In a recent episode of FBC Missions podcast, host Chad welcomed long-time friend and perspectives instructor Blake McDaniel to discuss the exponential growth of Christianity worldwide and the strategy needed to reach the remaining unreached peoples. This conversation offers startling statistics and encouraging insights for anyone wondering about the state of global Christianity today. Listen below.
Blake’s journey in missions mobilization began in middle age when, while working as a systems analyst at the University of Texas, he was invited to lead global outreach efforts at Hill Country Bible Church in Austin. This volunteer role ignited a passion that eventually led him to transition from his university career to full-time missions mobilization work. After serving with organizations like Advancing Churches in Missions Commitment (ACMC) and Pioneers, Blake found his way to the Navigators, an organization that had profoundly influenced his early spiritual formation as a college student in the 1970s.
The most compelling part of their conversation centered around the remarkable growth of global Christianity in recent decades. Blake shared that in 1790, when William Carey (often called the father of modern missions) went to India, only 1% of the world population was evangelical Christian. By World War II, this number had only grown to 3%. But then something remarkable happened – the percentage doubled to 6% in the next 40 years, then doubled again to 12% in the following 30 years. This represents what mathematicians call the exponential part of the growth curve, where the line begins pointing straight up.
Blake noted that most American Christians are completely unaware of this explosive growth because we tend to view global Christianity through an American lens. While many churches in the United States are struggling to maintain attendance, the church is exploding across Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia. Blake shared examples like Nepal, where the Christian population has grown from just a handful of believers in 1990 to approximately 400,000 today.
However, this growth isn’t evenly distributed. Using Jesus’ parable of the yeast from Matthew 13, Blake explained that while there’s plenty of “gospel yeast” in the world, it’s concentrated in certain areas while 40% of the world has virtually none. The podcast highlighted the “10/40 Window” – an area encompassing North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia – where the majority of unreached people groups live. This region contains 99% of all Hindus, 98% of all Buddhists, and huge percentages of the world’s Muslims, yet receives only about 4% of missionary resources.
To illustrate this strategic challenge, Blake used Coca-Cola’s marketing strategy as an analogy. If Coca-Cola’s goal is to put their product within reach of every person on the planet, they would allocate resources strategically – focusing heavily on markets where they have no presence. Similarly, the church needs to shift resources toward areas with little or no access to the gospel. The fact that Coca-Cola has achieved near-universal market penetration in just 150 years presents a challenging comparison to the church’s global mission efforts over 2,000 years.
Blake shared how his own journey led him to discover that while God hadn’t called him personally to serve in Central Asia, He had called him to mobilize others. “I’ve not created you to go, I’ve created you to mobilize,” Blake recalled God telling him. “I’m going to use you to raise up 100 or more long-term missionaries that will be far more successful than you would ever be in that setting.”
This powerful conversation reminds us that God is doing remarkable things in our lifetime – things that might make the apostles themselves wish they could witness. The challenge for Western Christians is to see beyond our own context, recognize the global movements of God, and find our specific role in His mission to reach all peoples with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
