Our needy world
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Graphic courtesy of the Visible Earth team, NASA, www.visibleearth.nasa.gov/
A world of spiritual darkness
Most of our world is shrouded in a dark, spiritual night. Two thirds of the world’s inhabitants follow non-Christian religions, and many of these religions are drastically different from Christianity. This removes these worshipers even farther from the Gospel message. Perhaps one out of every eleven people in the world is a born-again believer.
On the surface, these statistics could lead to some inaccurate conclusions. One might think that world evangelization could be accomplished simply by having every Christian take the Gospel to two non-Christians, or by having every born-again believer share the Gospel with eleven non-believers. The task of world evangelization is not that simple. As the links below will show, a considerable portion of the world’s Christian population lives isolated from the majority of the needy world. Isolated not only by barriers of religion, but also by geography, culture, and many times language. Therefore, many Christians will never have any direct contact with the majority of the lost world, which means that they will not be able to share the Gospel directly with them.
Use these links to find graphics and data that will introduce you to the dark, spiritual night in which much of our world lives. Please use this information to better understand the remaining task of world missions, to better understand the evangelical base for accomplishing this task through God’s strength, and to better uphold this task in your prayers.
- Total population
- Christianity
- Evangelical population
- Islam
- Hinduism
- Secularism or humanism (those that claim to be non-religious)
- Buddhism
- Least evangelized population
- The problem and its solution
- Sending populations for evangelical cross-cultural missionaries