Evangelicals are the world's fastest-growing movement
"4000 years ago, God promised Abraham to bless all peoples through him,"
write mission strategists Ralph Winter and Bruce Koch in their article
'Finishing the Task'. "Today, this promise is being fulfilled before our
very eyes, and with an almost unbelievable speed. Biblical faith is
spreading as never before." The magazine 'Missions Frontiers', published
by the US Center for World Mission, presented the following new figures,
based on their own research and David Barrett and Patrick Johnstone's
statistics:
| Annual growth |
| Global population | 1.6% |
| Pentecostal and charismatic churches | 7.3% |
| Evangelical churches | 5.6% |
| Protestant churches | 2.9% |
| Roman Catholic church | 1.2% (approx.) |
| Christianity | 2.6% |
| In comparison: Islam | 2.7% |
"Evangelical Christianity is growing 3.5 times as fast as the world
population," (Pentecostal and Charismatic churches 4.5 times as fast).
"That makes Evangelical Christianity, with 645 million members or 11% of
the population, the fastest-growing major religious group, and the only
movement growing significantly through conversion," says Johnstone.
Unreached peoples: not so unreached!
Of the world's 24,000 people groups, some 10,000, with a total population
of around 2.1 billion, are unreached. An 'unreached people group' is a
numerically significant population which shares a language, religion,
race, locality, trade, class, caste or other identifying element in which
there is no indigenous group of Christians which are able to reach the
people group with the gospel (the AD2000 and Beyond movement's definition:
less than 2% of the group are evangelical, or less than 5% are active
Christians). "Of the world's 6 billion inhabitants, around one third are
Christians, another third lives in people groups which have been reached
with the gospel, and the remaining third lives in unreached groups. That
is a great step forward from the situation in1974, when around half of the
non-Christians lived in unreached people groups; today, it is only one
third. For the first time in history, there are fewer non-Christians in
unreached people groups than in evangelised groups," the report continues.
Winter and Koch conclude: "We are clearly in the final era of world
mission. For the first time in history, we can see that the task of
establishing a church-planting movement in the language and social
structure of every people group can be completed."
Source: www.missionfrontiers.org,
