DAWN Fridayfax 1998 #28

The church is larger than you think

Author and missions researcher Patrick Johnstone, known for his 'Operation World' books, has published a new book under the title "The church is larger than you think", dealing with recent missionary developments:
"From the birds-eye view of history, we can see an incredible pattern in God's missionary action over the last 200 years: in the 18th Century, the focus was on the North Atlantic, in the 19th Century the Pacific, in the 1960s, Africa, in the 1970s it was Latin America, East Asia in the 1980s and Eurasia in the 1990s. The 10/40 Window, particularly Central and Southern Asia and the Middle East are the final great challenges for Christianity, aside from secularized Europe and the Jews."
Johnstone sees evangelical Christians as the main force behind the growth of Christianity, and identifies the following trends:
1. Evangelical Christianity has grown slowly but steadily in the West, while the rest of Western Christianity has shrunk significantly;

2. The real growth of Evangelical Christianity in recent years has been in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In 1960, non-Western Evangelicals were around half as numerous as those in the West; in the year 2000, they will be 4 times, and in 2010, 7 times as numerous;

3. Although Christianity as a whole is growing slightly slower than Islam, Protestant Christianity is expanding faster than Islam at 2.9% per year, which is almost double the rate of population growth, currently at 1.7%;

4. The Roman Catholic church is expanding more slowly than the population, which means that the percentage of Catholics in the population is decreasing. This is mainly due to the secularization in Europe and the trend to Evangelicalism in Latin America;

5. Protestantism is growing almost twice as fast as the world population, but this is almost entirely due to Evangelicals. Non-Evangelical Protestant churches are shrinking significantly. "Liberal theology is being preached in ever-shrinking churches in increasingly empty church buildings."

6. Evangelical Christianity is expanding more than three times as fast as the world population, and is hence the only religious group in the world with significant growth through conversion, at a rate almost double that of Islam:

   Year	Evangelical population	Evangelical growth	Muslim population	Muslim growth
   1960	81 million	n/a	464 million	n/a
   1970	114 million	3.5%	608 million	2.7%
   1980	180 million	4.7%	788 million	2.6%
   1990	303 million	5.3%	1034 million	2.8%
   2000	480 million	4.7%	1340 million	2.6%

   The 60's: Africa

   It could be said that the 1960s marked the period of spiritual breakthrough in Africa, even if the spread of Evangelical Christianity has continued. The massive growth followed the end of colonial rule, as most African nations became independent states. Never before has there been such a change in a whole continent, with Christianity winning over 50% of the population within a century.

   The 70's: Latin America

   Latin America was a Catholic continent for the majority of the past 500 years. In this century, however, the number of Evangelicals has grown from under 250,000 in 1900 to over 40 million in 1990, with over 60 million probably in the year 2000. On a typical Sunday, more Latin Americans attend an Evangelical service than a Catholic church. Even according to conservative estimates, in which enthusiastic exaggerations of membership numbers such as that of the Assemblies of God were corrected from 16 to 8 million, there are more evangelical Christians in Brazil than in all of Europe

   The 80's: East Asia

   In addition to the growth of the church in South Korea and under the 50 million expatriate Chinese and the Javanese in Indonesia, there was significant church growth in China after Mao's death. As a result, there are now more Evangelicals in Asia than North America. Singapore's churches are now the most evangelistically active in the world, with one missionary sent out per 1,000 Christians. Seven of the world's ten largest churches are in Seoul alone, a city in which there was not even a single church 110 years ago.

   The 90's: Eurasia

   The spectacular collapse of the Iron Curtain brought not only renewed life into the Orthodox church, but also a massive increase in evangelical activity in the ex Communist Bloc, where the church had previously been marginalised and frequently brutally persecuted.

   Source and information: Patrick Johnstone, in: "The Church is bigger than you think", WEC, Bulstrode, Gerrards Cross, Bucks, SL9 8SZ, Great Britain