Let's be generous for a moment. Let's say that there are one billion evangelical believers in the world. I think that is a little high, personally; but let's call it an even billion, as some claim.
Of those one billion, how many do think are missionaries? Go ahead, take a guess.
Would you believe about 98 thousand? I jest not. Ninety-eight thousand, give or take a few, have responded to the call of God.
Now the world is at an estimated 6.7 billion. One billion of those are evangelical believers. Ninety-eight thousand are missionaries, those men and women who carry the gospel around the world to others who have not yet believed.
I did some rough calculating, mainly because I did not want to invest all the time I have left today into the precision it would take to set this up. But let's just suppose that those 98 thousand are represented by the thickness of one sheet of paper. One sheet of standard paper is .0038 inches thick. I checked. If the internet says it, it must be true, right??? For argument's sake, we shall say it is true.
One sheet is .0038 inches thick. If that represents all the evangelical missionaries of the world, then it would take a stack of paper some 31,000 feet high to represent all the evangelicals of the world. Shades of Mount Everest, folks! I can't even get my mind around the ratio for the other 5.7 billion left in the world.
Do you think that perhaps God may be calling more than those 98 thousand who have responded? Did he call you?
What are we waiting for? How involved are we? God is calling. It's time to go.
5 comments:
Good thoughts here. I have flagged this post as a future blog post. Hope you don't mind my linking to it in the coming days.
Guy,
Compare these stats with the remaining world population and you will see a stack of paper about 45 kilometers high--that's more than 70 miles high, and we missionaries are one single sheet of paper. Gideon's Army never looked so good.
KDS
I need to learn to do math. 45 kilometers is hardly 70 miles high. I forgot my decimal point when I did my math. It's more like 25 miles high. Sorry for the ridiculous error.
After reading your post on my blog, one of my readers sent the following based upon your calculations...just another way to look at the numbers...
If each missionary were a sheet of paper, the stack would be 31 feet and 8 inches tall...impressive.
A Billion Christians is a stack of paper 316,000 feet and 8 inches high compared to Mt Everest at 29,029 feet. Another way to think of it is that a billion Christians would be a pile just short of 60 miles high. The world population is close to 7 billion or 420 miles high.
this gets better and better, doesn't it? We could have some real fun with these stats. I already saw many Peruvian Christians with eyes bugging out when we discussed the disparity. God, send more laborers into your harvest!
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