Even though evangelism will always need to be a major priority in the work of the church, THE NEED OF THIS HOUR is to CONSERVE THE HARVEST!

As you travel globally into the mission field, the one unanimous cry of the leaders of the nations is LEADERSHIP TRAINING! Without trained and grounded leaders, the church grows on a shaky foundation at best. David Shibley, found and president of Global Advance, recently said in an article that of the estimated two million Christian leaders in the developing nations of the world, only five percent have access to leadership training of any kind.

What is the Need?
TO PROVIDE TRAINING FOR THOSE WHO ARE EXTENDING THE KINGDOM IN THE MOST DIFFICULT REGIONS OF THE WORLD.

What is the Opportunity?
TO SERVE WHAT GOD IS DOING IN THE NATIONS BY EMPOWERING HIS LEADERS THROUGH ONGOING LEADERSHIP TRAINING.

Christianity is exploding throughout the world unlike anything we’ve seen since the beginning of Christianity some two thousand years ago. Many in the western church are unaware of what God is doing in the nations of the earth. Just look at the following statistics that are being revealed concerning God’s work globally.

• Worldwide: Last year alone, about 120,000,000 people were presented the gospel for the first time.



• Worldwide: About 1.7 billion people now listen to Christian radio or watch Christian TV on a monthly basis.



• Worldwide: Christians now spend 388,000,000,000 man-hours every year proclaiming the gospel in evangelism.



• Christianity is the single fastest growing religion in the world. For example, in AD 100 there were 360 non-believers for every believer. Today, there are only nine non-believers for every believer, and only four of those non-believers are from unreached people groups. Today at least 6,000 Bible-believing local churches exist to support each of the 10,000 missionary teams that will be needed to finish the task of reaching every people group for Christ. We have over 600 million Bible-believing Christians throughout the world.



• The number of people who are being presented the plan of salvation every day is now at least 260,274. Pray for today's quarter million plus. May they respond to the call of Christ. Every day now the average number added to the body of Christ worldwide averages 174,000. 3,500 new churches are opening every week worldwide.



• Our annual growth rate of church planting is presently at more than 8% per annum. We only need 11% per annum to allow us to place a living Christian fellowship -a local church--as a witness in every community in the entire world. We have seen countries like Singapore have a 10% increase of those who have seen Christ come into their lives. In the 1980's 10% of Korea and 10% of Chile turned to Christ, and over 10% in Indonesia - the largest Muslim country in the world. Indonesia is now over 25% Christian.



• Considering the growth rate of the world's religious blocks, Christianity is by far the fastest-growing religion in the world today. The total population of the world increases by 1.72% annually. The world's religions growth percentiles are as follows: Buddhists 1.7%, Nominal Christians 2.2%, Hindus 2.3%, Muslims 2.7%, Non-religious 2.8%, Bible-believing Christians 6.9%.



• True Christianity has grown by more than 300 million believers in the past ten years. About 10 million of these new Christians are from North America and Europe, and the rest -290 million--are from developing countries like Nigeria, Argentina, India and China.



• Every 14 days another translation of the New Testament is begun in a new language. If we're still here, at least some portion of the Bible will be translated into every language on earth by the year 2020.



• Globally there are 1.2 billion people who call themselves Christians and who share their faith.



• There are 500 million Christians committed to acting on the mandate to "bless all the peoples" -sometimes called the "Great Commission Christians". This number grows at an average rate of 6.9% per year, which is faster than the global population rate. For example, while world population has doubled since 1950, the number of Great Commission Christians has grown more than six times in the same period.



• There are at least 3 million full-time Great Commission workers.



• Thirty thousand Christians work full-time in broadcasting the Gospel in cross-cultural mission efforts. About 4.6 billion of the world's population receives Gospel radio broadcasts in their own mother tongue.



• Twenty-five thousand are involved in leadership positions in Great Commission efforts to bless every nation with the Gospel.



• There are at this time 3,970 mission agencies, 285,250 career missionaries, 180,000 short-term missionaries and 400 Great Commission research centers worldwide. One thousand of the mission agencies are new Third World organizations.



• Annually 2,500 mass evangelism campaigns broadcast the Gospel.



• More than 11,000 evangelistic items are produced each year; about 23,800 Christian periodicals proclaim the Good News; over 51 million Bibles are distributed yearly.

The stats above were taken from the Houston Mission Perspectives website, www.houstonperspectives.org The data was adapted by David B. Barrett and Todd M Johnson of the Global Evangelization Movement web site www.gem-werc.org. Other portions come from Patrick Johnstone's The Church is Bigger Than You Think, Bill and Amy Stearns' Catch the Vision 2000, and the course material for Vision for the Nations published by the US Center for World Mission.