Perspectives on the World Christian Movement

General Statistics

Active persecution of Christians takes place in: Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, North Korea, Laos, Vietnam, China, Iran, Morocco, Libya, Egypt and Algeria. Over 160,000 believers will be martyred this year.

US missionaries make up only 30% of the world's missionaries. Our slightly declining annual number is being overtaken by increased participation from Africa, Latin America and Korea.

Of those involved in missions in the US, 98% are Senders (Financial Support, Prayers, Letter, Mobilizers, Pastors, etc.), 0.5% are Servicers (Mobilizers, Administrative, Tech Support, Training, Communication), 1.5% are Missionaries (Church Planting, Development, Tentmaking, Tribal Outreach, Health Services).

Worldwide: Last year alone, about 120,000,000 people were presented the gospel for the first time.

Worldwide: About 1.7 billion people now listen to Christian radio or watch Christian TV on a monthly basis.

Worldwide: Christians now spend 388,000,000,000 man-hours every year proclaiming the gospel in evangelism.

Growth of the Church

Christianity is the single fastest growing religion in the world. For example, in AD 100 there were 360 non-believers for every believer. Today, there are only nine non-believers for every believer, and only four of those non-believers are from unreached people groups. Today at least 6,000 Bible-believing local churches exist to support each of the 10,000 missionary teams that will be needed to finish the task of reaching every people group for Christ. We have over 600 million Bible-believing Christians throughout the world.

The number of people who are being presented the plan of salvation every day is now at least 260,274. Pray for today's quarter million plus. May they respond to the call of Christ. Every day now the average number added to the body of Christ worldwide averages 174,000. 3,500 new churches are opening every week worldwide.

Our annual growth rate of church planting is presently at more than 8% per annum. We only need 11% per annum to allow us to place a living Christian fellowship -a local church--as a witness in every community in the entire world. We have seen countries like Singapore have a 10% increase of those who have seen Christ come into their lives. In the 1980's 10% of Korea and 10% of Chile turned to Christ, and over 10% in Indonesia - the largest Muslim country in the world. Indonesia is now over 25% Christian.

Considering the growth rate of the world's religious blocks, Christianity is by far the fastest-growing religion in the world today. The total population of the world increases by 1.72% annually. The world's religions growth percentiles are as follows: Buddhists 1.7%, Nominal Christians 2.2%, Hindus 2.3%, Muslims 2.7%, Non-religious 2.8%, Bible-believing Christians 6.9%.

True Christianity has grown by more than 300 million believers in the past ten years. About 10 million of these new Christians are from North America and Europe, and the rest -290 million--are from developing countries like Nigeria, Argentina, India and China.

Over 700 million people in 220 countries have seen the Jesus film, with 41,000,000 indicating a commitment to Jesus Christ and to follow-up Bible studies.
After 70 years of oppression in the Soviet Union, Christians number about 100 million - five times the number of the Communist Party at the height of its popularity, and 36% of the population. More than 15,000 public school teachers are now teaching morals from the Bible and the life of Christ in their classes.

In Central Asia, a church planted in Uzbekistan just four years ago has grown to 3,000 members and has planted 55 other congregations.

Mongolia, which had no church at all as recently as 1991, now has more than 3,000 believers in 17 congregations. And the Mongolians have sent their first missionaries to work with Operation Mobilization in India.

In Nepal, the world's only official Hindu country, over 100,000 Hindus have met the Savior in the last two decades.