Startling Statistics

[COLOS]

Stumbled across this page while looking for a world-wide census of Christians broken down into specific groups. I wonder how accurate these stats are, honestly. If this is correct, then…wow, man. Here are a couple of quotes: (hey, I copied a few that I thought were startling.)

*Information apparently collected from the Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary’s World Christian Database. More stats available in the blog from the first link on this post.

Most of these statistics are from World Christian Trends, William Carey Library, David
Barrett & Todd Johnson. The summary and analysis of the annual Christian Mega Census

An AD 2001 reality check: 50 new facts and figures about
trends and issues; concerning empirical global Christianity today. (from Table 1-1 in World Christian Trends, William Carey Library, David Barrett & Todd Johnson.)

[pretty sure this falls under Fair Use in quoting the part of the text of an article. I’m more than happy to suffer a moderator’s editing if this isn’t the correct way to present such information]

78 countries each have Great Commission (evangelical) Christians whose personal incomes exceed US$1 billion a year.

Annual church embezzlement’s by top custodians exceed the entire cost of all foreign missions worldwide. Emboldened by lax procedures, trusted church treasurers are embezzling from the Church $5,500,000 PER DAY. That’s $16,000,000,000 per YEAR!

[pretty sure that the embezzlement figure needs to be verified…at least I hope it isn’t correct]

TOTAL Christian spending on foreign missions - $15 Billion.

It is estimated that Christians worldwide spend around $8 BILLION dollars PER YEAR going to the more than 500 conferences to TALK about missions

US Christians control TRILLIONS in assets while at any given time 200,000,000 Brothers and Sisters are starving.

*All costs of ministry divided by number of baptisms per year. Cost per baptism in India - $9803 per person. Cost per baptism in the United State - $1,550,000 per person.

• Christians spend more on the annual audits of their churches and agencies ($810 million) than on all their workers in the non-Christian world.

• 91% of all Christian outreach/evangelism does not target non-Christians , but targets other Christians in World C {>95 Evangelized, >60% Christian} countries, cities, peoples, populations, or situations

• Currently there are over 33,000 Christian denominations in the United States.

These are protestant stats from a protestant website. Isn’t Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary fairly well regarded in protestant circles?

I’m not sure which groups are represented here. The site mentioned evangelical, charismatic, and neocharismatic specifically. Interesting.This makes me curious as to what the Catholic stats are in the same general theme.

How can alot of this be reconciled to the theology(ies) of protestantism?

91% of all outreach targets other Christians?! Alrighty then. Perhaps it’s targetting non-American Christians. Not too sure here.

78 countries with protestant Great Comission billionaires? Really?

Anybody else find this interesting, or am I all alone?

**and hey, I know there are alot of good hearted people out there in the protestant world that would be equally startled by this. What on earth is going on in the world when even the fraud inside the churches exceeds the amount spent on missions?! Sheesh, I honestly hope that these stats are not correct. Anywho, interesting stuff.

 

[Deconi]

Hmm…interesting!