Status of Global Mission 1997
Good deeds, but not good enough
by Justin D. Long
The total population of the world will reach 5.89 billion as of the middle of this year, edging up toward the projected 6.1 billion by AD 2000. Of those, 2.7 billion live in cities, 4.05 billion are adults over the age of 15, and 2.6 billion are literate. There are 400 megacities (with more than 1 million population), and 1.7 billion urban poor.
In our world today there are 1,995 million Christians, making Christianity the largest religion on the planet. Muslims follow a close second with 1,154 million, and the Nonreligious are third with 886 million. Of course, that great mass of the Church has many faces when a closer look is taken. Only 1.8 billion are affiliated with a church; the others claim Christianity but do not attend. Just 1.3 billion are practicing Christians, of whom 759 million are committed and active in the Great Commission. 497 million are part of the Pentecostal/charismatic renewal. We project that this year there will be about 160,000 martyrs.
Of the churches, 54 million are Anglicans, 6 million are Catholics (non-Roman), 34 million are marginal Protestants, 197 million belong to non-white indigenous churches, 214 million are Orthodox, 381 million are Protestants and 992 million are Roman Catholics. 309 million live in Africa, 299 million in Asia, 526 million in Europe, 450 million in Latin America, 202 million in North America and 19 million in Oceania.
Many of these statistics demonstrate the enormous size of the Christian impact on the world. Think of the magnitude of one particular achivement. In 1996, the distribution of Scriptures across the globe totalled 1.8 billion. Our research this past year uncovered another startling statistic. We counted the total of all book titles in the But these achivements must be interpreted in the total global context. To illustrate: the world's library catalogs list 34 million distinct book titles, in 360 languages; meanwhile, some 900,000 new books are published each year. In this context, the 65,571 books about Jesus number only 0.2 percent. And 73% of the non-Christian world (70% of World B, and 90% of World A) is adults or children who cannot read; another 15% can read but will never get a chance to read the 0.2% of books dealing with Jesus.
Another dose of realism emerges when we ask WHO the beneficiaries are of all this Christian impact. The surprising and disturbing answer is that other Christians including ourselves (i.e. the Christian world, World C) are the focus of 97% of all Christian ministry in the world. The remaining 3% is focused on those non-Christians we are already in contact with (World B). World A with its 1.1 billion people are by definition not impacted at all.
An example can be found in a revealing sentence in a recent survey by the United Bible Societies describing progress toward their stated goal of reaching with the Scriptures all unreached peoples in the world by AD 2000. After detailing what populations are now receiving the huge total of nearly 600 million Scriptures distributed annually by UBS, the report laments, "We are doing a better job of reaching out to Christians than we are to non-Chrsitians. Most of our effort is actually therefore to the people who have been reached by the gospel ALREADY!"
This failure to impact the non-Christian world has several causes. Chief among them are (1) the older foreign mission boards and societies of Europe and America no longer place missionaries among unevangelized peoples without an invitation to do so, having decided to engage in mission only in cooperation with their overseas partner churches; and (2) these agencies and their overseas partners respond, in most cases exclusively, to formal requests for foreign mission resources submitted by church leaders, missionaries or local Christians. But among World A individuals there are no churches and no persons who are likely to request mission resources or church planters, so none get assigned to World A contexts.
What has gone wrong is that most Christian activity does not impact the non-Christian world at all. Instead, it is focused on the undiscipled, the backslidden, the nominally Christian. To remedy this, here is a suggested solution. Christians today employ 5,151,000 full-time workers. What about setting as a goal the assigning by AD 2000 of one worker, probably a foreign or cross-cultural missionary, or one missionary couple or pair, to every one of the 4,000 unevangelized ethnolinguistic peoples on earth, and another worker to every one of the 15,000 non-Christian religions on the face of the globe? That's less than 0.4% of our present work force. Once that goal is set, we must get behind it with the full force of the recruiting power of the church, and see that it is met!
Until we deliberately establish direct, comprehensive, personal contact with every distinct non-Christian population across the globe, Christians will continue to be irrelevant to the lives, hopes and fears of those 4 billion non-Christians.
