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A sparkling white, 100-ton crane squatted on a street on the Yale University campus in New Haven. Towering above the campus quadrangle, it lofted its cargo-a 60-ton Caterpillar backhoe-gently over the chimney and roof, swung it freely through the air, and placed it on the asphalt like it was putting a baby to bed. Beauty flowed from its effortless simplicity. Power had been harnessed without a lot of noise and fanfare.

That same day a group of experts, gathered a couple of miles away, struggled painfully to understand what the latest numbers tell us about the growth of the church worldwide. Even with the latest computerized technology, they could not produce the kind of hard numbers craved by American Christians. They lacked the power of confident certainty manifested by the crane operator.

Theirs was a study in guesswork, confusion, and frustration, compared to the precision lifting operation on the Yale campus. American churches, friends of missionaries, and mission agencies seek the same kind of engineering exactness in trying to reduce missionary work and church growth to precise numbers.

Of course, it is important to find significant trends in what numbers we have. How can we help not rejoice at the spread of the gospel and the rooting of new churches? We thrill at the news that Jesus and the power of the gospel are known among more and more people.

Some generalizations emerged from the study group: There are more evangelicals in the non-Western world than in the Western world. That’s an impression we get from the data. But, of course, the people who gather the data do not agree on what makes a person an evangelical Christian. So we falter at the altar of engineering accuracy.

More good news: Churches outside Europe and North America send more missionaries than the old sending countries do. That’s an impression, not a hard fact, because these people are not hand counted and registered on a computer spreadsheet. The counters do not agree on what makes a person a missionary.

Amazing good news: Even in countries where the gospel faces religious and political opposition, people come to Christ. How many? If we knew, should we tell anyone? This problem drives nuts the compilers of country-by-country statistics. They want to be accurate, but if they report more Christians than the government reports, what reaction will this spark from the entrenched enemies of the gospel? Western sending churches feed on this good news. Mission agencies know that support dollars, and new missionary recruits, often arise in the context of glowing numbers. Numbers fuel our success syndrome.

Should we therefore chuck our missions statistics because their accuracy cannot be verified? No, because we know that the compilers do their very best to achieve perfection. They believe they serve us by publishing such data, so that we can be better informed in our prayers and in our ministries. At the same time, we should read the numbers with caution. Above all, we must avoid repeating statistics that vary widely from one source to another. At one conference you hear there are 50 million Christians in China; at the next meeting you hear the figure is 100 million.

We must guard against making unwarranted extrapolations from the numbers. Take Africa, for example. In the ’80s it was widely published that at the present rate of conversion growth, every African would be a Christian by the year 2000. Use numbers for praise and prayer, but do not worship at their shrine.

June 1, 2001