When Jesus commissioned his small group of followers to “make disciples of all nations” major cities were smaller than some of our neighborhoods today. Also, globalization wasn’t a thing.
To say that Christianity is “a little different” today than what it was 100 years ago, let alone 2,000 years, would be a gross understatement.
In this episode of Neighborhoods and Nations, Steven Morales takes a deeper look at Lausanne’s Global Report on the State of the Great Commission in order to have a better understanding of what Christianity started out as, how it’s changed over the years, and what it has the potential of looking like if we take action today.
In the second year AD, the Han Dynasty in China decided to take a census of its empire. It’s the oldest surviving census we know of, and it reported 59,594,978 people and about 12 million households. At the time, the entire world population was probably just over 200 million, and it’s estimated that the Roman Empire made up about half of that.
Right around this time, Jesus commissioned a small group of followers to make disciples of all nations. Back then, major cities were smaller than some of our neighborhoods. Rome, for example, was the epicenter of its empire, considered the largest and greatest city in the world, but it had less than 1 million people. Today, the largest city in the world has over 37 million. There are definitely a lot more people in the world today than there were 2,000 years ago.
That’s not the only thing that’s changed. Christianity went from being an unknown movement in Judea to becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire and eventually spread across hundreds of cultures across every continent. And today, with more than 8 billion humans on the planet, there are just about the same amount of people who call themselves Christians, as there are people who have never even met one. And if you look at Christianity today and think it’s a religion that’s mostly American or maybe European, or if you’re a Christian and English is your native language, hey, we’re so glad you’re here. You’re actually the minority.
If you’ve been around the missions world for a bit, you’ve probably heard of this book, An Introduction to the Science of Missions. It was written by the nephew of one of the most important theologians in history, and even though it’s from the mid-1950s, it’s still a classic. And in the last section of this book, the author summarizes the history of missions and Christianity around the world in five different periods. It’s actually a really helpful framework to help us see not only when and where Christianity spread, but also why.
After Jesus’ resurrection, the apostles were initially startled and afraid, but when the Spirit awakened them to their calling, the Gospel began expanding from Jerusalem to the wider area of Judea and Samaria. By the end of this first period, the Gospel went out as far as Britain and India despite frequent bouts of brutal persecution. Wherever Christians went, their faith went with them and so did their good works and compassion. They became known for caring for the sick and vulnerable in their times of greatest need.
After a couple centuries of spontaneous expansion, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Suddenly, Christianity became the rule of law, and the missionary enterprise found itself intertwined with political and cultural expansion. At the same time, this second period marks the beginning of Islam. Muhammad and his followers conquered large portions of the Middle East and North Africa causing a rift that has shaped the whole world to this day. This was a time of Holy Knights and Holy War, and even of a Holy Roman Empire. It was during this age of forced expansion that Pope Alexander gave the New World to Spain and Portugal in hopes to Christianize their inhabitants. But the Protestant Reformation and the arrival of the pilgrims on the Mayflower would change the landscape of the continent in ways no one could have imagined.
The next few centuries saw the church move in different directions. This is definitely the period less talked about, and a case could be made that by and large there seemed to have been a reduced emphasis on missions. However, places like Germany, England, and the Netherlands produced movements, the Moravians above all, who were deeply concerned with reaching the nations with an emphasis on simple preaching. While not as known today, these movements were instrumental in pushing the Christian faith into the new world, which moves us into our next period. What’s known as the great century of missions.
The 19th century saw the remarkable work of hundreds of missionaries take place, including the translation of the Bible into more than 250 languages. This was a time of William Carey, Lottie Moon, and Hudson Taylor. No doubt it was a golden age of missionary activity. Unfortunately, it was also the time what is known as the Scramble for Africa. This is one of the most regrettable moments in the history of Christianity, and it’s often cited as an example of how Christian proselytism can lead to religious oppression and colonialism.
The conquest of the African continent by a handful of European powers led to the suffering and death of millions. With their lands taken and the resources appropriated, there would be no tolerance for resistance. But despite anti-Gospel actions taken in the name of Christianity and seemingly against all odds, the true Gospel continued to advance. Research by sociologist, Robert Woodberry, shows that wherever Protestant missionaries were present, that country and that society had more books, more schools, and higher income per capita, and this was true of this era.
And that leads us to the present. In this period, Bavinck argued that if the world was going to be reached by the Gospel, it would need, “Missions to no longer be regarded as a special privilege of the ‘older’ churches in the West.” That, “The missionary enterprise now became a common undertaking of old and young churches, a common task performed in an ecumenical bond.” New partnership needed to be formed that would think differently about the world and how to serve it, not from the West to the rest, but from anywhere to everywhere. 20 years after this book was published, that’s exactly what would happen.
Dr. Matthew Niermann: In 1974, when Billy Graham and John Stott brought together 2,400 global Christian leaders to Lausanne, Switzerland, the Christian world looked very different than today.
This is Dr. Matthew Niermann. And for the last four years, he’s been gathering and analyzing data from all possible sources to get a better grasp of how the church truly looks around the globe.
Dr. Matthew Niermann: I would say that there are at least three main observations that every believer should know about what the global Church looks like today. Number one, the center of gravity has moved south. As Billy Graham took the stage to rally the evangelical church to the Great Commission, the Christian world was primarily centered in Europe and North America with approximately 60% of all Christians living in the West and the remainder living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This has completely changed. During the fourth Congress in 2024, the center of Christianity is firmly in the Global South with nearly 70% of all Christians living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. And this trend will continue. In 2050, it’s projected that nearly 80% of all Christians will live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Number two, mission is from everywhere to everywhere. In the years leading up to the 1974 Lausanne Congress, Christian missions were best described as from the West to the rest. At that time, Europe set more missionaries than Africa, Asia, and Latin America combined. However, as Christianity has shifted South, Christian missions are better described as from everywhere to everywhere. Now, just Asia alone sends more missionaries than Europe. Today, the United States sends most missionaries per Christian capita, but Brazil, South Korea, Philippines, and Nigeria are the next largest missionary-sending nations in the world.
Number three, we live in a digital age. Due to missionary activity in the 20th century, the world was reshaped. Men and women dedicated their lives to crossing national borders to bring the Gospel message to foreign lands. To do so, they learned new languages, new cultures, ate new foods, planted new physical churches, all sharing the Gospel in a contextualized way. Now in 2024, we are again facing a reshaping of the world, a changing from our physically-oriented world to a digital age. We now live in an age where physical geography and borders are not the biggest influencers in our lives. On average, the world spends six and a half hours using the internet a day. 4.6 billion people around the world daily are using social media for an average of two and a half hours a day. Missionaries of the 21st century will need to learn to adapt their digital identities and bring the Gospel to those not being reached online.
So let me try to help you visualize what this all looks like today. Let’s look at global Christianity as a hundred people. Out of those 100 people, 66 would live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. 16 would speak Spanish as their mother tongue, 10, English, eight, Portuguese, five, Russian, and three, Mandarin, and then one or two might have a language in common with another one. A quarter of those 100 Christians would be under 15. 11 Christians wouldn’t really know how to read, 34 would have difficulty in getting medical attention, and 47 wouldn’t have access to the internet.
A hundred years ago, an average Christian might’ve been John Williams, a 45-year-old Londoner, who is a third generation believer. But today, that average Christian is more likely to be a Nigerian convert named Ada Ibrahim. All in all, Christianity today looks a lot different than it did 2,000, 1,000, even 100 years ago. So when you think about the numbers, it might seem like the Great Commission is basically done, right? The mustard seed has grown into a tree, Christians are pretty much all over the place. I mean, look at this report from Pew Research Center. It says, “The number of Christians around the world has nearly quadrupled in the last 100 years, from about 600 million in 1910 to more than 2 billion a hundred years later.” To put that into perspective, there are more Christians today than there were people when Jesus gave the Great Commission to his disciples.
That’s encouraging progress, but let’s keep reading. “But the world’s overall population has also risen rapidly. As a result, Christians make up about the same portion of the world’s population today as they did a century ago.” And there’s just no way I can tell you how to fix that, but people that are way smarter than me have been thinking and praying about this for decades. And there’s one big thing that needs to change if we want to take a bigger bite out of that pie. And it’s not a new thing, it’s all about discipleship. The Lausanne report pulled 1,500 Christian leaders from all over the world, and the majority said that less than 50% of the Christians in their region could actually say what the Great Commission is, and that an even lower percentage would feel prepared to share the Gospel. This explains in part why so many are leaving the Church.
In the coming decades, Christianity is projected to experience the largest net losses due to people switching religions. In the next 30 years, around 40 million people are expected to convert to Christianity, while approximately 106 million are expected to leave. On top of that, today, 86% of the world’s Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus do not know a single Christian, and year by year that number keeps going higher. Millions of Christians don’t know they’re called to make disciples. The ones who do don’t feel prepared to do it. Millions more are leaving the faith, and there are still billions that haven’t even heard the Gospel in the first place.
David Platt: The current rate of mission spending and giving is nowhere close to keeping up with the population increases, which means that unless something changes in a tectonic way, more people than ever before in history will go to hell in the days to come without ever even hearing how to go to Heaven. In other words, something needs to change soon and in a significant way.
By the time you’re watching this video, there will be more than 8,057,236,243 people on this planet. The world we live in today is changing rapidly, and every year there’s more than 130 new million humans living in it. Yet there’s still more than 60 million people dying every year, and a growing number of those are unreached, meaning they’ll never hear about Christ’s saving work on the cross. So even though we don’t know how things will look a generation from now, one thing is clear, the task isn’t finished, our mission is not done. The church needs to respond to these new rising challenges with renewed commitment in the Gospel to make disciples of Jesus. He is with us and he is calling us to go.
Steven Morales is the Content Director at Radical and hosts Neighborhood & Nations. He is based out of Guatemala City, Guatemala.
