Missions Statistics Fifth Page
  • There are at least 3 million full-time Great Commission workers.
  • Thirty thousand Christians work full-time in broadcasting the Gospel in cross-cultural mission efforts. About 4.6 billion of the world's population receives Gospel radio broadcasts in their own mother tongue.
  • Twenty-five thousand are involved in leadership positions in Great Commission efforts to bless every nation with the Gospel.
  • There are at this time 3,970 mission agencies, 285,250 career missionaries, 180,000 short-term missionaries and 400 Great Commission research centers worldwide. One thousand of the mission agencies are new Third World organizations.
  • Annually 2,500 mass evangelism campaigns broadcast the Gospel.
  • More than 11,000 evangelistic items are produced each year; about 23,800 Christian periodicals proclaim the Good News; over 51 million Bibles are distributed yearly.

The stats above are adapted from data by David B. Barrett and Todd M Johnson of the Global Evangelization Movement web site www.gem-werc.org. Other portions come from Patrick Johnstone's The Church is Bigger Than You Think, Bill and Amy Stearns' Catch the Vision 2000, and the course material for Vision for the Nations published by the US Center for World Mission.


  • 63% of the world population - 3.8 billion people - are under 34 years old. Yesterday's youth culture is becoming mainstream, with similar values, a common language (English) and a common communication medium (the Internet) around the globe.
  • 11.1% of the world's population knows Jesus Christ According to missiologist Ralph Winter, only 1% of the world's population had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in 1430. Today, there are some 680 million Evangelical Christians -people who started to follow Christ after a personal conversion. The rate of increase is around 7% per year, compared to around 2.6% for Islam.
  • The strongest growth is currently in the following areas:

  1. House churches: in many nations, Christians are again meeting in the most normal places, there where they live or spend most time: apartments, houses, huts, in the street, in squares, bars, cafes and offices. In an age of increasing individualism in religion, anti-institutionalism, growing rejection of religious bigotry, confessionalism and denominationalism, organic and loosely organized forms of Christianity are experiencing a boom.
  2. Underground churches: underground churches, known only to insiders, are forming not only in China, Indonesia, Cuba and India, but also in the 'social underground' in the West.
  3. Youth churches and post-modern churches: churches planted by youths or post-modernists in the growing youth culture. In the USA alone, according to youth church expert Andrew Jones, some 5,000 such churches have been planted in the past 4 years.
  4. Cell churches: churches with a focus on discipline people in cell groups, and growth through cell multiplication.
  5. Indigenous churches: churches and movements led by nationals without outside intervention or startup help from other churches.
  • 120 million evangelicals in China. With a population of 1,262,556,787, of which between 4% and 12% are evangelical Christians, China has the world's highest population and the highest number of Christians. Due to persecution, which gives rise to highly secret organizational structures, and the in some cases explosive growth dynamics of the house church movement, experts' estimates range between 86 million and 150 million Christians in China.
  • Christian radio stations reach 99% of the world's population.
  • 8 out of 10 know who Jesus is. Missiologists such as Patrick Johnstone estimate that between 75% and 85% of the world's population have heard the gospel at least once.
Source: Friday Fax, Jan 18, 2001

In the section that follows below I have copied statistics from different sources. Discrepancies between different sources of data are due primarily to the different author's sources, methods, age of the data, etc. These are as reliable as we can obtain but should be understood to be general.

The statistics that follow were copied from a post of the Brigada-orgs-missionmobilizers (BOMM) forum where  anyone interested in mobilizing Christians to complete world evangelization can exchange questions & answers, testimonies, resources, news, needs, and addresses having to do with world mission. For subscription information contact Nate Wilson at mailto: NateWilson@XC.org

TESTIMONY--2002-04-16 (Statistics)

This post pulls together statistics on the state of world missions from four different sources, the Southern Baptist International Mission Board, the 2000 Mission Handbook, the recent World Christian Encyclopedia 2nd Edition, and the World Evangelization Research Center. This is not intended to be comprehensive, but just to provide some recent statistics from reliable sources pertinent to mission mobilization.


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