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| THE RACE - ISSUE 42 |
November 2001 |
True Numbers
What Really Is the World's Fastest Growing Religion?
Muslims tell us proudly and Christians announce in alarm that Islam is the world's fastest growing religion.
Is this true?
Over the last century, from 1900 to 2000, the proportion of self-professed Christians has remained steadily near one in three (33%). Muslims over the same period have grown from about one in eight (12%) to nearly one in five (19.6%).
Surprisingly, the most explosive religion of the twentieth century was "no religion." Atheists and people with no religion were doubling every twelve years from one in five hundred (0.2%) to more than one in six (18.9%) at their peak in 1970. With the decline of Soviet Communism, atheistic belief systems lost many adherents in Eastern Europe, but "no-religion" remains the fastest growing belief system in North America and Western Europe.
Strictly comparing Muslim and Christian population percentages is deceptive. Muslim birthrate (2.07%) is nearly half again greater than annual growth of world population (1.41%). New babies account for nearly ninety-seven percent of Muslim growth. Christian birthrate (1.22%), falls below the world average.
Ten percent of Christian growth comes from converting people of other religions. Annual converts to Christianity (2.5 million) outnumber converts to Islam (865,000) three to one.
Islam may have the fastest growing population, but Christianity is far more successful in penetrating new populations.
Percentages of mainline Protestants (5.6), Roman Catholics (17.5), and Eastern Orthodox (3.8) are declining relative to world population. These pull the overall annual Christian growth rate (1.36%) below world population growth. However, evangelicals (present in all of the Christian traditions) are growing three times (4.7%) faster than world population.
In 1900 evangelicals numbered one out of forty. By 1970 their proportions had doubled to one in twenty. In less than thirty years evangelical proportions doubled again to one in ten. Today one out of every nine people in the world (11.2%) professes to be an evangelical Christian.
Evangelical growth, however, is completely stagnant in Western civilization where the total number of evangelicals has not changed since 1970.
All of Christianity's phenomenal growth is occurring in the non-Western world. Today, non-Western evangelicals outnumber Western ones two to one.
Christianity is truly, once again, a non-Western religion!
Please, pray for our Algerian brothers & sisters, as they are part of this new growth. Pray for God’s Spirit to completely fill the land of Algeria - so all may know His Name!
The Algerian Team
therace@therace.ws
[Resource: Reveille Shofar]
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