If your idea of global missions involves hiking boots, mosquito nets and a one-way flight to an unreached jungle tribe, you’re not alone. That’s the script many young Christians inherited from Sunday school lessons and missionary biographies. But according to Matthew Niermann, a professor at California Baptist University and director of a groundbreaking new study on the Great Commission, that script is increasingly out of step with the world we actually live in.
“The world has changed,” Niermann said. “And we need a new imagination for missions that reflects those changes.”
This article is part of a new 6-part series, Rethinking Missions. Check back every Wednesday.
That change is documented in the new State of the Great Commission report, produced for the 2024 Lausanne Congress in Seoul, South Korea — a gathering of 5,000 Christian leaders from more than 200 countries. This massive study — over 500 pages with hundreds of graphs — offers a sweeping, sometimes sobering look at where global evangelism stands. And the headline is clear: The center of Christianity has moved.
“In 1900, the stereotypical Christian was a white European male,” Niermann said. “Today, she’s a Nigerian woman.”
While the percentage of the world that identifies as Christian has hovered around 33 percent for more than a century, the actual demographics of the Church have radically shifted. Christianity is now overwhelmingly a Global South reality — 80 percent, by some estimates.
This isn’t just a trivia fact. It’s a seismic shift that demands Western Christians rethink their role. The old paradigm — “from the West to the rest” — is outdated.
“We’re now in an ‘everywhere to everywhere’ era,” Niermann said. “That means the West isn’t the epicenter anymore. We’re one voice among many.”
For Western Christians, that shift calls for humility and a willingness to follow as much as lead.
“We need to recognize our brothers and sisters in the Global South as equal partners,” he said. “Their voices need to be heard — and in many cases, to lead.”
But even more surprising than the demographic flip is this: Despite decades of effort, money and innovation, the overall percentage of Christians worldwide hasn’t actually changed.
“When you zoom all the way out from 1900 to 2050,” Niermann said, “the percentage of global Christianity is essentially a straight line. It’s gone from 33.5 percent to 34, back to 33. That’s it.”
That flat line doesn’t mean nothing’s happened. In fact, the data shows major growth in Bible translation, evangelism campaigns and church planting — especially across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
“The work that’s been done — by people who have sacrificed their lives — is immense,” Niermann said. “We’ve kept up with global population growth. And evangelization in previously unreached regions has dramatically increased.”
But the fact remains: All that effort hasn’t resulted in Christianity gaining a larger share of the global population.
“It’s a deeply sobering metric,” he said. “It forces us to ask: Are we doing missions the way the world actually works in 2024?”
One major factor reshaping the mission field is the digital age.
“Seventy percent of the world is online every day. Sixty percent are on social media,” Niermann said. “That’s a level of global behavior we’ve never seen before.”
And yet, most churches still treat digital ministry like an afterthought.
“In the past, missionaries crossed physical borders to share the gospel,” he said. “Today, we also need to cross digital borders. And that requires the same level of cultural fluency and intentionality.”
He points out that just as missionaries once learned new languages and customs, today’s Church needs to engage the subcultures, platforms and algorithms that shape people’s digital lives.
“A young woman in rural Russia may feel more affinity with someone in New York she follows on Instagram than with her own family,” Niermann said. “We need to understand that digital identity now overlays geographic and ethnic identity.”
Too often, online outreach defaults to preaching to the choir.
“If my digital footprint looks like a Midwestern church member, and I’m posting content, it’s likely being served to people who already think like me,” he said. “That’s not crossing borders — it’s echoing them.”
Another red flag in the report: Only 3 percent of global missionaries are working among unreached people groups, despite those groups making up roughly 40 percent of the world’s population.
“That’s a huge misalignment,” Niermann said. “And it’s not because churches don’t care. It’s because reaching the unreached is hard. It often means going to places with no Christian presence, with major language and cultural barriers. But if we’re serious about the Great Commission, we have to engage anyway.”
Some of the most important mission fields, it turns out, aren’t even overseas. Many of the world’s largest unreached people groups now live in Western cities — refugees, international students, immigrant communities.
“There’s a huge opportunity right here, if we’re paying attention,” Niermann said.
He also points to two massive demographic shifts that should be shaping how we think about missions — but largely aren’t.
First, a growing global middle class.
“In the next 10 years, 2.5 billion people will move from poverty into the middle class,” Niermann said. “We’re used to thinking about missions in terms of poverty relief. But what about this new middle class? Their questions are different. Their needs are different. Are we ready for that?”
The second: global aging.
“A large portion of the world is aging fast,” he said. “The Church is heavily youth-focused, but how much have we thought about evangelism, discipleship and care for the elderly? Especially when they may be more open to faith than ever before?”
All of these shifts — geographic, demographic, technological — raise one key question: Is the Church willing to change how it thinks about missions?
“Too often, our imagination of what missionary work looks like is still based on stories from the 1800s,” Niermann said. “But the world has changed. If our methods haven’t, we’re not actually engaging the world as it is.”
Which is why this report exists in the first place — not to shame the Church, but to wake it up.
“We have to know the world,” Niermann said, “so that Christ can be known by the world.”
