Global Map: Christians per Cross-Cultural Workers Sent

« 12 Treasures: future directions for member care

Ethne06 is over; long live Ethne »

Global Map

Global Map: Christians per Cross-Cultural Workers Sent

Posted by Justin Long ⋅ May 2, 2006 ⋅

Email This Post ⋅

Print This Post ⋅ View comments

This month’s global map looks at Global Goal 4: for every 2,000 Christians to send 1 cross-cultural missionary. To create this map, we took the total number of affiliated Christians (of all traditions) from the World Christian Database, and compared it with the number of missionaries (of all traditions) sent out (restricting ourselves to solely Protestant/Independent missionaries might be more useful to some, but that data wasn’t readily available).

The countries in green have “met” this goal: less than 2,000 Christians are required to send a missionary. For example, the USA sends 1 missionary per 1,700 believers. Yellow countries are slightly above the goal; with a little bit of mobilization work they could likely meet the goal. The UK, for example, sends an estimated 18,500 missionaries; another 1,000 would bring them to the goal.

Blue countries have burgeoning mission movements but still have a significant distance to go to meet the goal. India is an interesting case in that it mobilizes thousands of workers, but it is difficult to tell which cross-culturally and which work within their own or a very similar culture.

Finally, orange and red countries have comparatively little cross-cultural mission mobilization. (Again, these countries have many local workers but few that are sent cross-culturally to other tribes, nations and regions.) However, the good side of this is that most of those mobilized from within these regions go to unreached areas. Believers need to focus on breathing life, resources and energy into these “small candles.”