If you only read headlines, you would conclude the church is in retreat. The actual data says something stranger and better: some of the fastest church growth on earth right now is happening in the places most hostile to it.
Start with the arithmetic, not the mood
In 1900, about 17.6% of the world's Christians lived in the Global South. Today it is roughly 69%, heading toward 78% by 2050. Africa alone has gone from around 9 million Christians to roughly 700 million in a single century — about a 75-fold increase.
That is not spin. It is the boring, checkable centre of the story, and it is worth sitting with before you read another word. God has not been idle. Every figure on this page is listed with its source on our mission data page, because we would rather show our working than ask you to take our word for it.
The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants.
Matthew 13:31–32
1. Iran — where it is illegal, and growing fastest
Iran permits no evangelism, no Persian-language church building, and no conversion from Islam. House-church leaders are regularly arrested and sentenced under national-security charges. By every reasonable measure it should be one of the deadest fields on earth.
Instead the Iranian church is widely reckoned among the fastest-growing anywhere in the world. Estimates of believers from a Muslim background run from the high hundreds of thousands into the millions, reached largely through satellite television, Persian-language media, dreams, and Iranians discipling Iranians. A revolution that set out to make Iran more religious appears to have produced a generation deeply disillusioned with enforced religion — and open to Jesus.
Read the full Iran profile and pray for it →
2. Algeria — North Africa's clearest movement in a century
For most of the twentieth century North Africa was written off. Then, from the 1980s onward, thousands of Kabyle Berbers in the mountains east of Algiers began turning to Christ — not through foreign missionaries, but largely through Algerians reaching Algerians, and through Scripture in their own Tamazight language rather than a formal Arabic they associate with the mosque.
It has come at a cost. Since 2018 dozens of churches have been ordered shut and believers have faced fines and prosecution for worship the state has not licensed. Both things are true at once: the clearest turning to Christ in North Africa in living memory, and real pressure on the people it produced.
Read the full Algeria profile →
3. Nepal — from a handful of believers to hundreds of thousands
Nepal was a closed Hindu kingdom until 1951. There was effectively no Nepali church; estimates put the number of known believers in single or double digits. Conversion carried a prison sentence well into the 1990s.
Today the Nepali church numbers in the hundreds of thousands and has, by some measures, been among the fastest-growing in the world for decades. It grew through Nepali believers rather than foreign staff — and it grew fastest during the periods of greatest restriction. Anti-conversion legislation returned in 2018, so this is a story still being written.
4. Ethiopia — ancient and accelerating at the same time
Ethiopia has been Christian since the fourth century, one of the first nations anywhere to receive the faith, and its own account of the Gospel's arrival reaches back to the official Philip met on the desert road in Acts 8. That alone would make it remarkable.
What makes it a current story is that the evangelical movement — far younger — has grown to roughly a fifth of the population, and Ethiopia now sends workers into the Horn of Africa: believers with the language, proximity and credibility to reach neighbours almost nobody else can.
Read the full Ethiopia profile →
5. China — the growth nobody was allowed to watch
When foreign missionaries were expelled around 1950 they left roughly one million Protestant believers and a widespread assumption that the Chinese church would not survive. Credible estimates today put the number of Chinese Christians near 100 million — growth that happened with no foreign personnel, no public buildings, and active suppression.
Pressure has increased again since 2018: surveillance of registered churches, restrictions on anyone under eighteen attending, and the closure of prominent house churches. The Chinese church has been here before, and it is quietly preparing its people for it.
And now the honest half
None of this means the job is done, and we would be lying to you if we implied it. Around 2.3 billion people still have no meaningful access to the Gospel — no church nearby, no Scripture in their language, no believing friend. Of the world's 10,423 people groups, 4,490 are unreached and 3,214 are frontier, meaning fewer than 1 in 1,000 follow Jesus.
Holding both halves together is the only honest posture. It keeps us out of the despair that says nothing is working, and out of the complacency that says the work is finished. If you want the whole picture in one place, that is exactly what The Great Commission Is Still On lays out.
What to actually do with this
- Pick one nation and stay with it for a week. Not five. One. Open its profile in the nation atlas, read what is genuinely hard there, and pray the four specific prompts on the page rather than something vague.
- Save it where you will see it. The Global Prayer Atlas keeps a private list on your own device, so the nation you chose is still there on Thursday when the feeling has worn off.
- Start where you already are. The nations in this article have diaspora communities in Western cities right now. Map the people already in your world with OikosMap, and find or start a weekly outreach group on the shared map at Evangelize.World.
- Bring one person with you. Intercession that stays private tends to fade. Intercession with a friend tends to last.
None of these five churches grew because conditions were favourable. They grew because ordinary believers kept being faithful where they were, usually without an audience. That is still the method, and it is still available to you.