Ministry in a Multi-Cultural and Unchurched Society

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Mi n i s t r y i n a Mu l t i -Cu l tura l and Unchur ched Soc i et y

World Christianity by the Numbers, continued

only 300,000. Peter Brierley, executive director of the Christian Research Association in London, maintains there are only 48,000 churches in Britain, whereas WCE2 says there are 66,000 (1:838, col. 82). Brierley also says that the figure of 12 million adults in the Church of England reported in WCE2 (1:145, col. 6, “Church of England”) is about eight times the number on the electoral roll of that church. Such glitches should not detract from the enormous achievement and contribution of the authors to the field of empirical research about churches and religions in the modern world. There is nothing comparable, and WCE2 will serve as the new standard reference text on worldwide Christianity. A suggestion to readers: In his article “That Statistical State of the Missionary Enterprise” in Missiology (January 2002), Michael Jaffarian, editorial associate of WCE2, gives a very helpful summary and introduction to understanding and using WCE2 . Read it first! World Christian Trends ( WCT ), designed to accompany WCE2 , should be viewed as the third volume in the set. It contains much valuable material that is of particular interest and importance to the missiological community. The subtitle Interpreting the Annual Megacensus is taken from the fact that every year some ten million Christians compile reports giving measurements on a wide variety of subjects regarding global Christianity. The authors, having access to “much of this material” (1:vii), have attempted here to organize, analyze, summarize, and synthesize the data provided. In a sleeve inside the back cover of the volume is enclosed a CD-ROM, which is described as the Portable Data Format of WCT . This is the first in a series of such products that will comprise the World Christian Database in electronic format that was promised in WCE2 . Many of the tables and diagrams from WCE2 are reprinted in WCT , which is convenient. Some categories are further refined and ex pended. For instance, there is what is called a megatypology of Evangelical Georenewal, which includes 69 varieties of Evangelicalism (p. 279). In addition to Evangelicals and evangelicals (recall the definitions and distinctions in WCE2 ), there are statistics on Evan gelical evangelicals, evangelical Evangelicals, Non-Evangelical evangelicals, and Non-evangelical Evangelicals (Global Diagram 11,