Sermon Illustrations
The Upside Down Shift in Global Missions
The landscape of global missions has undergone massive changes in the past few decades. Here are a few examples of the upside down, global shift in Christianity and missions:
- Christianity Today reported that 85 percent of the members of Yale University's Campus Crusade for Christ chapter are Asian, whereas "the university's Buddhist meditation meetings are almost exclusively attended by whites."
- The World Christian Encyclopedia recorded that more Anglican Christians worship in Nigeria in any given week than all the Episcopal and Anglican churches of Europe and North America combined!
- An examination of World Christian Trends reveals that there are now more evangelical Christians in Nepal than in Spain.
- The historic William Carey Memorial Church in Lester, England, is now a Hindu temple, while the church in India, the traditional home of Hinduism, now sends out over 41,000 cross-cultural missionaries.
- China can now boast of the fastest growing church in the world, with an estimated 16,500 new Christians every day.
- Today there are nearly half a billion Christians who are crossing cultural boundaries with the gospel from the Majority World.
- Each week fifteen thousand missionaries, mostly from Africa and Asia, are evangelizing communities in Great Britain.