Facts That Shame The Church

[Sister Alvear]

I read this today and thought some might be interested...I don´t know how up to date the figures are...I just know when I finished reading I was weeping..
taken fron the old time gospel ministry


Facts That Shame The Church

There are over 2,700,000,000 people who have never heard the Gospel at all, and there are only 5,000 to 7,000 missionaries worldwide, working directly with these totally unreached groups of people. That means there is approximately one missionary for every 450,000 of these people!

There are over 16,000 different and distinct cultures and people, groups, even whole countries, where not one single church is in existence. There are 7,010 distinct living languages, and 5,199 of them still have no Bible or Scripture translations available in their own language!

Do these figures move you at all? Does it matter to you than an estimated 80,000 unsaved people die every day (approximately 3,333 every hour...55 people every single minute!) to face the judgment seat of Christ?

Right now worldwide there are only 85,000 workers on the mission field, working mainly among those who have heard the Gospel before. This figure includes missionaries from all over the world of every nationality. When you compare this number with the amount of Americans selling Avon or Amway products, it is staggering. Just in America alone there are 435,000 Avon sales-people (with 1,280,000 worldwide), and over 750,000 Amway products distributors (with over a million worldwide)! Do you realize that these two companies combined have fourteen times more representatives in the United States alone than the Church of Jesus Christ has in the whole world outside of America? And what about the Christian representatives we do have in the world?

Only nine percent of the world's population speaks English, and yet ninty-four percent of all ordained preachers in the whole world minister to the nine percent who speak English. And ninty-six percent of all Christian finances are spent in the United States on six percent of the world's population. Only four percent of all Christian money is spent on missionary efforts to reach the other ninty-four percent of the world's population!

There are over 1,000,000 full-time Christian workers in the United States; while one half of the world's population (three major groups - Moslem, Hindu, and Chinese), 2,200,000,000 people. have only 2,417 full-time Christian workers. As you can see by these figures, something is definitely wrong. While we in America have approximately one worker for every 230 people.

Those who have never heard the Gospel even once have one worker for every 450,000 souls!" At our home bases we have only about four new converts a year for over two hundred professed believers. At this rate it would take centuries to reach the current population of the earth.

I read where a man said the Irish have a saying that: "Facts are like mules; they are stubborn things and must be faced." We must face sober realities and confess that, unless something revolutionary takes place in our midst at once, then we shall have failed God, and we will be held responsible at the Judgment Seat of Christ.

Success of the Early Church in Reaching the Lost

They succeeded where we have failed. So we must get back to apostolic evangelism. Dr. Graham Scroggie says: "The period covered by the Acts is approximately 53 years (B.C. 4 - A.D.30) thus showing how intense is the activities of this first generation of the Church History. Had the later generations of the Church followed the example of the first, the world would have been evangelized fifty times by now."

The truth is the church in its first 25 years of existence accomplished more than at any other time in the history of Christianity.

Their very existence was a living miracle of the power of God. Who would believe the fantastic story that Jesus of Nazareth, that man who died such an ignoble death of shame as a criminal on a felon's cross, had risen from the dead, and that He was the Son of God? Yet they had daily additions of 3,000 and 5,000.

They lived in a hostile atmosphere. The church's message was in direct opposition to the Jewish religion and to the worldwide conquest of Imperial Rome.