Christianity has undergone one of the greatest demographic and cultural shifts in its 2000 year history, the 2nd Global Christian Forum in Manado, Indonesia, was told.

In a statistical analysis of the changing demographics and practices of global Christianity, Mr. Peter Crossing of the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity, told the GCF that a century ago, 66 per cent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe, but today it accounts for only 26 per cent of the world’s Christian population.

Crossing also noted that a century ago Christianity was largely a Western phenomenon: “including strong European Roman Catholic presence in Latin America, where few church leaders were Latin Americans.” Today the new expressions of Global Christianity are coming from Africa and Asia.

He said the change was most dramatically illustrated by in the mother tongues used in worship and the number of denominations: today Mandarin Chinese is the 5th most prevalent language used to worship God – 100 years ago China hardly registered. (The top four today are Spanish, Portuguese, English and French.)

And Crossing said statistics showed there was over 1.136 billion hours of evangelism across the globe per year: “enough evangelism for every person to hear a one hour presentation of the gospel every other day all year long”, but “it was mostly directed at other Christians”!

Fuller extracts from Forum presentations can be found at:
www.globalchristianforum.org/Updates/update1.php
www.globalchristianforum.org/Updates/update2.php

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