Are There More Non-Western Missionaries Than Western Missionaries?

Abstract

Michael Jaffarian and his wife, Dawna, have been missionaries with CBInternational since 1983. They served in India and then for six years in Singapore. Jaffarian was an associate research editor for the second edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia and now serves as Coordinator of Research for CBInternational. F some years now, the idea that there are more FourFifths-World missionaries than Western missionaries has been showing up in various missions presentations and publications. Unfortunately, it is just not true.1 This idea stems from Larry Pate’s 1989 book From Every People, which makes a very important contribution to our understanding of the Four-Fifths-World missions movement. He projected, “If both the Western missionary force and the Two-Thirds World missionary force continue to grow at their current rates . . . [by 2000] the majority of Protestant missionaries will be from the non-Western world.” More specifically, “The number of Two-Thirds World missionaries holds the very real promise of surpassing the number of Western missionaries by the year 2000.” Though Pate warned that “a projection is not a prediction,” still the idea has been launched that this projection has become reality.2 It is one of the great items of missiometrical misinformation of our time.3 Note two important things about this assertion. First, for Four-Fifths-World missionaries, Pate counted both domestic and foreign missionaries, but for the Western world he counted only foreign missionaries. (Foreign missionaries leave their country of citizenship to serve God in another country; domestic missionaries serve cross-culturally within their own land, such as those from South India who serve among tribal peoples in central India, or Anglo-Americans who serve among Asians, Hispanics, or international students in America.) To arrive at a fair conclusion, Pate should have compared the same kind of missionaries—either foreign only or both foreign and domestic—for both regions of the world. He did not, however, and thus the size of the Four-Fifths-World missionary force is disproportionately large (or that of the Western world too small); the comparison is not valid. Second, Pate projected that the Four-Fifths-World missionary force would maintain a constant growth rate, with no slowing of the pace. Over time, however, new social or religious movements rarely show a consistent pattern of growth. There is almost always a significant slowing of the growth rate of such movements, and the growth rate of the Four-Fifths-World missions movement since 1989 has been no exception. Pate’s projection was thus built on the foundation of these two errors. Since 1989 both David Barrett in the World Christian Encyclopedia and the team of Patrick Johnstone and Jason Mandryk in Operation World have done the actual counting, and both show that Pate’s projection failed to come true. The second edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia (2001) shows the number of all Christian missionaries, from all ecclesiastical traditions. By the authors’ count, as shown in table 1, in the year 2000 there were more than four times as many Western missionaries as missionaries from the Four-Fifths World.