Updates

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In order to estimate the number of non-Christians who have personal contact with a Christian, a formula was developed and applied to each ethnolinguistic People Group. Results were summed and presented in the Atlas of Global Christianity (2009) as regional and global totals, expressed as the number and percentage of:

• Non-Christians who know a Christian
  
• Buddhists who know a Christian
• Hindus who know a Christian
• Muslims who know a Christian

These data are now available in the WCD on the new Personal Contact section of the Religion home page, with sample queries showing:

• a brief summary of percentages by continent
• and a fuller regional summary with numbers and percentages

While these fields can be seen under the ‘Personal Contact’ tabs in the detail screen of each Country and could also be added by users to any query at the Country level, it is suggested that reporting would be most helpful when confined to regional, continental or global totals.

Brief methodological notes are extracted to WCD_Personal_Contact_Notes.pdf from the Atlas of Global Christianity, Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p.350.

For the most complete discussion see Todd M. Johnson and Charles L. Tieszen, ‘Personal Contact: The sine qua non of Twenty-first Century Christian Mission’, Evangelical Missions Quarterly, October 2007, pages 494–502.

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The Christian Finance query shows data added this quarter from the World Bank (as reported in the UN's Human Development Report, 2014) being applied to estimate the total Christian income by continent and globe with a drill-down to the country level.

The simple assumption is that each person's income is the same as each country's Gross National Income per person. Within any one country no assumptions are made as to whether Christians have more or less income than others, but when aggregated to regions and the globe the weighting of many Christians in countries with higher incomes becomes apparent.

The results indicate that the personal income of church members in 2015 is in the order of 42,000 billion dollars.

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