Today, more than 40 percent of the world has not yet been evangelized. Yet about 97 percent of the current global total of 450,000 Christian missionaries are sent to people who already have access to the gospel.
Another startling fact: In 1900, more than 80 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe or North America, but today only about 25 percent live in those regions. The remainder reside in the Global South, which includes Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.
The geographic shift in Christianity also means a change in missionaries’ countries of origin. The United States still sends the greatest number of missionaries, but the next four countries are Brazil, South Korea, the Philippines, and Nigeria.
These are some of the findings from the State of the Great Commission Report released by the Lausanne Movement earlier this year, in advance of the Fourth Lausanne Congress in Incheon, South Korea. The report draws on research from international nonprofits and Christian organizations and presents insights from 150 global missions experts.
“The Great Commission is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end,” wrote Victor Nakah and Ivor Poobalan in one of the report’s essays. “The future is the presence of all tribes, tongues, nations, and languages worshipping the King at the end of the age.”
The success and unfinished task of global missions
Due to the work of missionaries and indigenous Christian movements, the gospel has now reached an estimated 4.57 billion people, while 3.34 billion have still not heard the gospel, according to data from the Joshua Project.
Yet most missionaries today aren’t going to countries with unreached people groups. “Most missionaries go to predominantly Christian or post-Christian contexts, leading to a lack of connection to and understanding of adherents to other religions,” the report noted. More missionaries go to Europe than to Asia, even though 60 percent of the world lives in Asia and sending a missionary to Europe costs 10 times as much.
The top sender—and the top receiver—of missionaries is the United States, with 135,000 missionaries going out and 38,000 coming in from abroad, according to the World Christian Database’s 2020 figures. The US Christian population is still the largest in the world, as about one-tenth of all Christians are American. Brazil follows with nearly 8 percent of the world’s Christians, due largely to the rapid spread of Pentecostalism. Brazil also sends out the second-highest number of missionaries with 40,000.
South Korea, with 35,000 missionaries, dropped from second to third place between 2015 and 2020. An aging missionary force and decreased involvement by younger Christians has contributed to this plateau. The 25,000 missionaries sent from the Philippines are mostly Catholics, and this number doesn’t include the Filipinos working overseas who function as bivocational missionaries.
In Nigeria, some churches are bypassing mission agencies and sending their missionaries directly to the unreached. An essay in the Lausanne report quoted a book by Yaw Perbi and Sam Ngugi: “The history of the world Christian movement is the story of collaboration between local churches and mission agencies [which] God has used … to advance the gospel right from the first century to date.”
Christianity’s growth in Africa
In the past century, sub-Saharan Africa has seen the fastest growth of Christianity anywhere in the world. That region and Latin America are the areas where Pentecostalism has grown most powerfully. In 1970, sub-Saharan Africa had about 20 million Pentecostals; today that number has skyrocketed to 230 million, according to the World Christian Encyclopedia.
The Pew Research Center projected that by 2060, more than four in ten Christians will call sub-Saharan Africa home. Much of this shift is attributable to demographics, as the region has the world’s youngest population. Currently, the median age of Christians there is 19, compared to 39 in North America and 42 in Europe.
Sub-Saharan Africa is also more religious. In Nigeria, about 90 percent of adults attend religious services weekly, compared to less than 40 percent in the US. Although people age 18 to 39 attend weekly church services less often than those over 40 all over the world, the gap is smallest in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Pew.
“Every person thinking about missions must not only consider how Africa participates, but Africans themselves must be ready to be on the frontlines of the mission force,” wrote Ana Lucia Bedicks, Menchit Wong, and Maggie Gathuku in a Lausanne report essay.
The unreached in India and Pakistan
Meanwhile, a majority of the world’s unreached people groups (UPGs), defined as groups that don’t have “an indigenous church capable of evangelizing their own people,” reside in South Asia, specifically in Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Nearly 3,000 UPGs—or about three-fifths of the world’s total—are in those two countries.
Currently, more than 60 percent of the 30,000 Indian missionaries work within the country, according to Operation World. Christians in India are facing greater persecution as a Hindu nationalist government is in control and Hindutva ideology becomes entrenched in society.
India’s expanding middle class offers both barriers and opportunities for the gospel to flourish, according to an essay by Carl Ebenezer, Ted Esler, and James Patole. “The combination of India’s religious, deeply caste-based social structures with this secular and pluralistic context poses a huge challenge in presenting the uniqueness of Jesus Christ,” they wrote.
Yet at the same time, the authors noted that many in India’s middle class “are not necessarily convinced by and dedicated to the teachings of their religion. Many would be open to listening and changing their view if invited to do so in a way that speaks to their experiences and needs.”
Pakistan has the strictest blasphemy laws among Muslim-majority countries, which can lead to imprisonment and even death. Christians living in the cities are also forced into low-paying jobs in sanitation.
The report noted that South Asia “is poised to remain the least evangelized region for many decades to come.”
Polycentric missions
As Christian centers shift away from the West and toward the Global South, missions activity is now polycentric, a term that means “from all nations to all nations,” according to Patrick Fung, global ambassador of OMF International.
An essay entitled “Polycentric Global Missions” argued that “mission has been polycentric from the start.” Although the early church began evangelizing in Jerusalem, persecution forced it to scatter across the Roman world and preach to the Jewish diaspora. Then believers went to Antioch to preach to the Gentiles; from there, Paul began his missionary journeys and planted churches, and those churches went on to spread the gospel further.
The report noted that with the exception of Europe, every region of the world “both sends and receives more missionaries than 50 years ago.” More missionaries are coming from countries where Christians are the minority, often helping them relate to the people they are trying to reach.
Yet one challenge is that Christian wealth is centered in North America, requiring discussions on how polycentric churches can encourage generosity, create “healthy channels” between Christians with more wealth and those with less, and identify new funding sources.
“If every culture has received the Great Commission, then every culture has the privilege of supporting the Great Commission,” said Scott Morton of the Navigators, who is quoted in another essay.
Diaspora missions
One way the gospel is spreading is through the movement of people leaving their home countries due to hunger, war, persecution, better job opportunities, or family. In 2020, there were 281 million international migrants in the world, an increase of 60 million from a decade prior, according to the World Migration Report. Of those migrants, nearly half are Christians.
This pattern fits into polycentric missions, as Christian migrants are relocating to new locations where they can witness and plant seeds. At the same time, Christians in the destination countries can evangelize the new arrivals, who often are more willing to accept a new faith as they are far from the traditions and religions of their home.
“God is sovereign over human history and human dispersion,” Sam George wrote in the essay “People on the Move.” One result, he stated, is that “Christianity in the West is not declining, but immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin American are reviving it and transforming it with renewed missional thrust.”
For instance, the tightening of freedoms in Hong Kong has led to a boom of Chinese churches in Britain as citizens of the former British colony find refuge in the UK. In Belgium, African Christians are increasingly teaching religious education classes. In the US, Bhutanese Nepali churches are growing as they meet in church buildings where the local congregation is dying.
“Christianity is a missionary faith par excellence since it is a faith that was born to travel,” George noted.
The church opposing injustice
Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty has dropped from 2 billion in 1990 to 1 billion in 2019, according to the World Bank. The Lausanne report connected this trend with the importance of integral mission, which addresses not only a person’s spiritual needs but also physical, social, and economic concerns.
Human rights are more protected than in previous centuries. Yet government restrictions on religion have increased globally. North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have seen the highest percentage of government use of force against religious groups, according to Pew.
Today, an estimated 40 million people are victims of forms of modern slavery, which include forced labor, sexual exploitation, and unwanted marriage. Women and girls are disproportionately affected, accounting for 70 percent of the victims of exploitation and 99 percent of victims in the sex industry.
“Though the church speaks out in certain pockets favoring the oppressed, in many of these cases it limits itself to statements from leadership and does not get it converted into actions,” wrote Christie Samuel, Jocabed Solano, and Jenny Yang in a Lausanne report essay. They urged the church to “take on its prophetic role by working more promptly in denouncing injustice, freeing the oppressed, and rising against the unrestricted freedom of the oppressors.”
Artificial intelligence presents both pitfalls and possibilities
Another seismic shift the missions community needs to take into account is how the internet is changing every facet of human life. The report stated that “the rise in digital media is potentially as transformative to Scripture engagement as the advent of the printing press in Early Modern Europe.”
With about 60 percent of the world connected to the internet, there are new opportunities for Bible apps that allow people to easily read and hear the Bible in their own language. Bible apps also provide a new way for people to access the Bible, especially in countries where security is a concern. Translation software, online collaboration tools, and crowd-sourcing have also expedited the Bible translation process.
At the same time, technological advances pose challenges for the church, particularly around artificial intelligence (AI) and what it means to be human.
“The proclamation of the gospel is not simply about information transfer but is rather a whole person transformation by the power of the Holy Spirit,” wrote the authors of the report’s essay on AI. They added that “many are seeking to harness the immense power of AI tools in the furtherance of the gospel message to all people, tribes, and nations.”
The authors acknowledged that God uses such tools to aid the church but warned that their use must be “guided by the unique nature of humanity and the recognition that machines are fundamentally different from humans.”
