Ministry in a Multi-Cultural and Unchurched Society

Append i x

269

World Christianity by the Numbers, continued

non-Christian religions who become converted to faith in Christ as Lord but choose not to join denominations but to remain in their religions as witnesses there to Christ”), and “Crypto-Christians” (”Secret believers, hidden Christians, usually known to churches but not to state or secular or non-Christian religious society”). If Crypto-Christians are secret and hidden, how do the authors know so much about them? Another problem is that the text in some of the country profiles (e.g., the United States) is largely carried over from the first edition (even some typos are repeated!), with some updated numbers. This creates confusion because the text, especially “Notes on Religions,” should have been not only updated but also revised to reflect the newly defined statistical categories. I confess that I gave up trying to understand Global Diagram 4 (1:9), titles “Four megatypologies of renewal for enumerating empirical global Christianity, A.D. 33-A.D. 2025,” with its so-called aggregate categories, schemes, slices, building blocks, and vertical segments as depicted on the charts, globes, and diagrams. And the “Great Commission Instrument Panel,” which includes a chart on “Cost effectiveness” based on “Cost per baptism,” inserted into every country profile, will test the patience and credulity of many researchers. In a work of such magnitude, it is unavoidable that some errors of fact should creep in. For instance, in Table 13-3 (2:682), which lists 130 of the world’s largest theological libraries, the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville, Tennessee, is listed as the fourteenth largest in the world with 548,575 volumes, more than the libraries of Andover Harvard, Princeton Seminary, or Yale Divinity School, and more than the religious holdings of the U.S. Library of Congress. In fact, Scarritt-Bennett Center has a tiny library of only 45,000 volumes. How is one to account for gross discrepancies between information reported in WCE2 and other reliable sources? For instance, in the profile on Kazakhstan, WCE2 says that 8.6 percent of the population is Orthodox, whereas the 2001 World Almanac and the Vatican News Service both say 44 percent is Orthodox. WCE2 says there are 510,000 Roman Catholics in Kazakhstan, but the Vatican claims