in Poland)
Than you Christianity Today, I find the charts very interesting, and in consideration of the everpresent task set before the Church, is it any wonder how the Apostle Paul made it without a computer and logistics? Even better, is it any surprise they had no sound systems or elaborate recording studios? (Ha!) I think they were too busy doing it to look up and try to figure out the results.
As a Christian writer, author and speaker, I appreciate CT’s reports, yet as leaders we must enourage people to view statistics as signposts-where we have been, using the resluts to point relevantly today towards, “is there not a cause!” Pastors and leaders I encourage you to help congregations that can see them negatively in the carnal mind. It is up to us to positively point this to a greater demand in our Great Commission to fulfill the Word of God and actually GO to every Nation! Let’s do it!
John Mark Pool
Word to the World Ministries
Baton Rouge, LA