Sheldon C. Good, web editor of the Mennonite Weekly Review, recently posted the following on the MWR blog site "Our World Together," and gave me permission to use it here (Incidentally, there is no logical reason that the "Northern Hemisphere" should appear on top of a world map!):
There are more Christians in China than the United Kingdom, and the population of Russia is nearly as Christian as the United States, a new study on global Christianity has found.
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life study shows Christians make up nearly a third of the estimated 2010 global population of 6.9 billion, and in a historic shift, no single continent or region is the indisputable center of global Christianity. From the study’s executive summary:
A century ago, this was not the case. In 1910, about two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe, where the bulk of Christians had been for a millennium, according to historical estimates by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. Today, only about a quarter of all Christians live in Europe (26 percent). A plurality — more than a third — now are in the Americas (37 percent). About one in every four Christians lives in sub-Saharan Africa (24 percent), and about one-in-eight is found in Asia and the Pacific (13 percent).
In short, the study shows that Christianity today, unlike a century ago, is truly a global faith.
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