2008 Trends in Christianity

Each year the International Bulletin of Missionary Research publishes an updated table of "missiometrics," key statistics in the mission of Christ. This year they included a table of the 50 most important trends. Some that I think are most interesting:

• 136 million people will be born this year, but only 5 million new Christians were baptized last year by all denominations, ministries, congregations put together.
• Christians spend more on annual audits of their organizations ($970 million) than they do paying all their workers in the non-Christian nations. Worse than that, total embezzlement's by top employees of Christian organizations exceed the entire cost of all foreign missions worldwide. Criminal penalties against clergy in sexual abuse cases now exceed $2 billion, and that does not include amounts paid out by insurance, etc., in civil cases.

Maybe you are ready for some of the good news:

• Since 1900, Christians living in cities have grown from 100 million in 500 cities to 1.3 billion in 5,000 cities. The Christian membership in cities has more than kept pace with urbanization, growing from 200,000 average per city in 1900 to 263,200 average per city in 2008.
• Despite predictions of the disappearance of religion, trends indicate that by 2200 people of faith will account for 87 percent of the world's population. But, this gets complicated. Every person on earth belongs to, on average, 10 of the different religious categories tracked in missiometrics.
• There are now 187,000 distinct books in libraries worldwide that are primarily about Jesus.
• Regular listeners to Christian programs over secular and religious radio/TV stations rose from 22 percent of the world in 1980 to 39% last year. It is important to note that most of these are from secular channels, while overtly religious channels seem to be a very ineffective way to get programs out.

How would you classify these realities?

• Christian bishops, evangelists and missionaries all fall into what sociologists consider a "high" murder rate, over three percent. That puts them among the most dangerous occupations.
• Nearly one in five Christians (19 percent) are among a massive, new category: independents and postdenominationalists. That means 423 million individuals worldwide have no interest in and no use for historic denominational Christianity.
• More than 90 percent of all Christian outreach and evangelism targets other Christians. Less than ten percent is directed toward non-Christians.
• There are 10 million converts to Jesus who have elected to remain within the Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim religions in order to witness for Christ at a personal level.
• The four people groups currently most responsive to the gospel are Jinyu Chinese, and the Pathan, Bihari, Maithili peoples of India and Nepal. The four people groups least responsive to the gospel are Levantine Arab, French, Czech and Russian.

Source: January 2008 issue of International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Table B, page 29.

Comments

[Gary Walter]

136 million to 5 million - that is sad...

(Hey Monte, I couldn't find an RSS or feed link on your page?)

[Monte Sahlin]

Gary, Thanks for asking! At the top left of the page there is something called "Blogarithm." If you enter your Email address there, you will get a brief note each time I post something new.