Lausanne World Pulse – Research Articles – One Hundred Years of Christian Growth

By Bradley Coon
April 2007

Contrary to the title of this article, graph 2 shows us that during the last century Christianity as a whole has grown at roughly the same average annual rate as the population (1.32% and 1.37% respectively). This means that in AD 2000 the percentage of Christians in the world was nearly the same as in AD 1900. So what is meant by the phrase “Christian growth”?

Shift is perhaps a better word to use here since there is certainly no equality in the way Christianity has grown regionally or denominationally. From graph 2 we see that all of the places where Christianity has grown at a faster rate than the population occur on non-western continents (the global South). Europe and North America have experienced declining Christian growth rates, yet all of the African and Asian regions have seen phenomenal Christian growth rates (North Africa and Western Asia are the exceptions due to the dominance of Islam in those regions).While none of these facts are particularly shocking (since the Church has been well aware of these shifts for several decades), visualizing just how dramatic they are paints a compelling picture of the increasingly diversified Church both now and into the future.

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