The Changing World of Missions

I just clipped this from the newsletter of ACU’s College of Biblical Study.  I encourage you especially to follow up on the link to the article by my mentor and friend Dan McVey.

The Changing World of Missions

An Essay by the staff of the Halbert Institute for Missions

Since 1949, the number of Christian believers in China has multiplied not less than ten times, now evidenced in tens of millions of believers in massive house church networks. In Africa over the past 100 years, the percentage of the population that represents Christian faiths has gone from 3% to more than 45%. If present trends continue there will be more believers in Africa by 2025 than on any other continent (over 600 million). In India, over 200,000 churches have been started by indigenous Indian mission agencies in the past 15 years. Singapore sends out more missionaries than any other nation as a rate of one missionary per 1000 church members. [Note:  I guess that Maureen is the “1” from our fellowship.  There should be more!--ap]  The Philippines sends out more missionaries to Muslim people groups than any other nation. Since 1975, the number of Majority World (Third World) missionaries sent out by their national fellowships into cross-cultural service has gone from 3400 to over 95,000, almost equaling those sent out by Western nations. Indonesia, Brazil, South Korea, and Nigeria are among the new centers of Christian influence in the world. More Muslims have become followers of Jesus in the past 30 years than in the previous 1400 years combined. The United States ranks fourth in the world in terms of the number of most unreached people living within our borders. Even in our lands of the Western world, "church" is being re-tooled and reshaped to fit a post-modern world in what we ourselves now term the "post-Christendom" age. Shifts in the centers of influence and vitality of faith are definitely taking place. Dan McVey, (ACU's missionary coordinator for Africa) offers the following exhortation [more ...]