A couple of things I mentioned yesterday whilst preaching at Westbury on Matthew 13:31-35.
1) The Historical Evidence for the Growth of Christ's Church.
See Rodney Stark's new book The Triumph of Christianity. Available here.
2) The Statistical Evidence for the Growth of Christ's Church.
'Evangelical defeatism is a failure of historical perspective. After all, the statistics are out there. It took 1,400 years for 1% of the world's population to become Christians, and then another 360 years for that to double to 2%. Another 170 years saw that grow from 2% to 4%, and then between 1960 and 1990, the proportion of the world's population made up of Bible-believing Christians rose from 4% to 8%. Now, in 2007, a third of the world's population confesses that Jesus is Lord and 11% of the world's population comprises 'evangelical' Christians. The evangelical church is growing twice as fast as Isalm and three times as fast as the world's population. South America is turning Protestant faster than continental Europe did in the sixteenth century. South Koreans reckon they can evangelize the whole of North Korea within five years once that country opens up. And then there's the Chinese church, consisting of tens of millions of Christians who have learned to pray, who have confidence in Scripture, who know about spiritual warfare, have been schooled in suffering and are qualified to rule.'
David Field, 'Samuel Rutherford and the Confessionally Christian State' in Chris Green (Ed.), A Higher Throne: Evangelicals and Public Theology, p. 86.
