CHRISTIAN
CONTINENTAL SHIFT

Topics: Believers; Body of Christ; Christianity; Church; Evangelism; Family of God; Great Commission; Missions

References: Genesis 18:18; 22:18; Psalm 22:27; 96:3; Matthew 24:14; 28:18–20; Mark 16:15; Acts 1:8; 26:17–18

At the start of the twentieth century, only 10 percent of the world’s Christians lived in the Southern continents and the East, while 90 percent lived in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Today at least 70 percent of the world’s Christians live in the non-Western world. More Christians worship in Anglican churches in Nigeria each week than in all the Episcopal and Anglican churches of Britain, Europe, and North America combined. There are more Baptists in Congo than in Britain, more people in church every Sunday in communist China than in all of Western Europe, and ten times more Assemblies of God members in Latin America than in the United States.

—Christopher J. H. Wright, “An Upside-Down World,” Christianity Today (January 2007)