Todd M. Johnson

Christian Missions and Islamic Da'wah: A Preliminary Quantitative Assessment

INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH, Vol. 29, No. 1 C and Muslims have a long history of outreach beyond their own communities. This short article examines the status of Christian mission to Muslims and of Islamic outreach as worldwide phenomena. In both cases we focus only on foreign outreach, counting missionaries who leave their national boundaries to work in another country. Although our estimates are preliminary, we believe they will be helpful in providing a context for understanding the significance of both movements.

Missiometrics 2005: A Global Survey of World Mission

January 2005 C in the Christian tradition has a long and respectable history, stretching from its biblical roots “Take a census” (Numbers 1:2), to “Count the worshippers” (Revelation 11:1), to the massive annual surveying that today we call “the megacensus.” This report continues in the missiometric tradition, bringing the reader up-to-date on the art and science of counting, on global documentation, on numbers of religionists and growth rates, on key trends related to Christian mission, and on the megacensus as a central ongoing phenomenon. In light of this collecting of statistics that occupies millions of Christian workers and costs over

Yearbook of international religious demography

1 billion annually, we hope to provide a reliable quantitative framework for understanding global Christianity.

Key Findings of Christianity in its Global Context, 1970–2020

Contributors are: Ariela Keysar, Brian Grim, Todd Johnson, Marcin Wodzinski, Raya Muttarak, Maria Rita Testa, Gina Zurlo, Yaghoob Foroutan, Marcin Stonawski, Vegard Skirbekk, Conrad Hackett, Michaela Potancokova, Phillip Connor, Peter Crossing, Juan Carlos Esparza Ochoa, Maria Concepcion Servin Nieto

Migration, Religious Diasporas, and Religious Diversity: A Global Survey

July 2013 Gina A. Bellofatto is a doctoral student at Boston University School of Theology, studying international religious demography. She is a Research Associate at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts, as well as at Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs. —gbello@bu.edu C around the world today find themselves in contexts that are very different from those of forty years ago. Since 1970, many societies have experienced dramatic social upheavals and severe environmental catastrophes, yet the period from 1970 to 2010 was also a time of great technological advancement and increased connections between people around the world. Such changes challenge Christians to think differently about the people among whom they live and work, the ways in which they interact with them, and the potential for future cooperation. Christianity in Its Global Context, 1970–2020: Society, Religion, and Mission, a report produced in 2013 by researchers at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts, offers a timely overview of the changing demographics of Christianity and Christians’ activities over the past forty years while looking forward to the next ten. If current trends continue, what will be the state of the world in 2020? Who will be the neighbors of Christians, and what issues will they be facing together? Here we summarize the key findings from the full report, which is available for PDF download at www.globalchristianity.org/globalcontext. Christianity in Its Global Context presents global data on the demographics of world religions, providing evidence for the continued resurgence of religion into the twenty-first century. It covers global Christianity, including Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, and offers projections for where growth of all major Christian traditions is most likely to occur in the future. The bulk of the report details the Christian, religious, and social contexts of each of the twenty-one United Nations (UN) regions and what changes have occurred or will occur from 1970 to 2020, with discussions of key social issues that are putting pressure on all residents in each region. The “Mission and Society” section of the report details the status of the worldwide missionary movement, including personal contact between Christians and other religionists around the globe, the status of unreached people groups, and the religious demographics of international migrants. The report also highlights the most pressing social issues in each of the UN regions, particularly those currently being addressed by the UN Millennium Development Goals.

Counting Pentecostals Worldwide

Abstract Vast efforts are put into the collection of statistics in every country of the world relating to religious adherence. Quantitative tools in the context of demography – births, deaths, conversions, defections, immigration, and emigration – provide a comprehensive view of demographic changes in religious diasporas, which are created by the migration of people worldwide. Utilizing the taxonomies of religions and peoples from the World Christian Database (WCD) and World Religion Database (WRD), a preliminary examination of religious diasporas shows 859 million people (12.5% of the world’s population) from 327 peoples in diasporas around the world. The continuing trend of religious migration around the world is both increasing and intensifying religious diversity, especially in the former Christian West. This paper outlines some key issues relating to religious diversity in the twenty-first century and how the movement of peoples worldwide contributes to those issues.

Christianity 2017: Five Hundred Years of Protestant Christianity:

Demographics on national, regional, and global Pentecostalism provide an essential backdrop to almost every kind of quantitative or qualitative study done on other aspects of Pentecostalism. This article outlines both the history and the research findings related to the subject of defining, categorizing, and counting Pentecostals. Subjects covered include early attempts to count Pentecostals, the development of taxonomies of different types of Pentecostals and Charismatics, and statistical estimates of Pentecostals and Charismatics by type.

The Making of the Atlas of Global Christianity

Throughout 2017, Protestants around the world will celebrate five hundred years of history. Although for several centuries the Protestant movement was based in Europe, then North America, from its Western homelands it eventually spread all over the world. In 2017 there are 560 million Protestants found in nearly all the world’s 234 countries. Of these 560 million, only 16 percent are in Europe, with 41 percent in Africa, a figure projected to reach 53 percent by 2050. The article also presents the latest statistics related to global Christianity and its mission.

Describing the Worldwide Christian Phenomenon

International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 34, No. 1 T centenary of the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference has proved to be an evocative moment for many who are concerned with Christian mission.1 Today the limitations and shortcomings of the conference are readily demonstrable, yet still it stands as a highly significant landmark in the history of the Christian faith. Above all, it has proved to be emblematic of the transition, achieved through the missionary movement, by which Christianity became a truly worldwide faith. Among many features of the 1910 conference that command attention is the atlas it produced that mapped the progress that had been made by Christian missionary effort at that time. Preparation for the conference was undertaken by eight commissions. The first commission, “Carrying the Gospel to All the Non-Christian World,” was something of a flagship for the conference. It was this commission, headed by the conference chairman John R. Mott, that engaged James Dennis and his colleagues to produce the atlas.2 An important question being asked today by those with Christian mission at heart is, Where are we 100 years after Edinburgh? One way of addressing this question is to create, once more, an atlas mapping the status of Christianity in the world today and tracking the key developments that have occurred in the hundred years since 1910. Marking the centenary has prompted, among those who cherish the memory of Edinburgh 1910, a note of celebration. Yet this is tempered by a note of repentance, recognizing that much has been learned in the course of 100 years and that different approaches to the missionary task are required today. An atlas inspired by the centenary would have to take account of this perspective.3 For example, Edinburgh 1910 was guided by an expectation that other world religions would wither and die in the face of the triumphant worldwide spread of Christianity. Today we may rejoice that Christianity has indeed spread worldwide, yet it is clear that other world religions have not only survived but have undergone significant growth and renewal. Any atlas published in 2010 claiming to portray global Christianity must take account of this reality.

Christianity 2019: What’s Missing? A Call for Further Research

Christian movements were already present in the sixteenth century. Although Christianity was dominated by the North from 950 to 1950,7 its center of gravity has been steadily shifting southward.8 In the early part of the twentieth century, Christianity broke the bonds of Europe and the Americas and began to spread widely in Africa and Asia. Nonetheless Cragg noted that “the geographical universality of the Church, or nearly so, had been achieved only in the context of a deep cultural partiality.”9 Cragg was aware of burgeoning movements of indigenous Christianity, but he recognized that Christianity was largely still characterized by Western culture. Only in the late twentieth century did Christianity around the world begin to disentangle itself from its colonial character. This change was entirely appropriate, for “the full-grown humanity of Christ requires all the Christian generations, just as it embodies all the cultural variety that six continents can bring.”10 No longer is the picture of the average Christian a white Westerner. Indeed, in 1980 an average of 7,600 such Christians were abandoning the faith each day.11 Rather, we have witnessed the coming of age of the younger churches within the context of decolonization and rising nationalism. In spite of the accusations of anti-Christian nationalists and of critics who accused it of being cultural-imperial in nature, Christianity provided the tools (e.g., education) for national resistance to colonial domination.12 Instead of destroying indigenous societies, Christianity, especially with its emphasis on the translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular, allowed for the preservation of indigenous languages and cultures.13 Churches persisted and grew in the face of opposition because of the strength it provided people in sociopolitical, economic, and cultural upheaval.14 Not only is the church growing in the non-Western world, but the voice and sense of identity of Southern Christians among the global Christian community is growing as a result of globalization. The European colonial empire system left a legacy of “a global religious heritage”—a common experiential and historical interconnectedness between former colonies and imperial powers.15 This legacy is being transformed by the exponential rise of the world population, urbanization, and migration in the last two centuries. Much of the global population growth in the coming decades will occur in urban centers, and fifteen of the seventeen urban conglomerations over 10 million in population are located in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.16 These burgeoning urban centers are also the loci of new Christian growth in the South. Christian ecclesiology and theology will likely develop in this context and be exported to the rest of the world. This trend is especially important in light of Andrew Walls’s observation that the course of Christian history is “not progressive but serial,”17 which implies that the South might be the center of Christian life for some time to come.