This report… by The Hive Group… is an incredible way to look at various stats about the world.
I could easily waste about 2 hours manipulating the sliders and checking out the results.
Be sure and read the notes below the report… to see where the stats come from and to find out why they labeled certain things the way they did.
Here’s what they said:
The Most Incredible Tidbit We Learned While Building the Map:
Russia is more than 100x as large as Bangladesh, but the two have very similarly sized populations.
That is incredible indeed… and so is the visual representation of how many people live in areas that are largely “unreached”. Over 1/2 of the world’s population is in Asia. 12 of the 15 largest cities in the world are in Asia (the other 3 are LA, NY, and Mexico City). China has 52 cities over 1,000,000 in population. The USA has about 60. India has 2 cities near 20,000,000. Dhaka, Bangladesh is home to over 13,000,000 and is projected to have over 20,000,000 in the next few years. Tehran = 12,000,000.
How will the church respond to the evidence?
1 response so far ↓
1 [don furnaloni] // Jul 27, 2006 at 8:40 am
one way to help the church to respond would be to understand what people employing such statistics could mean by “unreached.”
for me, it was always hard to wrap some kind of number or percentage around my head (partly because i always felt they were fudged on a bit) and therefore with the rest of the audience, tended to glaze over the pie charts and numbers being thrown at me.
if these charts and stuff help the church to “go on” being a sent people, then that’s all fine and dandy. but my trouble was trying to connect the dots with a people who never left their backyard unless it was time to go vacationing in branson.
but after getting on a field (other than my home-turf), i began to see other church buildings that were not of a restorationist bent, but were definately protestant. the thought occurred to me: the statistics that were thrown at me in my classes about the “unreached” should have been used to say that the rest of the world is just “unevangelical.”
so our real mission in life is to ‘reach’ the unevangelical and make them one. for me, then, what counts for someone being a practicing evangelical? working within a roman catholic context, they have clear (yet minimal) expectations of their parishoners: 1) goto mass at least once a year, 2) be pro-life, 3)participate in confession at least once a year, 4) take the eucharist at easter, etc.
i guess my question is: what are the statistics calling the church to do, or who are the statistics calling us to be? (to be honest, some of what i have written here is tongue-and-cheek, yet there is a truth in the jesting.) i guess the bottom line is, there are a lot of people living hopeless lives and the statistics don’t actually “say” anything about “the need” or how a community of believers should be motivated to “respond”–that’s our job.
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