Majority World

The Pew Research Center puts it plainly.

A century ago, the Global North held more than four times as many Christians as the majority world, sometimes called the Global South.

Today, more than 1.3 billion Christians live in the Global South, compared with about 860 million in the North.

The Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell projects that by 2050, 70% of all Christians will live in the Global South, what I call the majority world.

Philip Jenkins, using the World Christian Database, projects over a billion Christians in Africa alone by 2050, with Europe declining to 530 million.

I want you to feel how fast this is.

Stephen Bevan summarizes the change with a sentence that has become almost proverbial in mission studies.

The average Christian today is female, black, and lives in a Brazilian favela or an African village, or perhaps an Asian mega city.