The state of global Christianity, with Dr. Todd Johnson | E1
In what's called the global South, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania, only 18% of all Christians were in those areas in 1900. Today, 67% are, which happens to be two thirds. We look more like Revelation seven nine now, which is every tongue and tribe than we did a hundred years ago or even sixty or seventy years ago. So I think it's an exciting time to be a Christian. Let's put it that way.
Speaker 2:Welcome to this episode of On the Move, a podcast about missions, international ministry, and how transforming lives around the world. I'm your host, Leigh Ann White, and this week I'm honored to welcome Doctor. Todd Johnson from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. Doctor. Johnson, we're so glad that you're here.
Speaker 2:And I would just love to start off by getting to know you a little better. Can you talk to us a little bit about your faith journey and some of the things that God has had you do in his kingdom?
Speaker 1:Yes. Thank you. I'm happy to be with you here. Maybe I should start by saying that I I grew up in Minnesota, Scandinavian background, so I also had Lutheran background. Fortunate for me, I grew up in a really great, Lutheran church.
Speaker 1:I also grew up in the nineteen seventies. So as it turned out, the Jesus movement, had a big impact on me. I mean, I was a long way from Southern California, but we had a lot of music and revival and all sorts of things going on back in Minnesota. So that was one formative part of my teenage years. I trace my faith back to when I was about four years old because I I had a personal relationship even though I didn't know what that was early on in my life.
Speaker 1:And and, again, my great Sunday school teachers and others made a big difference for me. At the same time that I was participating in the Jesus movement, helping to lead summer camps and and things like that, I also love math and science. And so I was studying hard in school, and I was thinking about becoming a scientist and that sort of a thing. And my other interest was just in what was going on around the world, which was much harder in the nineteen seventies to pay attention to. You had to really be deliberate, and and I won a contest in elementary school when I was maybe 12 years old as a person who could find the most references to other countries in newspapers and other other, things like that.
Speaker 1:So these three things, didn't really seem compatible to me as I was growing up, but I didn't really know what was gonna happen. In the late seventies, I I moved to Southern California, joined Youth With A Mission, which was a agency that took young people around the world. And I ended up in Thailand in a refugee camp, working in a refugee camp, and it was actually the world's largest camp at the time. It was at the end of the Cambodian genocide. And that was a life changing experience for me because then I met people who had never heard the gospel before.
Speaker 1:I led construction group that was building hospitals. I was only 21 years old, but there's no one else there at the time. So I I was involved in that. I also led about 55, 56 Cambodians to Christ because it was a time when many Cambodians were were coming to Christ. And that that Sunday school that I had, helped me, to to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:And once you meet people who have never heard the good news before and are such so transformed by it. It it's something that never never leaves you. But I still had this love for math and science, and I ended up working at the US Center for World Mission in Pasadena, California. And the founder and his wife Ralph and Roberta Winter really encouraged me to pursue my academic dream at the same time while maintaining this passion for people who've never heard the gospel. And they had such a profound impact on my life.
Speaker 1:As it turned out, they had four daughters and the only one that wasn't married was the youngest and I managed to get to know her really well and we got married in California. So and she had also been through the Jesus movement and so on. So it was a it was a pretty neat thing for me. I then, met the world's leading Christian demographer, the person who was counting Christians all around the world. He had published the World Christian Encyclopedia in in, 1981.
Speaker 1:Once I met him, I realized this was the these three things coming together, you know, my love for the lord and, my love for math and science and being able to study every single country in the world. And I eventually went to work with him and was able to continue his work up here at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. He passed away in in 2011. So yeah. So, anyway, that's a little bit of my background and a quick story.
Speaker 1:I have three daughters, by the way, now too. So
Speaker 2:Wonderful. Wonderful. So thank you so much for that background. I love hearing people's faith stories. I love hearing their the story of their journey and and what God has done in their lives, and I really appreciate that.
Speaker 2:So you've found yourself at Gordon Conwell. You started studying Christianity. And before we kind of get into the specifics of that, can you talk just a little bit about the advantage of someone like you who loves the Lord and has an interest in in the counting side of things, in the research side of things, but also in the subject that you're researching. Can you talk for just a minute maybe about the advantage of that versus I think maybe I had the assumption as a child growing up in the seventies that if you wanted to be a good researcher, you had to be at the very least suspicious of what you were looking into. We see in you that there's a a different perspective there.
Speaker 2:So can you talk for just a minute about the advantage you have as a researcher in your field?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's really a great question and, an important one too because, this has been part of a wider discussion within, you know, the field of social science and history. In fact, you know, as I was finishing my my, doctorate in the early nineteen nineties, you know, this was a big discussion. And and some people even put forward the idea that that the most objective person is one who hates the subject, you see. Somehow that that makes you more objective.
Speaker 1:There's actually a very important article that was written in the American Academy of Religion. I think it was the president of the academy, Robert Wilkin at at the University of Virginia who wrote a really convincing article that believers can be some of the best researchers. And and one of the reasons is that, you know, as a believer, you're paying really close attention to what's happening. And that that's the advantage, really, is that you can see and you're more interested in in all of the things that are happening within a religion, may maybe more naturally anyway. And you do need to deal with bias, but the truth is that that everyone's biased.
Speaker 1:And the person who thinks they're not biased is really the one who's in the most trouble. So a believer can recognize, you know, I might I'm carrying along this bias. But the irony is, in almost about the same time is that many many social scientists who weren't believers actually predicted that religion was gonna disappear by the year February. And, and that was very common. And that was really a a deep bias because religion is actually rebounding in that period.
Speaker 1:And and, the world's becoming more religious every single day right now, which is again hard to believe, but actually shows that you can be really wrong in this case. And I I think in studying Christianity around the world in great detail, it's actually helpful to be a Christian. Although we can learn a lot from people who aren't Christians who also study it. So I'm sympathetic with that, but but it doesn't make a person a better researcher.
Speaker 2:So as we've kind of alluded to already, in The US where many of our podcast listeners are located, there is a general sense that the church and Christianity itself is declining. But the Center for the Study of Global Christianity has has perhaps found something different. So what does what does this the research that the center has done reveal about the state of the church worldwide?
Speaker 1:So as it turns out, Christianity is shrinking in some places, and is growing in others. So with 200 and some odd countries, every country is really telling a a different story. You know, like a a place like the Democratic Republic Of Congo was 1% Christian in 1900. It's 95% Christian Christian today. Today.
Speaker 1:So that's quite a transformation over time. But a place like Turkey was 22% Christian in 1900, and it's 0.2% Christian today. Christianity is dynamic in the sense that, you know, events like wars and famines and genocides can have a big impact, or people convert to Christianity like in the Democratic Republic Of Congo. But in much of the Western world, there has been shrinkage, you know, in the percentage of people who are Christians. And some of that is younger people leaving the churches, you know, in the the rise of the nones, n o n e s.
Speaker 1:That's a real thing. But it's also the movement of people as well. People are moving around. And one reason The United States is becoming less Christian is that people from other faiths are coming and living here, which is not a bad thing, especially for Christians to have contact with people in other of other backgrounds. So it's kinda complicated.
Speaker 1:And while Christianity is shrinking in the traditional sense in The United States, there's also the influx of large numbers of Christians from all over the world which has changed the the character of Christianity by having people from everywhere come here and with all different cultural backgrounds and languages. So so actually, it's a difficult question to answer. Personally, I can say, I may be getting ahead of myself a little bit, but I I said this on a television interview once, which was kinda shocking, I guess, for the person asking me. And they were saying, don't don't you want The US to become a 100% Christian? And I said, well, actually, I think it'd be better if it was 33% Christian, like, one out of three.
Speaker 1:And and I said, reason is that all around the world, we're you know, Christianity is about a third of the world's population, if you take the whole world's population. And really an ideal situation, if you're a a missions minded person, is for Christians to have close contact with people who've never heard. So why put all the Christians in one country and have another country with no Christians? So why not just see Christians spread out evenly around the world so that every country in the world is 33% Christian, which I still think is a good idea. It's not gonna happen, but just for the sake of illustration.
Speaker 1:So so if you're worried about Christianity declining, put it in global perspective. And so, anyway, I I think it's a it's a good question, but it's a complicated one in today's world. So
Speaker 2:So let's follow that thread a little bit to look at things globally because I think something that, again, as admittedly Americans, we can we can become a little self centered, I think, in our thinking and and not have a global mindset. But as we look at the world and we think about what is happening and what God is doing, and you kind of alluded to this that that there is growth that, yes, there might be decline here in The US, but there is growth elsewhere. Elsewhere. What are you seeing in in regards to that growth? What in what areas of the world does it seem like Christianity is is rising?
Speaker 2:More and more people are self identifying as believers?
Speaker 1:Right. Well, maybe we can start with the big picture because that that's really the most interesting aspect of this, and that is you know, I mean, our encyclopedia that I mentioned earlier looks at Christians in detail in every country from the year 1900 to 2050. So we go into the future as well. Our main finding, really, this idea of people becoming Christians in some places and leaving in others has, led us to the idea that there's been a huge shift, which is probably the best word, especially for people who count. You know, it's like a demographic shift, a shift of in the center of gravity.
Speaker 1:We talk about it that way. And in one sense, it's really simple because, let's say, in 1900, 82% of all Christians were Europeans or North Americans. Alright? Today, let's say in 2020, it's 33%, which means, the other way around in what's called the global South, which is Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania, only 18% of all Christians were in those areas in 1900, and today, 67% are, which happens to be two thirds. So two thirds of all Christians in the world live in the global South and one third in the North.
Speaker 1:So that's a big shift. And for evangelicals, it's even greater. So evangelicals, which are a subset of all Christians because I'm when I talk about Christians, I mean Catholics, Orthodox, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, you know, everybody. So, if we isolate the evangelical world, the evangelical world was 92% western, 92% in the global North, and, today is 77% in the global South. And, and Pentecostals are even further south.
Speaker 1:86% of all Pentecostals today are in the global South. So that's quite a shift. The good news is that most people who've never heard the good the gospel are in the global South, in Asia in particular. So so it's good that Christianity has has shifted in that sense. Another way to think about this is the shift in in mother tongues.
Speaker 1:In other words, what language do Christians speak? The number one mother tongue since about nineteen seventies or 1980 is actually Spanish. Not because of Spain, of course, but because of Latin America. So that's the number one language that Christians speak as a mother tongue. Number two is English and of course, people in India speak English as the mother tongue.
Speaker 1:Many people do. So it's not merely, United States and and Britain and so on. And then the number three, mother tongue is Portuguese which is not because of Portugal but because of Brazil. So it's more of the of the Latin American side. Number four is Russian because of the size of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Speaker 1:And number five is perhaps the the the most surprising and and new one, and that's Mandarin Chinese is the fifth largest mother tongue. And if we went down the list and it's, you know, it's in our in our encyclopedia and atlas and that sort of a thing, you'd see in a sense, languages of the global South moving up the list and the North languages moving down. So that's one really big big change over the over time. And maybe just briefly to say that it's such a good change because Christianity is not really meant to be, you know, one group of people or one language and that sort of a thing or from one place, let's say Europe. And in fact, in the very earliest years of Christianity, even for the first thousand years of Christianity, the majority of Christians were Africans and Asians.
Speaker 1:But that fact is not very well known because of European dominance in Christianity from, you know, the year January right up until, you know, in the nineteen eighties even. So we're we're living with the reality of this great shift, but our mindset is still in this second thousand years that we're a European religion or we're a white religion or we're a Western religion. When I was sharing the gospel with Cambodians, they really didn't want to or need to join a European religion. They have their own culture, which is beautiful in in, you know, in light of the good news. And we look more like Revelation seven nine now, which is every tongue and tribe than we did a hundred years ago or even sixty or seventy years ago.
Speaker 1:And and that I think the challenge for American Christians is a lot of people who are seeing the decline wish we could be like we were in the nineteen fifties or something. Go back. But there's no going back. We're actually moving in the opposite direction, which is which is looks more like what you read about in the bible. I don't know how how else to say it.
Speaker 1:So I think it's an exciting time to be a Christian. Let's put it that way.
Speaker 2:I would agree. I would agree. And I I love oh, I just love as you were talking and you were listing off the languages thinking about that truth that someday, you know, there will be every tribe and tongue. And what a beautiful thing that is. And I I think for many, that's an an exciting thing to think about.
Speaker 2:So as we think about the growth of Christianity that's observable in the global South, how important is the Continent Of Africa overall to the growth that we're seeing?
Speaker 1:You know, there's there's sort of two answers or or two time periods to think about. One is the earliest time period. As I mentioned before, in the first nine hundred and some years of Christianity, Africans and Asians were in the majority. And so there's there's a project, literal literal project to try to recover some of the African voices from the earliest part of Christianity. I mean, some we know.
Speaker 1:I mean, there there's church fathers and mothers who who obviously were in Africa, not in Europe, and then others in Asia as well. So we can we even if you study the church fathers, you quickly realize that they were spread out. A friend of mine has done some research on the council of Nicaea, you know, in in the year 03/25, which was in present day Turkey. And it turns out that the majority of of people, bishops and Christians who were at Nicaea were from Africa and Asia. So that wasn't that wasn't a European meeting.
Speaker 1:I mean, Christianity was starting to get a foothold in Europe, is wonderful, of course, a wonderful thing. But even as we say the Nicene Creed or any of the early creeds, we're really saying something that was put together by African and Asian Christians. See, so that to get your mind around that is is really something. But if we fast forward to the present, you know, 60 countries in Africa and and many, especially as as you go South of of the Sahara Desert, most of those have been completely transformed demographically speaking in the last hundred and and something years. And as it turns out, I'll I'll just give one illustration of of how important Africa is, and that is I I was at the five hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in Wittenberg, Germany.
Speaker 1:A bunch of us got together. It was actually under an evangelical umbrella. And there's about a 100 of us at this meeting, and I was presenting my research. And my research showed that in 2017, five hundred years after 1517, 41% of all Protestants in the world were African. Okay.
Speaker 1:So that's a big a big amount. And as it turned out, there was maybe six or seven Africans in the room. So not really representative of what what is happening. And I I was thinking about that. And then a a little ways into the meeting, someone, you know, after I had presented, someone said from the front, we want Africans to know that they're welcome at the table in this umbrella organization.
Speaker 1:And I happen to be sitting next to a Christian from Ghana, a very well known Christian, and he leaned over to me and a couple other others of us. And he said, we have a proverb in Ghana. And the proverb is that it is good if you invite me to the table, but it's better if you invite me into the kitchen. And I thought, okay. So this is is something I've been grappling with as I've been someone who constantly presents about the shift in Christianity.
Speaker 1:And I'm very much aware that that one of our weaknesses is how much our our training and our faith represents this European history, which is not a bad history, but it isn't really applicable to everyone else. Not not naturally. I mean, there's still very much that that, you know, people around the world can gain from studying Martin Luther or Calvin or or anything. So so we're not saying that. We're just sort of grappling with the fact that we belong to this beautiful global faith.
Speaker 1:And I and I felt like having my my friend who said this, I thought, well, this is really the issue because western organizations still really control the agenda, you might say. And even if you're welcoming to people from other places in particularly Africa, we really need to see the ideas come from come from everyone. In other words, everyone gets in the kitchen. That would be a big mess. Right?
Speaker 1:But it but I think that's where we're headed. And I think this metaphor, which is not mine, but my friends from Ghana, has been very, very helpful. In fact, there was a missions meeting in Thailand in at the beginning of the year, and had people from all over the world come together, and they used my friend's proverb as a way to think about the future of Christian mission. See that how do we get everybody in the kitchen instead of just replicating Western ways of of looking at the world. So I I think that is one of our biggest challenges.
Speaker 1:So that's something we need to consider.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, that's such a great proverb. I it just makes me think we have personal experience of the fact that Africans are are active in missions themselves. They are actively going to unreached people groups. They're actively going to other countries just the the ones that we know personally and I I think your research has also worn that out as well hasn't it that that Africans are now very integrally involved in in what we think of as missions in in the sense of a person going to another culture or another country, to share the good news of Jesus.
Speaker 2:Are you are you finding that? Is that is that a true statement?
Speaker 1:Yes. Definitely. And if we back up just a little bit, it's important to realize that, you know, this this remarkable change in in the growth of Christianity in Africa was was you know, the catalyst at the beginning were, missionaries. Many of them from Europe at that time, even in, say, in the colonial, period. The catalyst, you know, was a missionary who came and began to preach the good news and and that kind of a thing.
Speaker 1:But even even from the beginning, it was well known that that the people who did the most work were people from those groups who were being reached by this new effort. We and in missiology, we call that indigenous agency, which means that much of the work was done there. And by the way, our, one of the main findings of our of our work and especially our recent encyclopedia is that women were probably the major people who spread the good news, throughout Africa and and other places and still do, actually. The way we discovered it, although we had we had had known something about it, was we asked someone to help us get photos for our encyclopedia about of what Christians were doing all over the world. And, she just went out and asked people, send me, you know, photos that we can put in this book.
Speaker 1:And, the the interesting thing is that that almost all the photos were of women doing various things around the world. So so, we we've actually followed up our encyclopedia with a women in world Christianity project, and there's a book coming out pretty soon, showing that this is the case. One scholar called Christianity a global women's movement. So that's pretty interesting. And, of course, that's contrast if you if you ask, churches and agencies to send you pictures of their leaders, then they're almost all men, you see.
Speaker 1:So there's attention there. But it's been wonderful to see that, in Africa, in Asia, that the the gospel has been spread primarily through evangelism, you know, by indigenous people. Okay. But the missionaries always necessary because someone has to to cross that initial barrier. So that that's the case.
Speaker 1:But also then Africans, as we're talking about Africans, were quick to be to go to the next tribe that may have not heard, and then they became the missionaries in in doing so, and the gospel would spread beyond the initial, you know, language or people that had been reached by the missionary. And then beyond that, Africans are now and have been for a long time actually sending out missionaries outside of their countries from Nigeria to India and that sort of a thing. So, yes, very much so. And I think it's it's actually of course, it's a good thing for any Christian to be involved in sending out missionaries, but it's especially good if people encounter missionaries from all over the world because then they get a sense of of a global faith. I should back up a little bit to my experience in Cambodia because it's it's on this subject as well.
Speaker 1:As it turns out, I was the only American on that team that was working there, and we had people from South Africa, from from Malaysia, and and Philippines, and so so we were from all over the place. I'll never forget. We were together, and we were, you know, sharing the good news. And one one of my Cambodian friends said, who are you people? You don't seem to represent any one country.
Speaker 1:And I thought that was actually part of the strength of our of our witness is that we weren't representing a particular country. We were representing the whole world, I mean, in that little microcosm. And I've often thought that, you know, the best team would be a a multinational team. You know? You know, we're here from planet Earth, and we have good news for you.
Speaker 1:And all peoples are welcome. Just look at us. You see that kind of a thing. Of course, it's not practical, but on the other hand, it it underlines what I think is so exciting about the shift of Christianity is that we really are very diverse, and people know that that's important when they're hearing the the good news for the first time.
Speaker 2:I want to take just a minute to talk about something that's that's maybe not as extensive a part of the center's research, but I have seen on your website that there has been a little bit of effort understand about the formal theological training of pastors in particularly the global South. Can you touch on that for a little bit and just share what the center has learned about formal education for pastors?
Speaker 1:So we did a research project about ten years ago, which really went back, you know, a couple earlier decades because people have noticed this in the past and that is that, you know, one of the results of this fabulous growth of Christianity has been sort of the inability of the institutions to keep up with the training side of it. Okay? So, and maybe this is part of that same problem of the shift again where where a lot of it is sort of based in Europe and The United States, and and that that really great education even, you know, our own work at Gordon Conwell is really good, but it's really not sufficient to reach all the people in the world, all the pastors in particular who would need theological education. So in our research project, we sort of looked at the reach of all of the institutions which would be the formal side of it, you know, seminaries and universities with biblical training and realize that probably only 5% of all pastors worldwide have this formal theological education. And and that's the that's, you know, a statistic that's been used a lot by people who do the training.
Speaker 1:But, of course, one important thing to say is that the goal isn't really for a 100% to have formal theological training. It's that that goal is not gonna be easy or not even possible or maybe not even desirable to reach. And so much of the solution to that particular problem is actually found in those who are doing informal theological education because probably what needs to happen is for really good informal training to be to to you know, for everyone every pastor to have access to that training and be able to to take that training. So it is actually in an ironic way, it's more of a call to the those that are doing informal training than to the formal. Now the formal training does need to continue to grow because it does provide a foundation for, you know, the whole community.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, I mean, we're trying to get more scholarship money so that we can train people who would train people. You know? I mean, we're we're we're not gonna train on the ground pastors. That's really not our job, but maybe we can train some people, teach Greek and Hebrew where that's appropriate, and then they can go back and use that in their context. So it's a good problem to have in one sense because the reason where we have the problem is because our faith has grown so much unexpectedly in so many places around the world.
Speaker 1:It's a challenging problem too because Christianity looks so different in in so many places. And and one one place, that that everyone's pretty much, well aware of is the house churches in China. Training is needed everywhere. I mean, we all know that. I mean, if we're gonna do anything, especially as we're helping other people, you know, we need to to have more training ourselves in order to do that.
Speaker 1:And so there's very creative ways in which people in house churches or people in even even secret believers and movements like that. Each of these contexts needs additional training, and people are busily working on it. So I I think it's an exciting area to be involved in, and it's gonna last for a while because Christianity continues to grow in in new places. So it's an exciting ministry.
Speaker 2:It is. And I think it and maybe you can just comment briefly on this that that the migration that we talked about earlier in some of the shifts is actually just gonna help with all of that. Right? Because if a student comes from from a closed country and they come to The US to study or they go to another another country to study where they're exposed to believers and to to, you know, a chance to learn and grow that would would help with some of those, maybe even potentially some of the training things that people would would come to know the Lord and could then maybe pursue some of the formal theological training. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I it's more of a question that rather than a conclusion that I've made. I'm just wondering if maybe some of that migratory, behavior that we're seeing will actually help us in in all of these things.
Speaker 1:Yes. I I think it will. And and ironically, I think it will actually help the Western churches both in Europe and in North America to have that cross pollinization with people from all over the world. It might be that they're I mean, we've seen this at at Gordon Conwell. The people come to to learn from us and then we learn from them.
Speaker 1:It's really healthy for our institution to have students from around the world, studying with us. It's also then it it becomes apparent maybe our faculty should also be from around the world. And we're we've made like many institutions, we've made big strides in that area to be more diverse in our faculty. And then the next thing is maybe our curriculum and maybe our what we're teaching needs also it needs this this, wisdom from other places, and that is what we're working on as well. So so the the growth of global Christianity has actually had a big impact on us as an institution.
Speaker 1:We're we're yes. We're able to train other people, but then we're transformed ourselves. And I think maybe going back to, you know, the decline of Christianity in The United States, young people maybe not seeing the church, as seriously, as as they should. Maybe global Christianity will offer something a little different that there is more to Christianity, and some of the weaknesses of Western Christianity will be addressed, you know, through the presence of Christians from around the world, which may then impact, further generations even in this country.
Speaker 2:What could someone listening to this today take away as a personal way to apply this conversation about global Christianity and how truly Christianity is growing in unexpected ways maybe from our perspective? But what could someone take away as something that they could apply to their lives today?
Speaker 1:When I was a teenager, I was trying so hard to find out what was going on around the world. Of course, now it's a bit overwhelming. You know? Everything's coming at us, so fast. But but I wonder if if we could just take the opportunity to really begin to listen, to what's happening around the world, especially among Christians around the world, and to, you know, to read some of the writings that are emerging from the global south.
Speaker 1:You know, there's there's house church people in China who are writing that you can access, especially on the Internet now. And there's people from India. There's Africans who have been from many different countries now who are writing and and and and, of course, video. I mean, there's a lot of video. I think there's just an opportunity to hear the voices that would be really healthy for all of us to hear.
Speaker 1:And so maybe that's one way in which technology really is is helpful to us as we try to engage the rest of the world. And I would say again that this is on two different levels. One is listen to Christians from all over the world. And, of course, then it's okay if you read and you and you look online. Maybe there's somebody lives across the street, and it's time to to cross the street and to get to know people.
Speaker 1:And then I would say this is all true as well with with people in other faith communities. They're writing. They're, you know, a peep making appeals on on online, and they live across the street too. So for me, the the thing I wanted most was very, very difficult when I was growing up. Now it's a lot easier, but gotta watch all the noise that comes with it.
Speaker 1:You know, if we could just break through the noise and and learn from others, I think that would be wonderful.
Speaker 2:That intentional mindset, right, to learn from others and to engage and and to just be be a student and and be looking for opportunities to pursue the transformation that God has for each of us. I think that's, what I hear you encouraging me to do and to think about. So thank you. Thank you so much. So thank you so much for your time and for sharing your wisdom with us today.
Speaker 2:So doctor Johnson, can you tell us where someone could go if they wanted to see a little bit more about the research that the center has done and how maybe they could learn a little bit more about you?
Speaker 1:Yes. So the Center for the Study of Global Christianity has its own website, which is simple. It's just www.globalchristianity.org. And we have some nice videos there. We've got some free resources.
Speaker 1:We try to put up announcements of our latest publications, and we offer a free statistical table that you can download on how many Christians there are in each part of the world and and that sort of a thing. So that might be a place you can find a few good things. And you can contact us through there as well. We're happy to correspond with anyone who has questions.
Speaker 3:Thank you for listening to this episode of On the Move by twenty one c International. Twenty one c International is a Christian nonprofit organization on a mission to encourage, equip, and empower Christian pastors in the global South by providing free informal biblical and pastoral training. You can visit 21c International to learn more, and be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform to hear more about missions, international ministry, and how God is changing lives around the world.
