The New Shape of World Christianity

Skye Jethani:

As I move toward greater involvement with the efforts to organize Cape Town 2010, I’ve finally picked up a book that’s been on my desk for some time–Mark Noll’s The New Shape of World Christianity. I’ve just gotten in to it, but I thought I’d share a few remarkable statements and statistics from the openening chapters.

• Today there are more missionaries from Brazil engaged in crosscultural ministry than fromBritain or Canada.

• There are over 10,000 foreign Christian workers serving in Britain, France, Germany and Italy–and more than 35,000 in the U.S. Most of the missionaries in Britain are from Africa and Asia.

• “This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called ‘Christian Europe.’”

• “This past Sunday more Presbyterians were in church in Ghana than in Scotland.”

• “Today, the largest Christian congregation in Europe is in Kiev, and it is pastored by a Nigerian of Pentecostal background.”

• “More than half of all Christian adherents in the whole history of the church have been alive in the last one hundred years. Close to half of Chrisitan believers who have ever lived are alive right now.”

• In 1900, over 80 percent of the Christian population was Caucasian and over 70 percent lived in Europe. Now, according to historian Dana Robert, “The typical late twentieth-century Christian was no longer a European man but a Latin American or African Woman.”