The Greatest Church Growth Is beyond Our Shores: The World’s Biggest Churches Are Not in Dallas or Los Angeles

We are in the springtime of Christian missions.

The last couple of decades of the twentieth century hold forth more promise for the dynamic spread of the Christian faith around the globe than any other period of time since Jesus turned the water into wine.

What a distance we have come from the sixties! That was a wintertime for missions in the United States. The Western powers were retreating from their colonial empires. The Vietnam War had pushed American morale to an all-time low. Violent struggles for civil rights erupted. College students revolted on their campuses. Young people left their homes, hit the streets, and formed the hippie movement. America was under a dark cloud of confusion, pessimism, and despair.

Inevitably, this social mood influenced the churches. Many denominations that were not firmly committed to biblical, evangelical theology made decisions to demote evangelism and promote social ministries. One of the outcomes was a frightening membership decline in the mainline churches, which persists today. Missionary programs were curtailed, sometimes because the sources of funds were drying up. A professor of missions wrote a book entitled Missionary, Go Home. Christian leaders began talking about a postmissionary era. Not a few wondered out loud whether the whole missionary movement had failed.

In some circles a residue from the sixties still remains. For example, the mission agencies affiliated with the Division of Overseas Ministries of the National Council of Churches were sending out 8,279 missionaries in 1969 but only 4,817 in 1979, a drop of over 40 percent in ten years. But the general trend is the other way. The total number of North American Protestant missionaries sent overseas was 34,460 in 1969 and 53,494 in 1979, an increase of more than 50 percent over the same ten years.

Yes, the ice of the wintertime is thawing and the grass is turning green. The decade of the seventies saw some of the most significant advances in world missions yet recorded. The academic field of missiology came into its own and opened new avenues of theory and practice for Christian mission. New missionary agencies began to spring up in the Third World like daffodils in May. New research and receptivity advanced Muslim work to a degree that few could have anticipated. The bamboo curtain lifted in China and revealed that some of the most vigorous church growth in history had been going on all the while. Many observers have detected a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit “with signs and wonders following” that may be widespread enough to signal a new age of Christian outreach.

Springtime is here, and there is considerable reason for optimism.

Missions On The March

The momentum begun in the seventies seems to be increasing in the eighties. The number of agencies and societies committed to sending out missionaries will undoubtedly increase through to the end of the century. The MARC Mission Handbook lists 47 agencies formed between 1975 and 1979. Some new ones will be established within denominational structures, some without. Mission societies will continue to start in the U.S.A. and other Western nations, but in all probability a much greater number proportionately will be formed in the Third World. The number of missionaries will increase, but qualifications may change. Missionary budgets will swell, but different priorities may exist for spending the money. Strategy will be better planned. Missionary candidates will be better trained and more efficient. Every year should see more men and women won to Christ and more new Christian churches planted than the previous year.

For the first time in human history, the World Christian Encyclopedia calculated that each Christian is evangelizing 2.4 times as many non-Christians now as in 1900.

Increasing attention will be given to the cities of the world. The move toward the cities is awesome. When I was in school I was taught that New York and London were the largest cities in the world. Now there are 11 cities larger than New York, and by the year 2000 there will be 23 larger cities. Raymond J. Bakke, the ranking evangelical urban expert, calculates that every month the world grows by two Chicagos! By the end of the century, Mexico City will have 31 million inhabitants. That is more people than live in all of Canada now.

Bible translation has made tremendous progress. There is some Scripture in over 1,763 languages, covering 97 percent of the world’s population. But the remaining challenge is twofold. First, the Scriptures need to be translated into the remaining 3,000 languages and dialects. The notion that the dialects will disappear with the modernization of the world is a myth. In many parts of the world, minority dialects are becoming more, not less, popular.

High Student Interest

Student interest in missions is now at a new peak. It last crested in the early part of the century with the Student Volunteer Movement. In the 1920s the SVM recruited over 2,000 missionary candidates a year, but then fell into a rapid decline. Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship picked up the slack and, in 1946, began holding triennial student missionary conventions. They are now known as Urbana Conventions because they are held on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana. Along with many other conferences, the Urbana Convention felt the impact of the antimissionary mood of the sixties. It came to a climax in Urbana in 1969 when convention director David Howard found himself “embroiled in a prolonged and heated discussion” with new staff members who doubted whether Christian missions should be emphasized that much at all. I myself was invited to address the plenary session on the topic of evangelism. At the time I was a missionary in Bolivia and rather unaware of the student feelings of the day. I was startled by the hostile reception of my stress on soul winning. Speakers who emphasized social revolution were loudly applauded.

But no longer. Inter-Varsity mission leaders such as John Kyle and David Bryant now say that instead of spending time arguing about the validity of missions, they have more than they can do in helping motivated students get involved in missions. The vast majority of the 15,000 to 17,000 participants in each Urbana Convention go away truly turned on to reaching the world for Jesus Christ. Their Student Training in Missions program has grown over 300 percent in the last six years.

A central focal point of this new student interest in missions is at the U.S. Center for World Mission, an umbrella organization founded by Ralph D. Winter in Pasadena, California, in the mid-seventies.

The U.S. Center For World Mission

The U.S. Center for World Mission is itself a remarkable sign of the times. Founder Ralph Winter resigned from the faculty of the Fuller Seminary School of World Mission in 1976 and struck out by faith to purchase the former campus of Pasadena College, a Nazarene school now at Point Loma, California. The U.S. Center has become a beehive of activity for the promotion of missions. The miracle story of how this happened is told in Once More Around Jericho, written by Roberta Winter who, along with her husband, was the cofounder. The stated purpose of the center is to stimulate a movement for frontier missions throughout the United States. Frontier missions may be defined as the evangelistic activity that focuses on the 16,750 unreached groups of people in the world that do not as yet have a witnessing Christian church in their own culture. They help missions, churches, and students to become meaningfully involved. Divisions of the center include mission strategy, mission mobilization, mission training, and mission services.

In addition to the fact that personnel in the U.S. Center have backgrounds in 64 different mission agencies, organizations and activities directly sponsored there include: training English teachers to go to other countries and teach English; the Institute of International Studies for college and university students; the Career Foundations Program providing a year of studies between college and career involvements; the William Carey International University headed up by Virgil Olson; and others. Dozens of cooperating organizations have leased space on the campus and contribute to the center’s activities. The Episcopal Church Missionary Community, the Chinese World Mission Center, the Institute of Tribal Studies under Don Richardson of Peace Child fame, International Missionary Advance, which promotes indigenous missionary movements in Third World countries, and the Fellowship of Artists for Cultural Evangelism are just a few of them.

Academic Advancements

Despite social conditions that could have militated against them, two significant events took place in the midsixties that would prove to influence the course of world missions. One was the founding of the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, in 1965. The other was the World Congress on Evangelism held in Berlin in 1966.

Donald A. McGavran, now recognized as perhaps the most influential missiologist of the twentieth century, had a new vision for missionary education, which led to the founding of Fuller School of World Mission in 1965. While some European universities had chairs of missiology previous to that, missiology had not been a recognized field of academic pursuit in the United States. At that time, degrees offered in missiology, schools of mission, and full-time mission professors were hard to come by. Now Fuller offers two master’s degrees and three doctorates in the field, guided by a faculty of nine full-time resident professors in the different branches of missiology. At this writing, over 2,000 Fuller alumni are serving on all continents. In 1973 the American Society of Missiology was formed, and the journal Missiology began to be published. Programs similar to Fuller’s are now springing up at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois; Biola University in La Mirada, California; Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas; Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky; Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas; Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Columbia Bible College in Columbia, South Carolina.

The Lausanne Committee

The year after Donald McGavran founded his graduate school of missions, Billy Graham gathered some of his friends to convene the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin in 1966. While the emphasis on new mission outreach was not especially prominent there, it was stressed eight years later in the second such effort, the International Congress on World Evangelization held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974. More than 4,000 persons from virtually every nation of the world gathered at Lausanne to celebrate what God had been doing and to catch a new vision of the remaining task. Two of the presentations at Lausanne, which have subsequently had a considerable impact on world missions, were a plenary session address by Ralph Winter and a research document by Edward R. Dayton.

Ralph Winter, at that time still on the faculty of the Fuller School of World Mission, argued that the highest priority of the total task of world evangelization had to be cross-cultural evangelism. He showed statistically that by far the majority of the non-Christians of the world would not be able to accept Jesus Christ if people did not leave their own culture and engage in what is classically known as “missionary work.”

Edward Dayton, director of the MARC research division of World Vision International, distributed in booklet form the first report on the world’s unreached peoples. This was an effort to break down into manageable units the non-Christians who needed cross-cultural evangelism.

Another outcome of the Lausanne congress is almost too big to describe—the worldwide reverberations of that meeting. At least 30 other congresses, conferences, and regional or world-level meetings trace a large degree of their impetus to that meeting. By the end of 1982, the remolding of the perspective of the major forces in missions was virtually a clean sweep, particularly among Protestant evangelicals. The challenge of the unreached peoples of the world and the need to get on with the task optimistically was widely accepted. For example, Time magazine’s Christmas 1982 cover story said, “The most important change in Protestant missionary strategy in the past 10 years has been to identify and seek to contact some 16,000 tribes and social groups around the world that have been beyond the reach of Christianity.”

This focus on reaching the unreached people groups was the major theme of the Third World-level meeting after Berlin and Lausanne. The Consultation on World Evangelization was convened in Pattaya, Thailand, in 1980. The role of the Lausanne movement, and especially the leadership given by Leighton Ford, the chairman, and Gottfried Osei-Mensah, the executive secretary, as well as by Bishop Jack Dain, John R. W. Stott, Thomas Zimmerman, Donald Hoke, Saphir Athyal, and many others, has been a major factor in moving the Christian world into the springtime of missions.

Seventy-Eight Thousand Christians A Day?

It may be rather hard to believe, but at the present time, according to our best calculations, each day welcomes a net increase of at least 78,000 Christians on this planet. How do we arrive at that figure?

First of all, we take into account the world population explosion. World population back in the days of Abraham and Moses was no doubt far less than 100 million. At the time of Christ it had reached 275 million. When William Carey launched the modern missionary movement around 1800, the world population had grown to about 900 million. It then passed 1 billion in 1850, 2 billion in the 1930s, 3 billion around 1960, 4 billion in 1975, and reached 4.7 billion in 1983.

According to statistics released by the U.S. Center for World Mission, there were 1,362 million Christians in 1983, or just about 30 percent of the world’s population.

The World Christian Encyclopedia calculated that 64,000 new Christians are added each day by natural increase of so-called biological growth. But over and above this, some others are added each day through conversion from the world. No one knows exactly how many of these there would be, but one educated guess says about 14,000. How is that guess made?

It is based on the assumption that all across the world, committed Christians—those who are true members of the body of Christ and who are dedicated to obeying God in all things, including witnessing to non-Christians—will produce an additional 2 percent increase annually as the result of evangelism alone. The U.S. Center estimates the number of true Christians at about 259 million. Adding on 2 percent would mean 5.18 million per year or 14,000 per day in round numbers. In graphic form it looks like this: (1) Among nominal Christians: biological growth means a 52,000 net increase. (2) Among committed Christians: biological growth means a 12,000 net increase; conversion growth means a 14,000 net increase. Total daily net increase: 78,000 Christians.

One result is that every week approximately one thousand new churches are established in Asia and Africa alone. Most of them begin as small, struggling groups of believers meeting in a home or under a tree or in a school. But each one constitutes a definite group of believers who are committed to each other to meet regularly to worship God, to help each other grow in the faith, and to reach out in love to the unchurched around them.

Even so, churches are not growing at the same rate around the world. There is little or no growth in the Mongolian People’s Republic, in Albania, in Libya, or in Afghanistan. Growth comes hard in France and in Bangladesh and in Israel. But in numerous places in the world the gospel is spreading vigorously. And right now, a few places such as Korea, Ethiopia, China, Central America, Indonesia, and the Phillippines are dramatic flash points of growth. For the most part, Christianity is simply growing “out of control”!

Let’s look at some of this growth region by region.

Phenomenal Growth In Latin America

In many parts of Latin America the Protestant churches are growing three times the rate of the population. Back in 1900, only 50,000 Protestants were to be found in Latin America. The number passed 1 million in the 1930s, 2 million in the 1940s, 5 million in the 1950s, 10 million in the 1960s, and by 1980 the figure was over 20 million. Some predict that by the end of the century there will be 100 million Protestants in Latin America.

Many denominational groups are seeing good church growth there. But the most spectacular has been among the Pentecostal churches. Around the middle of our century, Pentecostals comprised something like 25 percent of all Protestants in Latin America. Now, 30 years later, the figure is in excess of 70 percent. The largest of the Pentecostal denominations is the Assemblies of God in Brazil, which claims a constituency of 6 million. Among them, full adult members number 3.8 million. I became so fascinated by the upsurge of the Pentecostal movement in Latin America that I wrote a book called What Are We Missing? and attempted to analyze some of the dynamics behind the growth.

Along with Brazil, Chile has seen some of the most explosive growth in Latin America. One of the reasons for this is that Christians there regularly move right into the streets to preach the gospel in plazas and on street corners. In evenings and on weekends you can’t walk far around the city of Santiago without running into a group of Pentecostals playing accordions, singing at the top of their lungs, and sharing the testimony of their faith with whoever will listen. A large number of Christians trace their spiritual pilgrimage back to hearing the gospel preached out in the open air.

One of my favorite churches is the Jotabeche Methodist Pentecostal Church of Santiago, pastored by Javier Vasquez. For years I visited them in their old building on Jotabeche Street, which accommodated 5,000 people. But that became entirely inadequate to handle the crowds, so they built a new sanctuary to accommodate 16,000, around the corner on Alameda Avenue. A balcony on one side holds the 2,000-member choir and orchestra combined. On a typical Sunday evening, when the main service is held, one thousand instruments—mostly guitars, mandolins, and accordions—will be playing while all 2,000 choir members are singing special numbers. While they are singing, some worshipers will begin “dancing in the Spirit” while others shout “glory to God.”

But this building is also inadequate, because Vasquez’s flock numbers between 80,000 and 90,000 members 12 years of age and over. Members are allowed to attend the mother church only once a month. The other three Sundays they are participating in the activities of one of the many smaller “classes” located in the different neighborhoods of the city. The classes are like satellite churches. Their membership runs between 800 and 3,000, and each is led by one of Javier Vasquez’s associate pastors. Many of the classes have their own very substantial church buildings.

The Church That Seats 25,000

But the Jotabeche sanctuary, much larger than anything in the United States, is still not the largest in Latin America. The Brazil for Christ Church in São Paulo reportedly seats 25,000. I say “reportedly” because some have contested that figure; but even if it is slightly off, it is an immense place. I visited it before it was completed. At that time the congregation was still meeting in the narthex, which seated 5,000. When I asked how many pews they had, the person who was showing me around said, “I don’t know—we ordered a mile and a half!”

Traditionally, the message of the gospel in Latin America has appealed to the working class. But changes have begun to take place, and many middle- and upper-class people are now opening their hearts to Jesus Christ. Some of this is happening through the Catholic charismatic movement. But evangelical Protestant churches are also begining to take root among the more wealthy. In Bogota, Colombia, the Foursquare Church is multiplying home Bible studies in 12 upper-class neighborhoods. Some of these classes regularly have up to 100 who attend.

Incredible Guatemalan Growth

One of the global flash points of growth is Central America. In Guatemala, for example, there were a thousand Protestant believers in 1930, but 1.5 million in 1980. According to a research report by James Montgomery of Overseas Crusades, the nation is now almost 25 percent evangelical, and soon will be much more. The Assemblies of God are currently growing at 44 percent per year. For example, one of their local churches, growing 50 percent per year, increased from 2,500 in 1978 to 8,500 in 1981.

An African Surge

In East African, a little group of 10 that split from the Catholic church in 1962 has now grown to 150,000.

When I attended the Lausanne congress in 1974, I mentioned in one of my workshops the urgency of planting new churches. Afterward a Nigerian came and thanked me. As we talked, I discovered that in the previous five years the Lord had used him to plant no fewer than 258 new churches, which have a total of 34,000 believers. I calculated that to average one church a week for five years! In the same category is Ezekiel Guti, a Zimbabwean who recently visited our School of World Mission. He has been vigorously planting churches for 15 years and now is the leader of a new denomination of 85,000 members and 240 churches. Attendance in the mother church in Salisbury frequently runs between eight and ten thousand. Few if any parallels to these African church planters can be found in the Western world.

The 34,000-Seat Tent

The most popular evangelist in Africa now is a German missionary to South Africa named Reinhard Bonnke. He has teamed up with a black South African pastor who has a special gift of healing, and they travel through the black areas with a tent. The tent they had been using until recently accommodated 10,000, but proved to be much too small. So in 1982 they took delivery from an American engineering firm of a new tent that accommodates 34,000. It is held up with 12 hydraulically operated center poles and transported from place to place in six semitrailer trucks.

Ethiopia has been a Marxist country since 1975. The government is doing all it can to restrict the Christian movement. But it is not being successful. Despite persecution, churches are growing vigorously. The Word of Life Churches, fostered in the past by SIM International, are adding a new church almost every week. The Lutheran Mekane Yesus Church, which had only 13,000 members in 1960, grew to 100,000 by 1978, then spurted from 100,000 to 500,000 in the next two years. And all this occurred in the face of severe persecution that saw the imprisonment of the church’s general secretary, Gudina Tumsa.

Gathering The Harvest In Asia

Comparatively speaking, the growth of churches in Asia has been slow. But many recent events point to the probability that the proportion of Christians to the whole population will increase in Asia more than any other region of the world. Probably the first Asian nation to become predominantly Christian will be Korea (with the exception of the Philippines, which is already about 85 percent nominally Catholic).

One hundred years ago there were no churches in Korea. Now in the city of Seoul alone there are 6,000. In 1970, 10 percent of South Koreans were Christians. By 1980 there were 20 percent. Many expect 30 percent when they celebrate the Christian centennial in 1984. In the army, the chaplains are doing a remarkable job; 47 percent of the personnel is Christian. Of 200 members of Parliament, at least 60 are born-again believers. At least three mass Christian rallies on Yoido Island in Seoul have attracted more than 1 million. The largest, held in 1980, drew 2.7 million, perhaps the largest single gathering of human beings in world history. Six new churches are started in South Korea every day.

The Methodist church began in England, but now the world’s largest Methodist congregation is in Korea—the Kwang Lim Methodist Church of over 10,000, pastored by Kim Sundo. The Presbyterian church began in Scotland, but now the world’s largest Presbyterian congregation is in Korea—the Young Nak Presbyterian Church with over 50,000 members, pastored by Park Chu-Choon. The Assemblies of God began in the United States, but now the largest Assembly of God is in Korea—the Full Gospel Central Church with over 270,000 members, pastored by Paul Yonggi Cho.

The Full Gospel Central Church is a phenomenon in itself. The present sanctuary, where I had the privilege of preaching a couple of years ago, seats 10,000. But the walls are being knocked out and the seating will be expanded to something between 25,000 and 35,000. When it is finished, they will still have to hold seven services every Sunday as they do now. An auxiliary 15-story building next door will have an auditorium to seat 3,000 on each floor, and the worship service will be transmitted there by closed-circuit television. The church will thus be able to serve the 500,000 membership projected by Pastor Cho for 1984.

A key secret of Full Gospel Central Church growth has been the establishment of 19,000 home cell groups, each with a trained leader who takes the responsibility of the spiritual well-being of 10 to 15 families (see related article on page 50). Because of this approach, no one in the massive church feels lost or uncared for. Cho has been in such demand to share his insights into church growth with other leaders that he established an organization called Church Growth International, with a worldwide ministry. It is likely that he will turn out to be one of the most influential leaders in global Christianity in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Surprise In China

Unquestionably, the greatest surprise in world Christianity in recent years was the discovery of church growth in China. When the missionaries were expelled in 1949–50 and the bamboo curtain fell, hopes were not high. At the time there was a total of about 1 million Chinese believers. The efforts made by the Communist government to extinguish the church were massive. Pastors were jailed, Bibles were confiscated and burned, church buildings were closed, Bible schools were disbanded, Christian literature was outlawed, both lay leaders and clergy suffered humiliation, imprisonment, and torture, and most outside observers thought the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution would be successful in wiping out the church. But as the bamboo curtain began to lift in the late seventies and news began to filter out, it became clear that the Holy Spirit had remained behind in China and was doing mighty things. The first word was that the 1 million were still there. Then the estimates continually grew, to 3 or 5 million, then 8 or 10 million, and now even conservative estimates range between 30 and 50 million.

Northeast India is a land of tribal peoples. Seventy-five years ago it was populated by 1.5 million headhunters. Then the missionaries arrived with the gospel, and a tranformation has taken place. Today at least 75 percent are Christian. Of the largest tribes, 67 percent of the Khasis are Christian, 90 percent of the Nagas, and 98 percent of the Mizos. A number of leaders from these tribes, whose fathers were literal headhunters, now have graduate degrees from our School of World Mission.

There are many other focal points of growth in Asia. One of the greatest ingatherings into the kingdom of God in recent years began in Indonesia in 1965. Such a large percentage of the population is now Christian that the government reportedly has withheld the results of the latest religious census because they might be an embarrassment to Muslim political leaders.

In Burma, churches among minority peoples were growing so fast that the missionaries were expelled 20 years ago, but the churches among the tribal peoples have kept growing. In the very north of Burma, the Kachin tribe alone now has 100,000 Baptist believers. The largest known baptismal service in the world was held at the Kachin Baptist Centennial Convention, in 1977, when 6,000 were baptized. The number baptized on the day of Pentecost was doubled!

Missionary work had been very difficult in Cambodia (Kampuchea) through the years. Then the Communist government took over and began a horrible program of genocide. Large numbers of Cambodians fled to the refugee camps across the border of Thailand. There they opened their hearts to the gospel. The Christian and Missionary Alliance reported that 25,000 of them had become believers in one year. This is five times the total number of converts that the missionaries had seen in over 59 years of evangelistic work.

These stories of God’s amazing work in the world in which we live could be multiplied over and over again. But it is time now to take a look at the challenge. Much has been done, but much yet needs to be done.

The Challenge Of The Fourth World

When we learn that there are 78,000 new Christians every day, that a local church in Korea has almost 300,000 members, that a new church is starting in Africa every week, and that God is at work as never before recorded, it would be easy to react the wrong way. It would be easy to say, “Hey, this is great! The job is getting done much faster than I thought. I’m not really needed. I’ll turn my attention on something else.”

Don’t fall into that trap!

In order to get the blessing, we look at the wonderful way God is bringing people to himself and building his church. But in order to catch the challenge, we look not at the Christians but at the Fourth World.

For some years now, the term Third World has been in use. There is still some debate as to its precise meaning, but most people who use it refer to those nations that refuse to align themselves with either the Communist bloc headed by Russia, or the capitalist bloc headed by the United States, and that have decided to be their own masters on the international scene. This world includes, therefore, most of the nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Most of the Third World is yellow, black, brown, and red, and most of its people live south of the thirtieth parallel north.

By Fourth World I mean all those people, no matter where they are found, who have yet to commit themselves to Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. There are Fourth World people in Russia, there are some in Africa, there are some in Chicago, Illinois, and there are some in every other tribe, tongue, and nation.

It is much better to talk of sending missionaries to the Fourth World than to the “heathen,” although in the final analysis you are saying the same thing.

God expects us to do our part to reach the Fourth World with the gospel message and persuade its people to become followers of Jesus. Of them, about 850 million are in a position to hear the gospel from already existing churches. That leaves 2.3 billion, or 73 percent of all non-Christians, who will not even hear the gospel unless someone decides to leave his or her own culture and become a missionary. No wonder Ralph Winter argues that the highest priority of all missionary work is cross-cultural evangelism. I agree.

The Blessing And The Challenge

In summary, most Christians in America today are enjoying great blessing. I cannot think of another time in history when it could have been more exciting to be a Christian than in the latter part of the twentieth century.

I am often amused by Christians who are overly nostalgic. They say, “My, the Christian church is in terrible shape. If we could only go back to the first century, we would know what God really can do through a dedicated church.” I don’t think we’re perfect today by any means, but I disagree with that perspective. I honestly think that if Luke himself could have the choice, he would rather live today than in the first century. When we lift up our eyes to what God is doing worldwide today, that early activity around the eastern Mediterranean seems like a small pilot project compared to what is happening now.

But as the Bible tells us, to whom much is given, of them much is also required. We must face the challenge realistically. I hope that every person who reads this will decide to become a world Christian. There has never been a better time to do it.

An increasing number of older people are saying, “Tell me more. I want to be fully informed about Christian missions.” An increasing number of young people are asking, “How can I get involved personally? How can I buy into a piece of the action?”

Do Something Now!

1. Get in touch with MARC at World Vision International, 919 West Huntington Drive, Monrovia, California 91016. Ask for a free sample of the MARC Newsletter and a list of the materials they have available. Become familiar with the excellent research they are doing.

2. Write the U.S. Center for World Mission, 1605 Elizabeth Street, Pasadena, California 91104. Send $1.00 and ask for a copy of their chart “Unreached Peoples of the World—1983.”

3. Read one or more of these books:

In the Gap, by David Bryant (Inter-Varsity Missions). This is the best all-around tool for becoming a world Christian.

The Christian World Mission, by J. Herbert Kane (Baker). This is a textbook that provides a serious introduction to missions from an evangelical perspective.

What Are We Missing?, by C. Peter Wagner (Creation House). This is the book on the Pentecostal movement in Latin America that I mentioned previously. Many who have read it have commented that it not only expanded their vision for the world but it also increased their faith in God. I hope it does the same for you.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

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