Lausanne World Pulse – Research Articles – The Past Five Years of Christian Growth Worldwide

By Bradley Coon
April 2008

In the April 2007 issue of Lausanne World Pulse, I wrote an article entitled “One Hundred Years of Christian Growth.” The article used visual aids to compare the growth of Christianity both externally (with population growth) and internally (between various ecclesiastical blocs).

These figures captured the monumental changes to the Christian world between the years 1900 and 2000, including the shift of the Christian majority from the Global North to the Global South and the emergence of a vast number of churches that are independent of traditional branches of Christianity.

Although the reader response to this data was positive, many asked, “What does the growth of Christianity look like now?” This article seeks to answer that question by examining the growth of Christianity from 2000 to 2005 using the same visual formats as the April 2007 article. Definitions and an explanation of how to read the graphs may be found in the previous article located here.

Graph 1 (above) highlights the same trend noted in the previous article, namely, that Christianity continues to move southward at a steady pace. However, although the gap is closing, the percentage of Christians living in the Global South (sixty-eight percent) is far below the percentage of the global population living in the South (eighty-four percent).

Graph 2 (above) compares the average annual growth rate of Christians with that of the population for each region of the world between the years of 2000 to 2005. Some interesting trends are noted here, and more can be found by comparing these growth rates to those taken over the past one hundred years.