Updates

The populations of every religion in every country are freshly reconciled with each biennial revision of the population data produced by the UN: (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017). World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision).

This WCD update provides the latest re-reconciliation of statistics on Christian denominations and world religions together with projections of all religious adherents for 2020, 2025, 2030 and 2050.

The pace of work on the forthcoming 3rd edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia (2020) continues to ramp up with collaborators from each of the 234 countries providing valuable input on Christian denominations and the state of the church in each country's context.

Each year Bible Societies and agencies around the world report on their work of translating the scriptures into new languages or revisions, and on the distribution of printed scripture products (Bibles, New Testaments, Portions and Selections).

Publication dates, often representing the culmination of many years translation efforts and great community celebrations, are listed in the Recent translations query on the Scripture home page.

The United Bible Societies annual report also collates distribution data from each of the individual Bible Societies. WCD reports these data as a rolling 5-year average, updated this quarter, together with estimates of non-UBS distribution. See the "Scripture" fields for adding to country-level queries such as Scriptures in the Country and Regions home page.