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Q: Operation World is a huge feat of numbers crunching. How do you arrive at the numbers and verify their accuracy?
A: We have a very hard test that people apply to Operation World. The first country that people look at when they pick up Operation World is their own or the one in which they are ministering because it’s the one they know best. And if they see something that’s wrong, they’re going to put the book down and not use it. So in other words, we must write the book well enough that they can pick up the book and feel happy with what has been written. We haven’t always achieved that. Some have complained, and rightly. But there haven’t been very many.
When it comes to numbers, Christian numbers, religious numbers, are extremely difficult to obtain with any degree of accuracy. But we have one wonderful rule-everything must add up to 100 percent. It may seem a funny, simple thing to say, but if the numbers don’t add up, we’ve done something wrong. And we must go back and check it. You can’t have 10 million Christians in a country that has only eight million people. It helps to do crosschecks.
We’ve also issued a CD with this edition of Operation World. What people will find if they dig down into it is our entire statistical database. Every non-confidential figure we use is in there. Every figure we use is linked with a source, is an extrapolation or an estimation. It is indicated that it is so. And so people can actually go to the basic figures and challenge them. People do, and we’re grateful for any improvement. But basically, we have won a degree of integrity with the statistics, especially with us making it open for anybody to see-where we got them from, what logic we used to derive them, and we’re open to challenge on them. And therefore, I have a degree of confidence that we’re not too far out. And where we are, we will certainly rectify.
But the purpose of Operation World is not the statistics. That’s a minor part. But it’s an important part because it gives us an integrity. Even proof for the almost outrageous statements we make, like the one I mentioned to you about the decade of the ’90s possibly being the greatest decade of growth that evangelicals have ever known. We’ve got the proof and we can go to each individual denomination from which we derive those figures to see if we were exaggerated or understated. As far as secular statistics are concerned, it’s not so hard, but it’s often difficult. They are widely available in the public domain. It’s the religious and the spiritual and Christian [data] that are the extremely difficult ones. Some denominations have no idea how many people they have. So we have to make estimates. But again if we overestimate, we have too many Christians and we need to reduce the figures a bit.
Q: How do you report the numbers in places where the church is persecuted?
A: As far as statistics for countries where it is a security challenge, an example of that is India. The Indian Christians pled with us to not put the real figures, that we put down instead what the official government figures are purported to be. This is what I used in the book. If you’ll look under India, you’ll see that I put that the number of Christians in India is actually much higher. In fact, one of the Christian leaders in India went to the chief minister of Andra Pradesh and challenged him to his face and said, “Why have you given distorted government statistics for Andra Pradesh? Saying the Christians are getting less in this state, when you know perfectly well that in Andra Pradesh, 10 percent of the population is Christian.” And the man didn’t deny it. Hindu extremists will use Operation World to provoke persecution for Christians if we publish the actual figures. So if you look in India on page 310, you’ll see there I put down that the religion figures for 2001 are largely derived from the 1991 census for many reasons.
Therefore, I put down 2.4 percent of the population is Christian when it comes to religion. When it comes to Christians, I put down what percentage Protestants are of all Christians. To add up the number of Protestants, Catholics, independents, marginals, added altogether would come out to way above what the government is saying. But I soften it that way.
And then again you have the problem that many Muslim countries vastly overstate the Muslim population. And then you’ve got to find your way through the fog, through the deceit. They make the percentage so high that if we add in what we know to be the Muslim population, you’re dealing with 110 percent of the population. To give an example, Nigeria had claimed in the past to be 75 percent Muslim. But it’s probably nearer 35 percent Muslim. There is enormous inflation of figures in many states, even with recent census figures, which are more accurate. But there’s still exaggeration. So all this has to be taken into consideration.
We sent out the manuscripts for each country to as many contacts as we could find. In India, for instance, 30 or more. In other countries, it may be less. But we had to chivy and encourage and plead with people to respond and we have gotten a reasonable response. Some of the smaller countries not, but there was checking on the spot. It doesn’t cover us from making mistakes, but it does lessen the possibility.
May 10,2002