Updates

Every five years the Center for the Study of Global Christianity publicly releases a benchmark for tracking the globe's least evangelized peoples.

The listing, included in this quarter's update, is a definitive statement on the globe’s largest unevangelized peoples. It lists 247 ethnolinguistic peoples each with a population over 1 million and each with less than 50% evangelized in the year 2015.

It shows that almost two thirds of the population of 1.4 billion people in these least evangelized megapeoples have essentially no knowledge of Jesus Christ's life and claims. With one Christian for every 100 people, the 14 million Christians living among them overall are a tiny minority.

In fact, the five least evangelized megapeoples have not a single known Christian amongst 6 million people: the Bakhtiari of Iran; the Beja (Beni-Amer) of Sudan; the Dimili Kurd (Southern Zaza) of Turkey; the Southern Luri (Lori) of Iran; and the Laki (Leki, Alaki) also of Iran.

The full list can be seen from the World A Megapeoples link on the People's home page. As with all queries, it is immediately sortable by any of the fields displayed, and subscribers can add fields or change criteria to customize the listing.

The core religious data of the World Christian Database has been updated from mid-2010 to mid-2015.

Estimates for the number of religionists in every country of the world are now reconciled with the United Nations population projections for mid-2015. The update includes statistics on all world Religions as well as the Peoples and Country tables, and preliminary data for Cities and Provinces.

Unless labelled otherwise, all data in WCD now refer to 2015.

Note that Christian denominations and communions remain labelled as AD 2010 and will remain so until the first estimates for 2015 denominations become available. Also, note that religions by province for 2015 is preliminary data and full reconciliation of religions in the Province table with the Country tables should follow next quarter.

New projections of religious adherents for 2020, 2025, 2030 and 2050 are also included in this update.

Revised methodology document
The Methodology of the World Christian Database document has been revised to include material from Todd M. Johnson and Brian J. Grim, The World’s Religions in Figures: An Introduction to International Religious Demography (Oxford: Wiley-­-Blackwell, 2013).