Faith · The Church Today

The Church Today

Where the church is breaking, and where it is gathering. Both are true.

This page tries to look honestly at the one church Christ began, as it actually stands today: scattered into many bodies, and at the same time gathering by the multitude. It is not written from a single camp. It traces the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, the Protestant denominations and where they have divided, and the revivals across the nations, and it holds the splits and the gatherings in the same frame, because both are where the church is right now.

Last updated June 2026. Every claim below is sourced from a trusted outlet and linked inline; current developments are dated.

Church tracker

Each card carries a recent development, fetched from a trusted source and cited inline. A continuously updated live feed is planned for Phase 2; nothing is posted here until it can be sourced.

Vatican & the Pope

The era opened with a death: Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit, who led the church from 2013 on the themes of mercy, the poor, and migrants, died on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025, at age 88. The conclave that followed elected Robert Prevost, a Chicago native and longtime missionary in Peru, in May 2025 as Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (May 2026), warns against letting artificial intelligence dominate humanity, calls modern just-war thinking "outdated," and urges that lethal decisions never be handed to machines. He has pressed an insistent peace message: in an April 2026 Sunday appeal he urged ceasefires in Ukraine, Lebanon, and Sudan, "I appeal to the parties in conflict to cease fire and to seek with urgency a peaceful solution." In his first year he has centered the papacy on peace, unity, and "synodality" (a listening, participatory church), drawing on his Augustinian conviction that "truth does not come from one individual, but rather through dialogue among many," and pointedly meeting across the church's divides, both the progressive Jesuit James Martin and the traditionalist Cardinal Raymond Burke.

Sources: CBS News, National Catholic Reporter, EWTN Vatican, USCCB, Death and funeral of Pope Francis.

The Orthodox Church

The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops reports an "accelerated growth" of converts in the U.S., which "some have even called a flood," especially among the young (ages 15–30), straining parishes for clergy (Nov. 2025).

Source: Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops.

Nations & faith

Some states write the faith into their founding law. Zambia's constitution declares "the Republic a Christian Nation while upholding a person's right to freedom of conscience" (carried into its 2016 edition); and in 2017 Samoa amended its constitution so Article 1 reads "Samoa is a Christian nation founded on God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit." And in the Muslim Gulf, the UAE opened the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, a mosque, a church (St. Francis), and a synagogue side by side, growing out of the 2019 Document on Human Fraternity signed on Pope Francis's UAE visit.

Sources: Constitution of Zambia, Constitution of Samoa (2017), Gulf News.

Votes & splits

Newest: in June 2026 the SBC voted to bar churches with women pastors (see below), plus documented positions and realignments.

Sources under "Denominational votes & splits."

Revivals & gatherings

The encouraging side: the great revivals of history, below.

Live feed of current gatherings: Phase 2.

The history of the splits

Christ prayed that his people would be one. The story since has run the other way: one church becoming many. This is not written to score points against anyone, but to see plainly how far the family has scattered, and to feel the weight of the prayer in John 17. The major fracture lines:

c. AD 33 · One church
At Pentecost the believers "were all with one accord in one place" (Acts 2:1). For its first centuries the church, though spread across the empire, understood itself as one body holding one faith.
451 · Chalcedon and the Oriental Orthodox
The Council of Chalcedon defined Christ as one person in two natures. The churches that could not accept that wording, the Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, and Syriac churches, separated and remain distinct to this day as the Oriental Orthodox.
1054 · The Great Schism
After centuries of growing distance over authority and the wording of the creed, Rome and Constantinople excommunicated one another. The one church of the first millennium became two: Roman Catholic in the West, Eastern Orthodox in the East.
1517 · The Reformation
Luther's protest against indulgences opened a century of division in the West: Lutheran, Reformed (Calvin), Anabaptist, and Anglican churches each went their own way, and the principle of dividing over conscience went with them.
1600s onward · Into the thousands
Baptists, then Methodists, then Pentecostals (Azusa Street, 1906) and countless others followed. The dividing did not stop; it accelerated.
Today · How many?
The World Christian Encyclopedia counts on the order of 45,000 Christian "denominations." That number is real but easily misread: it counts a body once per country it operates in, so a single global communion present in 100 countries adds 100 to the tally. It measures organizational scatter across borders, not 45,000 separate gospels. The honest takeaway is not a precise count but a direction: very far from the one flock of John 17.

Connected on this site: Loving the Church You Disagree With, Covenant, and The Creeds, the small floor where Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant still stand together.

Denominational votes & splits

The detail behind the tracker card. Each item below, including the June 2026 SBC vote, is drawn from a source actually retrieved and quoted, never asserted from memory.

Southern Baptist Convention, women in the pastorate

The SBC's confession of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (Article VI), holds that "While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture." Acting on that doctrine, on June 10, 2026 at its annual meeting in Orlando, the convention passed the "Truth and Unity Amendment," sponsored by Albert Mohler Jr., by 6,028 to 2,026 (74.66 percent), clearing the required two-thirds. It bars cooperating churches from affirming, appointing, or endorsing a woman "in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, such as preaching to the assembled congregation." This was the first of two required votes; it must pass again at the 2027 annual meeting in Indianapolis to enter the constitution. Earlier attempts in prior years had fallen short of the two-thirds bar. Sources: The Christian Post, CNN, Religion News Service, and the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, Article VI.

Women in the pulpit: the big divide

Step back from any single vote and a clear fault line appears. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches do not ordain women; most mainline Protestant bodies (Methodist, Episcopal, ELCA Lutheran, PCUSA) do, and have for decades; and evangelicals are split. A 2021 Lifeway survey captured it: asked whether a woman could be senior pastor of their church, 94 percent of Methodist pastors said yes, with Pentecostals at 78 percent and Presbyterian/Reformed at 77, but only 47 percent of Lutherans, 43 percent of non-denominational, and 14 percent of Baptist pastors agreed, mainline 76 percent versus evangelical 44. Source: Lifeway Research.

United Methodist Church, LGBTQ clergy

At its 2024 General Conference, on May 1, 2024, the UMC removed its ban on ordaining LGBTQ clergy, in place since 1984, by a vote of 692 to 51, and ruled that clergy and churches are not to be penalized either for holding or for declining to hold same-sex weddings. Source: UM News.

Global Methodist Church, the conservative counterpart

As the UMC liberalized, conservative congregations formed the Global Methodist Church, launched May 1, 2022, over the same disputes on same-sex marriage and non-celibate gay clergy. It has grown fast: about 6,000 congregations by October 2025 and, as of early 2026, more than 7,000 congregations with at least 4,500 pastors. Source: Global Methodist Church.

The wider Methodist family

Behind the UMC's troubles is a much larger tree. The World Methodist Council represents some 80 Methodist and Wesleyan churches with more than 80 million members across 138 countries, all descended from the 18th-century revival of the Anglican brothers John and Charles Wesley. It is among the larger Christian communions, and like the rest of global Christianity, much of its weight now lies outside the West, in churches such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Uniting Church. Source: World Methodist Council.

Lutheranism's center of gravity moves to Africa

The same southward shift has remade Luther's own tradition. The Lutheran World Federation counts more than 77 million members in 148 churches across 99 countries, and its largest member church is no longer European but the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus (10.4 million, up 18 percent in two years), followed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania (7.9 million). African Lutheran membership grew while Europe's declined, the Church of Sweden slipping even as Ethiopia surged. Source: The Lutheran World Federation.

The Baptists, counted (partly)

Baptists are one of the largest Protestant families, and characteristically hard to total because they prize local-church independence. The Baptist World Alliance gathers an estimated 53 million Baptists in 283 bodies across 138 countries, about half the world's Baptists and the seventh-largest Christian communion. But it undercounts: the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest single Baptist body, left the alliance in 2004, so the worldwide Baptist total likely tops 100 million. Even counting the church is a study in Baptist independence. Source: Baptist World Alliance.

Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the definition of marriage

The 221st General Assembly approved a marriage amendment in 2014; a majority of presbyteries ratified it on March 17, 2015, redefining marriage in the constitution as "a unique commitment between two people." The change took effect June 21, 2015. Source: Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The Reformed family, worldwide

The PCUSA is one strand of a much larger Calvinist family. The World Communion of Reformed Churches, formed in a 2010 merger and tracing its roots to 1875, gathers about 100 million members in 228 denominations across 108 countries, Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregational, Uniting, and Waldensian churches descended from John Calvin's Reformation. It is the largest association of Reformed churches in the world and one of the larger Protestant communions. Source: World Communion of Reformed Churches.

Anglican realignment

Conservative Anglicans founded the Anglican Church in North America on June 22, 2009, out of the Common Cause Partnership and aligned with the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON). Unlike the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, the ACNA is not a member province of the Anglican Communion, a realignment that now runs through the wider Anglican world. Source: Anglican Church in North America.

The global Anglican rupture

The bigger Anglican story is global. After the Church of England agreed to bless same-sex relationships in 2023, the conservative GAFCON and Global South provinces, which represent a large majority of the world's practicing Anglicans, mostly in Africa, declared in the Kigali Commitment that they would no longer recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury's authority. In October 2025 they moved to "reorder" Anglicanism into a rival "Global Anglican Communion." As Rwanda's archbishop put it, "We have not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion." Source: Christianity Today.

How big, and how southern, the Anglicans are

The stakes of that rupture are large: the Anglican Communion is the third-largest body of Christians in the world, after the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, with around 80 million members across more than 165 countries. And its center of gravity has shifted decisively south: as one Anglican body puts it, "the 'average' Anglican is a young woman from Sub-Saharan Africa," with the largest single Anglican church now in Nigeria, not England. Source: Anglican Church in North America.

Africa's own churches

Not all of African Christianity was planted by Westerners. The African Instituted (or Initiated) Churches, founded by Africans from the early 1900s, blend Christian faith with indigenous culture, music, dance, and a strong emphasis on healing, prophecy, and the Spirit. They are self-governing and self-supporting, free of any foreign mission board. The largest include the Kimbanguist Church in the Democratic Republic of Congo (about 5 million) and South Africa's Zion Christian Church (millions more); by the World Council of Churches' estimate, AIC adherents number over 80 million, a major force in their own right. Source: World Council of Churches.

Back to Nicaea: a step toward healing

Against all the fracturing, a sign in the other direction. On November 28, 2025, Pope Leo XIV and the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met at Iznik (ancient Nicaea) in Turkey to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea (325), where the church first confessed the creed it still shares. Together they recited the Nicene Creed and pressed for unity; Leo urged Christians to "overcome the scandal of the divisions," saying "the more we are reconciled, the more we Christians can bear credible witness to the Gospel." It is the John 17 prayer answered, in part, by the heirs of the oldest split. Source: America Magazine.

The "other" Catholics: East in communion with Rome

Unity already exists in a form many never notice. Alongside the Latin (Roman) Church, the Catholic Church includes 23 self-governing Eastern Catholic churches, about 18 million members, who keep ancient Eastern liturgies (Byzantine, Syriac, Armenian, and more) while being in full communion with the pope. They include the Syro-Malabar and Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches and the Maronites, who say they never broke with Rome at all. They are a living bridge between the Christian East and West. Source: Eastern Catholic Churches.

How Orthodoxy holds together (and doesn't)

Behind the Orthodox stories on this page sits a distinctive structure. The Eastern Orthodox Church, about 220 million adherents, is the second-largest Christian communion after Rome, but it has no pope. It is a family of self-governing ("autocephalous") national churches, with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople honored only as "first among equals." Roughly half of all Orthodox Christians live in Russia and the former Eastern Bloc, which is why a Moscow-Constantinople quarrel can shake the whole communion. Source: Eastern Orthodox Church.

The Catholic Church, by the billion

The largest single Christian body keeps growing, and shifting. The Vatican's yearbook put the global Catholic population at about 1.4 billion (1.406 billion by the 2023 count, rising past 1.42 billion in 2024), roughly 18 percent of humanity. The growth is lopsided: Africa surged 3.3 percent in a year (led by the Democratic Republic of Congo's 55 million and Nigeria's 35 million Catholics) while Europe crept up just 0.2 percent. The Americas still hold the largest share, with Brazil alone home to 182 million Catholics. Source: The Catholic Herald (reporting the Vatican yearbook).

And the Protestants, gaining

The other great branch is harder to count, because it is so many things at once, but it is large and growing. By one analysis, roughly 1.04 to 1.12 billion people identify as Protestant (in the broad sense, including evangelicals, Pentecostals, and independent churches), about 39 to 42 percent of all Christians. Trinitarian Protestantism is said to have already overtaken Roman Catholicism in global church attendance, and on current trends Protestants could be nearly half of all Christians by 2050. Source: Center for the Study of Global Christianity data (via CCC).

The Adventists' global surge

Among the faster-growing global Protestant bodies is the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which reported 22,785,195 members at the end of 2023 and has since passed 23 million. Like so much of Christianity today, its growth is concentrated in the Global South: its largest unit is the East-Central Africa Division (over 5.3 million members), and its African divisions together account for nearly 10 million, with Latin America (the Inter-American and South American divisions) close behind. Source: Adventist world demographics (church statistics).

The Salvation Army: a church in uniform

One of Christianity's most recognizable bodies is easy to mistake for a charity. William and Catherine Booth founded it in London in 1865 as "The Christian Mission," renamed the Salvation Army in 1878; it calls itself "an evangelical part of the universal Christian Church" whose mission is "to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name without discrimination." It now serves in over 100 countries and, by its own count, helps more than 27 million people a year through shelters, disaster relief, and recovery programs. Source: The Salvation Army.

The church as the world's hospital

One of Christianity's largest footprints is medical. The Catholic Church alone runs about 117,000 health facilities, hospitals, clinics, and care homes, an estimated 26 percent of the world's healthcare. The reach is greatest where states are weakest: the World Health Organization has estimated that faith-based organizations own between 30 and 70 percent of all health infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, and church hospitals provide, for example, around 40 percent of HIV care in Lesotho. For millions in remote villages and slums, the nearest clinic is a Christian one. Source: National Library of Medicine (PMC).

And the world's schoolhouse

The same is true of the classroom. Christian missionary schools were, in much of Africa, the continent's first structured schools, founded through the 19th and 20th centuries and providing the bulk of formal education in the colonial era, often before any state system existed. The aim was partly evangelistic, teaching people to read so they could read the Bible, but the byproduct was mass literacy. The legacy endures: faith-based schools still account for more than 20 percent of primary enrollment in a number of African countries, especially where government provision is thin. Source: Africa Education.

And the world's relief workers

The third arm is disaster relief and development. World Vision, founded in 1950 to care for Korean War orphans, is now the largest Christian relief-and-development organization on earth, with revenue around 3.14 billion dollars, some 33,000 staff, and work in over 100 countries. It is not alone: Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. Catholic bishops' overseas agency founded in 1943, and Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse are among the world's larger humanitarian groups, several Christian relief agencies now rank among the biggest NGOs anywhere. Source: World Vision International.

The church and the environment

Care for creation has become its own front. In 2015, Pope Francis issued "Laudato Si'," the first papal encyclical devoted to the environment, arguing for an "integral ecology" in which care for the earth and justice for the poor are one cause, not two. It reshaped Catholic social teaching, was read by scientists who had never opened a papal document, and helped frame the 2015 Paris climate talks. The wider response among Christians is uneven, many evangelicals remain wary of climate activism, but a "creation care" movement now spans Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant lines. Source: USCCB.

Church of England, same-sex blessings

In February 2023 the Church of England's General Synod voted to apologize to LGBTQ+ people and to commend the "Prayers of Love and Faith," allowing clergy to offer blessings to same-sex couples, while still not permitting same-sex marriage in its churches. Source: The Church of England.

Roman Catholic Church, the Synod on Synodality

On October 26, 2024, the Synod on Synodality approved its 155-paragraph final document, which Pope Francis made part of his official teaching at once. It left the most-debated question open: "the question of women's access to diaconal ministry remains open," and "discernment needs to continue" (the women-deacons paragraph drew 97 votes against). Source: Aleteia.

The Vatican on trial: financial reform

Pope Francis's drive to clean up Vatican finances reached a landmark on December 16, 2023, when the Vatican City State court convicted Cardinal Angelo Becciu of embezzlement and sentenced him to five and a half years, the first time in 500 years a cardinal stood trial on penal charges in the Vatican. The case centered on a London property the Secretariat of State bought for 350 million euros and sold for about 186 million, a loss of roughly 139 million. Source: America Magazine.

The abuse crisis and its cost

No account of the church today is honest without it. The clergy sexual-abuse scandal has reshaped the Catholic Church and cost it enormously: by Georgetown University's CARA, U.S. dioceses paid about 4.384 billion dollars to settle abuse claims between 2004 and 2023, and recent settlements push the total past 5.5 billion, including 880 million from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and 323 million from the Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York, both in 2024. A wave of dioceses has filed for bankruptcy under the weight of claims. Source: OSV News.

Not only a Catholic reckoning

Protestants have faced their own. In May 2022 the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant body, released a 288-page independent report by Guidepost Solutions that found its Executive Committee had mishandled abuse for some two decades and stonewalled survivors, while a staff member quietly kept a list of more than 700 accused ministers, never acting to keep them out of ministry. Days later the SBC published the long-secret list and pledged reform. It was a painful but real act of accountability, and a reminder that the abuse crisis is not confined to one communion. Source: The Baptist Paper.

Pakistan: blasphemy as a weapon

In Pakistan, persecution runs through the law itself. Christians are about 1.6 percent of the population but are disproportionately caught by the blasphemy laws, under which Section 295-C carries a mandatory death sentence and, rights groups say, "accusations alone are tantamount to a sentence." The charges are frequently fabricated from personal grudges, and an accusation can ignite mob violence: in August 2023, after two Christians were accused of desecrating the Quran, mobs in Jaranwala burned 26 churches and many homes, and a year later fewer than 400 of an estimated 5,000 attackers had been arrested. Source: Christian Solidarity International.

Orthodoxy, the Moscow–Constantinople rupture

The largest split in modern Orthodoxy: on October 15, 2018, the Russian Orthodox Church, more than half of all Eastern Orthodox Christians, severed full communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople after Constantinople moved to grant independence (autocephaly) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Patriarch Bartholomew signed the tomos of autocephaly on January 5, 2019. Source: 2018 Moscow–Constantinople schism.

Germany's Synodal Way and the tension with Rome

The sharpest test of Catholic unity runs through Germany. Launched in 2019 after the abuse crisis, the Synodal Way voted in March 2023 to let lay men and women preach at Mass and, by 38 bishops to 9, to permit blessings of same-sex couples, alongside calls to reconsider priestly celibacy and women's ordination. Rome pushed back hard, barring the proposed permanent "Synodal Council" of laity and bishops as an overreach of episcopal authority, and Pope Francis warned against stoking division. The standoff is the clearest live fault line between a national church and the Vatican. Source: OSV News.

The war that split Orthodoxy further

Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine drove a deeper wound through the Orthodox world. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow openly backed the war, appearing at Kremlin events and blessing the aggression, casting it as a defense of the church across the old empire. The fallout was severe: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, long tied to Moscow, declared independence from the Moscow Patriarchate in May 2022 and stopped praying for Kirill, and Orthodox bodies in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia moved to separate as well. Source: Carnegie Endowment.

The Vatican–China deal on bishops

Rome's most contested diplomacy is with Beijing. A provisional 2018 agreement, never published, is believed to let Chinese authorities propose bishop candidates with final approval reserved to the pope; it was renewed a third time on October 22, 2024, this round for four years. Supporters say it begins to reunite China's state-backed and "underground" Catholics; critics, led by Hong Kong's Cardinal Joseph Zen, call it a surrender on religious freedom, and Beijing has breached it (installing bishops without Vatican consent in 2022 and 2024). Source: Crux.

The Latin Mass restricted

An old liturgy became a new flashpoint. On July 16, 2021, Pope Francis issued Traditionis Custodes, restricting the Traditional Latin Mass (the 1962 missal) by requiring priests to get their bishop's explicit permission, reversing Benedict XVI's 2007 ruling that had freed any priest to celebrate it. Francis said worldwide bishop surveys showed the older rite was being used "in an ideological way" to reject the Second Vatican Council. The move drew a sharp backlash from traditionalist Catholics, among whom the old Mass had been drawing notably young crowds. Source: America Magazine.

The great revivals

The splits are only half the picture. Alongside the fragmentation, the church keeps gathering, sometimes by the hundreds of thousands. The revivals below are named with their figures and movements; no song lyrics are reproduced. The newest, still-current gatherings are held for the Phase-2 live feed, where each will be sourced before it posts.

In history

The Welsh Revival, 1904–05. Under Evan Roberts, an awakening swept Wales and rippled around the world, one of the most studied revivals of the modern era.
Azusa Street, 1906. A multi-year revival on a Los Angeles back street, under William Seymour, from which modern Pentecostalism spread across the globe.
Billy Graham, Seoul, 1973. At the closing meeting on June 3, Graham preached to more than 1.1 million people at Yoido Plaza, reported as the largest live audience to that point for an evangelistic message. (Billy Graham Library)
The Jesus Movement, late 1960s–70s. A wave of conversions among the young of America's counterculture that reshaped worship and evangelism for a generation.
São Paulo March for Jesus, 2019. The 27th edition of the march, held annually since 1993, drew a reported three million people through São Paulo, its largest turnout since it began. (Fox News)

Recent

THE SEND, Brazil, 2020 (reported). A 12-hour evangelistic gathering across stadiums in Brasília and São Paulo. Figures as reported, pending a primary source before exact numbers are published: reportedly more than 140,000 in person and over 1.7 million on the Portuguese livestream. (Fox News)
Franklin Graham, Copacabana, 2022. More than 68,000 gathered on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for an evangelistic event. (Fox News)
Asbury University, 2023. A spontaneous outpouring at Hughes Auditorium in Wilmore, Kentucky (February 8–24, 2023), after students stayed to worship following a chapel service, drew an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 visitors from more than 200 colleges and several countries. (Wikipedia)
National Eucharistic Congress, 2024. Part of the U.S. Catholic Church's National Eucharistic Revival, the 10th National Eucharistic Congress drew nearly 60,000 Catholics to Indianapolis (July 17–21, 2024), with more than 1,600 priests, seminarians, and bishops in its opening procession. (Catholic News Agency)
The Jubilee Year, 2025. Pope Francis opened the Holy Door at St. Peter's on December 24, 2024 to launch the Catholic Holy Year, themed "Pilgrims of Hope" and held about every 25 years; more than 30 million pilgrims are expected in Rome before it closes in early 2026. (Euronews)

Phase 2: a live feed of the newest gatherings will be added here, each sourced before it posts.

By the numbers

What the polls show about belief and attendance, from research bodies across the spectrum.

The center of gravity moves south

Pew Research Center's June 2025 report on the global religious landscape found the number of Christians grew from 2.1 billion in 2010 to 2.3 billion in 2020, even as their share of world population slipped from 31 to 29 percent. The shift is regional: sub-Saharan Africa has overtaken Europe as the region with the most Christians, accounting for most of the decade's Christian growth. Source: Pew Research Center, June 2025 (via The Good Newsroom).

Africa, the coming heartland

The shift is set to accelerate. Pew projects that the share of the world's Christians living in sub-Saharan Africa will rise from 26 percent in 2015 to 42 percent by 2060, driven by high fertility and a young population, the region already records tens of millions more Christian births than deaths each half-decade, even as Europe and North America decline. The faith's demographic center is moving decisively south. Source: The Leaven (reporting Pew).

Still the largest, but Islam is catching up

The long-range demographic picture is one of two giants converging. Pew projects that between 2010 and 2050 the world's Muslims will grow about 73 percent and Christians about 35 percent, leaving the two at near parity by 2050, while Christianity stays the largest religion. After roughly 2070, on current trends, Muslims would edge ahead, by 2100, about 35 percent of the world Muslim to 34 percent Christian. The driver is mostly fertility: Muslims average 3.1 children per woman, Christians 2.7. Source: Anadolu Agency (reporting Pew).

"Reverse mission": the South evangelizes the North

The flow of missionaries has turned around. African, Asian, and Latin American Christians increasingly come as missionaries to secular Europe and North America, now seen as "its own mission field," one Nigerian-British pastor calls himself "a missionary from below." Diaspora churches like the Redeemed Christian Church of God have planted hundreds of congregations across the West. The honest caveat: these churches often remain largely African or migrant, and struggle to reach secular native Europeans, so the "reverse mission" is real but its cross-cultural reach is still limited. Source: Premier Christianity.

The training can't keep up with the growth

The southward shift has a quiet crisis attached: the church is growing faster than it can train its leaders. In the United States there is roughly one formally trained pastor for every 230 people; in the majority world, the ratio is about one per 450,000. With the World Evangelical Alliance estimating some 50,000 new baptized believers every day, the training infrastructure simply cannot keep pace, which is why groups like the Langham Partnership work to educate Global-South pastors and scholars in their own countries. The danger of the gap is real: untrained leadership leaves churches more exposed to prosperity teaching and syncretism. Source: Christianity Today.

Who will be the priests? Africa now

The shift shows up in who is training for ministry. In the Vatican's 2022 figures, Africa had 34,541 seminarians, about 32 percent of the world's total and the only continent still growing (up 726), while Europe, long the church's main source of priests, fell to 13,461, just 12 percent, down 859. African and Asian seminarians together are now over 60 percent of the Catholic Church's future priests. Source: Aleteia (reporting Vatican statistics).

The coming clergy shortage

In the U.S., the people who lead churches are thinning out. Seminary enrollment has fallen for over a decade and the pandemic pulled retirements forward, while a Barna study found 38 percent of pastors had at least considered leaving full-time ministry, around half among millennial pastors. The strain is concrete on the Catholic side: roughly 3,544 U.S. parishes have no resident priest, and in some dioceses six parishes share one. Source: Relevant.

The mission field becomes the mission force

As the church's center moved south and east, so did its missionaries. South Korea, where Billy Graham preached to 1.1 million in 1973, became the world's second-largest missionary-sending nation: Korean missionaries grew from 511 in 1986 to 10,422 in 2002 and more than 20,000 by 2013, sent from a once-mission-field nation back out to the world. Source: Lausanne Movement.

The global church convenes: Lausanne 2024

The worldwide evangelical movement gathered to plan its next chapter. In September 2024, the Fourth Lausanne Congress drew roughly 5,200 Christian leaders from more than 200 countries to Incheon, South Korea, fifty years after the movement began in 1974. It set records for participation by women (29 percent) and under-40 and "marketplace" leaders, signaling a generational and global handover, and issued the 97-point Seoul Statement on the gospel, Scripture, the church, human dignity, discipleship, the nations, and technology. Source: Christianity Today.

The unfinished task: the 10/40 Window

For all the growth, the church's missionary movement still measures what it calls an unfinished task. Mission researchers (the Joshua Project) map a "10/40 Window," the band of latitudes from about 10 to 40 degrees north running across North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, that holds only a third of the world's land but nearly two-thirds of its people, and most of the world's Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. Inside it sit roughly 5,900 "unreached" people groups, some 3.4 billion people with little access to the gospel; about 64 percent of those in the Window live in such groups. It remains the least-evangelized region on earth. Source: Joshua Project.

The world's largest single congregation

The same country holds the biggest church on earth. Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, a Pentecostal congregation founded by David Yonggi Cho in 1958 (it began with tent services for struggling residents), grew to a membership its officials put approaching 800,000, with nearly 200,000 worshipping weekly across services running from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Its story is not unmixed: Cho was convicted of embezzlement in 2014, and the church, like Korean Christianity broadly, now reports a plateau amid eroding public trust. Source: The World (PRX).

How many Christians are in China?

Nobody knows for sure, and that uncertainty is itself the story. Pew's 2023 analysis found 2 to 3 percent of Chinese adults identify as Christian (around 20 million in 2018), rising to about 7 percent on a broader belief-in-Jesus measure, while the government reports 38 million Protestants. After rapid growth in the 1980s and 1990s, Pew finds it has stalled since 2010 (23.2 million self-identified in 2010, 19.9 million in 2018). The true figure is likely higher than any survey shows, since many worship in unregistered house and underground churches amid tightening restrictions. Source: Christianity Today (reporting Pew, 2023).

China's "Sinicization" of the faith

Beijing is not only counting Christians but trying to reshape them. Under Xi Jinping's policy of "Sinicization," which scholar Fenggang Yang argues is less about Chinese culture than about "political domestication," subordinating churches to the Communist Party, authorities have demolished or remodeled churches, required patriotic displays, and pushed the official Three-Self church's five-year plan to reinterpret the Bible "in Chinese cultural terms." Large independent congregations like Chengdu's Early Rain Covenant Church have been shut down and leaders jailed, even as millions keep worshiping in house churches. Source: Christianity Today.

Vietnam's highland Christians

Another communist state, a different story of growth under pressure. Since the late 1980s, Protestant Christianity has spread rapidly among Vietnam's ethnic minorities, the Hmong and Montagnards of the highlands, largely through unregistered house churches; Protestants now number around 1 million. The state shifted after 2004 from "eradication" to "containment," but harassment persists: officials deny church permits, summon house-church leaders to "criticism" sessions, and withhold ID and household-registration documents from Christians who refuse to renounce their faith, leaving thousands effectively stateless. Source: Under Caesar's Sword (University of Notre Dame).

Cuba: revival in the house churches

In officially atheist Cuba, faith has quietly boomed. After an opening that accelerated with John Paul II's 1998 visit, evangelical churches have multiplied; Cuba's Assemblies of God alone grew from about 10,000 members in the early 1990s to 120,000, alongside roughly 100,000 Baptists and 40,000 Methodists. Because the government will not permit new church buildings, and has demolished some built without a permit, believers meet in thousands of "house churches," often filling living rooms each week. Churches have stepped into social roles the state once monopolized. Source: America Magazine.

Iran: the underground revival

The flip side of China's plateau: in Iran, conversions from Islam have surged despite severe legal penalties. Operation World rates Iran's evangelical movement the fastest-growing in the world; by one widely-cited estimate, converts from a Muslim background grew from 5,000 to 10,000 some twenty years ago to between 800,000 and 1 million today, meeting mostly in house churches and online. The numbers are rough by necessity, the church is clandestine, but a 2020 survey found only about 40 percent of Iranians still identify as Muslim, against the official 99.4 percent. Source: The Gospel Coalition (citing Operation World).

Nepal: from zero to a fast-growing church

A Hindu kingdom until recently, Nepal has seen one of the fastest-growing churches in the world. Its 1951 census recorded zero Christians; by 1961 there were 458, by 2001 nearly 102,000, and by 2011 some 375,000, more than tripling in a decade. The growth tracks the country's shift from closed kingdom to secular republic (the monarchy ended in 2008), service-based outreach, and converts seeking relief from caste discrimination. Source: Christian Today.

Mongolia: a church a generation old

Few churches on earth are as young. When Mongolia's communist era ended in 1990, the country had just four known Christians; today the Protestant church numbers around 63,600, about 2 percent of the population, drawn in part through humanitarian work, the Jesus film, and a Mongolian New Testament finished in 1990, with help from Korean and Western missionaries. Its leaders are clear-eyed about the strains, though: shallow or syncretistic faith, a recent plateau, mostly unpaid first-generation pastors, and heavy reliance on foreign funding. As one put it, "we don't need many believers, but we need many disciples." Source: Christianity Today.

The Pentecostal century

What began on a Los Angeles back street in 1906 is now one of the largest movements in Christianity. Pew finds Pentecostal and charismatic believers make up more than a quarter of all Christians and over 8 percent of the world's population, concentrated in the Global South, 44 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, with explosive growth in the Americas: in Brazil the Protestant share rose from 2.6 percent in 1940 to about 21 percent today, driven largely by Pentecostals. Source: The Christian Post (citing Pew).

The world's largest Pentecostal body

The Pentecostal surge has an institutional flagship. The World Assemblies of God Fellowship, founded in 1989 and rooted in the U.S. Assemblies of God (1914), is the largest Pentecostal denomination on earth, reporting nearly 89 million members and adherents in some 451,000 congregations across 190 countries. Like Pentecostalism generally, the overwhelming majority of its members are now in the Global South, with Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa among its largest fields. Source: Assemblies of God.

Pentecostal fire inside the Catholic Church

That same Spirit-centered worship reaches deep into Catholicism too. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal began in 1967 at the "Duquesne Weekend," when Catholic students sought what they called baptism in the Holy Spirit, and it spread worldwide, bringing tongues, prophecy, and healing prayer into ordinary parish life. By 2013 it counted well over 100 million Catholics, strongest in Latin America, Brazil, India, and Nigeria. Four popes have blessed it; in 2019 Pope Francis gave it a single official body, CHARIS. Source: Catholic Charismatic Renewal.

Latin America: Catholicism's long ebb

The world's most Catholic region is changing fast. Pew's January 2026 report found Catholic identification down sharply across six nations over a decade, Colombia 19 points (79 to 60 percent), Chile 18, Brazil 15, Mexico 14, Argentina 13, Peru 9. The classic story was conversion to Pentecostal Protestantism, and Protestants are now sizable (Brazil 29 percent, Chile 19), but the bigger recent flow is to the religiously unaffiliated, who now outnumber Protestants in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. Even so, belief in God stays high, around nine in ten in every country. Source: Catholic Review (reporting Pew, 2026).

Western Europe: Christian in name, not in pew

The old Christian heartland is now the most secular. Pew's 2018 survey of Western Europe found most people still identify as Christian (71 percent in Germany, 64 percent in France), but the great majority are non-practicing: in the UK, for instance, non-practicing Christians (55 percent) outnumber practicing ones (18 percent) three to one, and the religiously unaffiliated keep rising. Christian identity lingers as a cultural marker even where the churches stand empty. Source: LSE Religion & Global Society (reporting Pew).

Canada slips below a strong majority

Canada is on the same path, a step further along. Its 2021 census recorded 53 percent of Canadians as Christian, down from a strong majority a generation earlier, even as "no religion" surged. Survey data since has put the Christian share lower still, near 42 percent by 2025. (Researchers note the census likely overstates Christian numbers, since household heads often report teens as religious when they no longer identify that way.) Source: Broadview (reporting StatCan and later surveys).

France: a surprising baptism surge

Against that secular European backdrop, a bright spot. At Easter 2025, the French Catholic Church baptized a record 17,800 catechumens, 10,384 of them adults plus more than 7,400 young people aged 11 to 17, a 45 percent jump in adult baptisms over 2024. The longer arc is steeper still: adult baptisms rose from 3,900 in 2015 to 10,384 in 2025. Strikingly, 18-to-25-year-olds, students and young professionals, are now the largest group of adults seeking baptism (42 percent). Source: Catholic Review.

Notre-Dame rises from the ashes

On April 15, 2019, the world watched Paris's 860-year-old Notre-Dame cathedral burn, its roof and iconic spire collapsing in flames. Five years later, on December 8, 2024, it reopened, rebuilt "identically," spire and all, by an army of craftspeople using oak and lead and traditional methods, and funded by hundreds of millions in donations that poured in from around the world. For a secular continent, the loss and recovery of a cathedral drew a striking outpouring of feeling, a reminder of how much of Europe's identity is still bound up with its churches. Source: CBS News.

Taizé: where young Europe still prays

Some of that youthful searching flows to a hillside in Burgundy. The Taizé community, founded in 1940 by Brother Roger as "a sign of unity in the Church and in the human family," draws young adults from across the continent for simple, sung, candlelit prayer that deliberately blends the traditions of divided Christians. Its roughly 80 brothers still host huge gatherings: the 48th European Meeting, held December 28, 2025 to January 1, 2026, drew 15,000 young people aged 18 to 35, among them 1,000 Ukrainians. Source: Catholic News Agency.

World Youth Day: the church's biggest crowd

On a far larger scale, the Catholic Church's international youth festival keeps drawing some of the biggest crowds on earth. At World Youth Day in Lisbon, the closing Mass with Pope Francis on August 6, 2023, drew an estimated 1.5 million young people, one of the largest gatherings in Portuguese history, served by 25,000 volunteers from 130 countries. Only about 350,000 had formally registered; roughly a million and a half came. The next World Youth Day is set for Seoul, South Korea, in 2027. Source: Catholic News Agency.

A saint in jeans and sneakers

The church gave that generation a patron of its own. On September 7, 2025, Pope Leo XIV canonized Carlo Acutis, the first "millennial saint," an Italian teenager born in 1991 who used his computer skills to build an online catalogue of Eucharistic miracles before dying of leukemia in 2006 at age 15. Usually depicted in jeans and sneakers and nicknamed "God's influencer," he has become a startlingly popular figure among young Catholics; he was canonized alongside Pier Giorgio Frassati, in the first canonization of the new pope's reign. Source: USCCB.

An American "Easter boom" too

The pattern is showing up in the United States. Heading into Easter 2026, U.S. dioceses reported sharp rises in adults entering the Catholic Church through OCIA: Newark up about 30 percent (1,701 candidates), Boston from 450 to more than 680, Portland from 1,000 in 2024 to 1,700, Cleveland more than doubling since 2023, and Notre Dame expecting 163, its largest class in at least 25 years. Nationally, adult baptisms and receptions reached 34,552 and 55,453 in 2024. Some dioceses are calling it a regional revival. Source: OSV News.

America's Latinos and the Catholic Church

The trend reshaping U.S. Catholicism most is among Hispanics, long its growth engine. Pew found that Latinos identifying as Catholic fell from 67 percent in 2010 to 43 percent in 2022; the religiously unaffiliated tripled from 10 to 30 percent, while Protestants held steady near 21 percent. The losses flow overwhelmingly one way: for every 23 Latinos who leave the Catholic Church, only one converts to it. Among Latinos under 30, only 30 percent are Catholic and 49 percent claim no religion. Catholicism is still their largest faith, but barely. Source: America Magazine (reporting Pew).

Pew: the long decline has leveled off

Pew Research Center's 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, released February 26, 2025, finds 62 percent of U.S. adults identify as Christian, down from 78 percent in 2007 and 71 percent in 2014, but "relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%" since 2019. By tradition: Protestants 40 percent (evangelical 23, mainline 11, historically Black 5), Catholics 19 percent. Pew cautions that younger adults remain less religious, so further decline is still likely. Source: Pew Research Center.

Ligonier / Lifeway: belief is stable but shaky

The 2025 State of Theology survey (Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research, 3,001 U.S. adults, January 2025) found broad stability alongside striking inconsistencies: 57 percent said the Holy Spirit "is a force" and not a personal being, and 49 percent agreed "Jesus was a great teacher but not God." Source: Lifeway Research.

PRRI: the "nones" near a new peak, but slowing

PRRI's 2024 Census of American Religion (published May 2025) found the religiously unaffiliated at a new peak of 28 percent of U.S. adults, while white evangelical Protestants slipped to 13 percent, down from 17 percent in 2013. Yet most affiliation trends barely moved between 2023 and 2024, a sign the long shift has slowed. Source: PRRI.

Christian nationalism, measured

One of the most-debated terms in American religion now has data behind it. PRRI measures "Christian nationalism" by agreement with five statements, such as that the U.S. should be declared a Christian nation and that its laws should be based on Christian values. In its 2024 survey of 22,260 adults, 10 percent qualified as Adherents and 20 percent as Sympathizers, while two-thirds were Skeptics (37 percent) or Rejecters (29 percent), a balance stable since 2022. In other words, it is a real and influential current, but most Americans, and most Christians, do not embrace it. Source: PRRI.

The "nones" are not all atheists

The rise of the religiously unaffiliated is not a simple rise of unbelief. Pew's 2025 study of religious "nones" found that fewer than half (45 percent) say they believe in God, yet only about a third (32 percent) point to nonbelief in God or a higher power as their reason for being unaffiliated, many step away from organized religion while still holding some spiritual belief. Source: OSV News (reporting Pew, 2025).

Where belief migrates: astrology and the "spiritual"

As church attendance falls, eclectic spirituality fills some of the gap, though more shallowly than headlines suggest. Pew's May 2025 study found that 28 percent of U.S. adults consult astrology or horoscopes and 27 percent believe the stars can affect their lives, actually down slightly from 29 percent in 2017. The bigger finding is how casual it is: most who dabble do it "for fun," and only a small minority lean on it for real guidance. The drift from church looks less like a new rival faith than like a softer, do-it-yourself spirituality. Source: Deseret News (reporting Pew).

Are young men returning to church?

A popular headline says Gen Z men are flooding back to faith. The careful answer is narrowing, not reversal. Pew's 2025 study found "no birth cohorts in which men are significantly more religious than women," and women remain more religious overall, but the historic gap is shrinking, mostly because progressive young women are leaving institutional religion over its teachings, not because young men have surged, though some surveys do show young men now attending slightly more often than young women. Source: The Conversation.

The Church of England, recovering but smaller

England's established church shows a modest rebound. Its 2024 Statistics for Mission report counted a "worshipping community" of 1.009 million, above a million for the second year since the pandemic, with Sunday attendance up 1.5 percent to 581,000 and weekly attendance about 702,000, the fourth straight year of growth. The honest caveat: in-person attendance still has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. (This is the official church count, distinct from a 2025 "Quiet Revival" report that was later retracted.) Source: The Church of England.

England crosses a line: no longer majority Christian

A milestone in the country that gave the world the Anglican Communion. The 2021 census (Office for National Statistics) found that for the first time, fewer than half of people in England and Wales, 46.2 percent (27.5 million), described themselves as Christian, down from 59.3 percent in 2011. "No religion" leapt to 37.2 percent, and the Muslim share rose to 6.5 percent. The Bible Society's research head read it less as mass apostasy than as people "shedding labels." Source: Church Times (reporting ONS).

The rise of the "nondenominations"

Even as old denominations shrink, the fastest-growing slice of American Protestantism belongs to no denomination at all. The 2020 U.S. Religion Census counted 44,319 nondenominational congregations with about 21 million adherents, now the largest (or second-largest) Protestant grouping in the country, with 3.4 million more people than the Southern Baptist Convention. Counted as one body, it would be more than 13 percent of American churchgoers, the very end of the road that began with the splits above. Source: Christianity Today.

The Amish: growth without converts

One Christian group is booming by an old method, having children. The Amish numbered about 411,000 in North America in 2025, up 131 percent since 2000, and their population has doubled roughly every 20 years, almost entirely from within. The drivers, per Elizabethtown College's Amish Studies, are large families (five or more children on average) and a retention rate of 85 percent or more among young adults choosing to join the church. They now have settlements in 32 states and three Canadian provinces. Source: Amish Studies, Elizabethtown College.

The Anabaptist family, no longer mostly Western

The Amish are one branch of a wider tree. The global Anabaptist family, the "peace churches" born in the 16th-century Radical Reformation, Mennonites, Brethren in Christ, Amish and kin, numbers about 2 million baptized believers in 87 countries. Its center, too, has moved south: roughly 45 percent now live in Africa, with only 3 percent in Europe and 29 percent in North America. The Mennonite World Conference, the main global body, gathers some 1.44 million of them across 110 churches in 61 countries. Source: Mennonite World Conference.

The most Christian region on earth

By proportion, no part of the world is more Christian than the Pacific Islands: about 99 percent in Papua New Guinea and Tonga, 97 percent in Samoa, 64 percent in Fiji. The faith arrived with Protestant missionaries in the 1700s and 1800s, but its spread, historians stress, owed less to white Europeans than to Indigenous Pacific Islander missionaries who carried it island to island and translated it into local life. Fifty years on, the historic churches still claim the great majority of these nations. Source: Christianity Today.

The mainline's long fall

The decline has not been even. America's historic "mainline" Protestant churches have shrunk far faster than evangelical ones. From the mid-1960s to roughly 2013, the Episcopal Church fell from 3.6 to 1.9 million (down 49 percent), the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) from 3.3 to 1.76 million (down 47 percent), the United Methodist Church from 11 to 7.4 million (down 33 percent), and the United Church of Christ by about 52 percent. Over the same span the Southern Baptist Convention grew 46 percent and the Assemblies of God more than 400 percent, though both have since slowed. Source: The Gospel Coalition (FactChecker).

The megachurch era

Where many Protestants now gather is fewer, larger rooms. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research counts roughly 1,800 U.S. megachurches, Protestant congregations with 2,000 or more in weekly worship, up from 350 in 1990 and 650 in 2000, with an average attendance around 4,092. Most are nondenominational or only loosely affiliated, another sign of the move away from the old denominational map. Source: Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

Faith under pressure worldwide

Pew Research Center's June 2026 report on global restrictions on religion found that in 2023 governments harassed religious groups in 185 of the 198 countries studied (98 percent), and that 55 countries had elevated, high or very high, social hostilities involving religion, up from 45 the year before and near the highest levels in the study's history. Source: Pew Research Center, June 2026 (via OSV News).

Gallup: attendance keeps sliding, unevenly

Gallup finds about 30 percent of U.S. adults now attend religious services every week or nearly so, down from 42 percent two decades ago. The slide is uneven by tradition: Catholic weekly attendance fell from 45 to 33 percent, while Protestant attendance has held nearer 44 percent. Source: Gallup.

The great dechurching

The quieter half of America's religious change is not about belief but about showing up. Researchers Jim Davis and Michael Graham estimate that about 40 million Americans have stopped attending church over 25 years, the largest such shift in U.S. history. Most did not leave in a crisis of faith: roughly 30 million are "casually dechurched," gone for ordinary reasons like moving or inconvenience, while about 10 million left over real hurt. The hopeful part: more than half say they would return if they found a genuine expression of the faith. Source: WBUR On Point.

"Deconstruction": not always leaving

A much-discussed word for what many believers are doing with their faith. Lifeway Research cautions that "no one knows exactly what it means," and identifies at least three different things people call deconstruction: a complete departure from Christianity; staying committed to God while wrestling with the failings of religious institutions; and plain spiritual burnout. Only about 31 percent of Americans express great confidence in organized religion, a backdrop to all three. The honest point: not every doubter is on the way out. Source: Lifeway Research.

The "cultural Christian" moment

Running against the secular tide is a small but loud current of intellectuals reconsidering Christianity. The most prominent case: in November 2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a famous ex-Muslim atheist, published "Why I Am Now a Christian," saying unbelief had left her "spiritually bankrupt" and that the West's freedoms rest on a Judeo-Christian foundation worth recovering. Skeptics question whether such figures are believers or merely "cultural Christians" defending civilization; supporters say the very debate marks a shift in the West's mood toward faith. Source: ReligionUnplugged.

Open Doors: where following Christ is dangerous

Open Doors' 2025 World Watch List (January 2025) estimates more than 380 million Christians face high levels of persecution and discrimination across its top-50 countries, with North Korea again first. In the reporting year it counted 4,476 Christians killed for their faith, 7,679 churches or properties attacked, and 4,744 imprisoned. (Open Doors is a Christian advocacy ministry; the figures are its own estimates.) Source: Open Doors, via The Baptist Paper.

North Korea: the hardest place of all

One country has sat at the very top of that list for years. Open Doors calls North Korea "arguably the most dangerous place on earth to follow Jesus." Under a 2020 "anti-reactionary thought law," simply being a Christian or owning a Bible is treated as a serious crime; the group reports that those discovered face imprisonment in labor camps with little hope of release, or execution, and family members can be punished too. Believers who remain meet in utmost secrecy. (Figures and accounts are Open Doors' own.) Source: Open Doors.

Eritrea: only four faiths allowed

Among the harshest places for believers is one of the oldest Christian lands. Eritrea's government recognizes only four religious groupings; most evangelical and Pentecostal Christians are treated as illegal, their worship banned and gatherings criminalized. Open Doors reports raids, indefinite imprisonment "in brutally shocking conditions," and the targeting of young Christians through open-ended military conscription; even the recognized churches face state control, with Catholic health facilities forcibly closed in 2019. (Accounts are Open Doors' own.) Source: Open Doors.

Japan and the faith that hid for 250 years

Some places resist the gospel without ever quite extinguishing it. Christianity reached Japan in 1549 with Francis Xavier, then was banned by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1614 and brutally suppressed. Cut off from priests, believers went underground for roughly 250 years, disguising their faith in Buddhist-looking forms (the "Maria Kannon," part Virgin Mary, part Buddhist deity) and passing the Bible down orally. When religious freedom returned in 1873, some 30,000 "Hidden Christians" emerged. Yet Japan remains one of the developed world's least-Christian nations, around 1 percent. Source: Wikipedia.

Nigeria: the deadliest place, and a hard debate

Nigeria sits at the center of those numbers. Open Doors' 2026 World Watch List counts 3,490 Christians killed there, out of 4,849 worldwide, roughly 72 percent of the global total, blaming Fulani militants, Boko Haram, and ISWAP. But the framing is genuinely contested. The UN's humanitarian coordinator for Nigeria rejects the "Christian genocide" label: "Attributing this violence to the targeted persecution of a religious group, I would not take that step," noting that "the vast majority of the more than 40,000 people killed in the insurgency are Muslims" and that much of the bloodshed is farmer-herder conflict intensified by climate and land pressure. The honest reading: Christians are dying in large numbers, and the violence is not only, or simply, religious. Sources: Open Doors, via EWTN, UN News.

The Sahel: the new front line

Just north, West Africa's Sahel has become the deadliest zone for this kind of violence. In Burkina Faso, Al-Qaeda-linked (JNIM) and Islamic State (ISGS) groups have massacred civilians, including Christian worshippers: on February 25, 2024, ISGS attacked a Catholic church at Essakane, killing at least a dozen. Human Rights Watch, which calls such massacres war crimes, counts more than 26,000 dead since 2016 and millions displaced, many of them Christians who had already fled north-to-south. Source: Human Rights Watch.

India: rising pressure, and a court pushing back

In India, the United Christian Forum, a Christian rights group, recorded 834 attacks on Christians in 2024, up from 734 in 2023, more than two reported incidents a day, concentrated in Uttar Pradesh (209) and Chhattisgarh (165) and often tied to "forced conversion" accusations under anti-conversion laws now on the books in several states. The legal tide is not one-way: in November 2025 India's Supreme Court quashed cases against more than 90 Christians under Uttar Pradesh's law, a justice calling continued prosecution a "travesty of justice" and questioning whether the law intrudes on constitutional religious liberty. Sources: The Wire, Christian Solidarity International.

India's Christian-majority corner

The other side of India's story: it has Christian-majority states. In the remote northeast, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghalaya are overwhelmingly Christian, the fruit of 19th-century Baptist missionaries. By the 2011 census Nagaland was 88 percent Christian and more than 75 percent Baptist, making this small Indian state, by proportion, the most Baptist place on earth, more so than Mississippi. American Baptist work there dates to the first Naga baptisms in December 1872. Source: Wikipedia.

Iraq: an ancient church nearly emptied

One of the oldest Christian communities on earth has all but collapsed. Notre Dame's Under Caesar's Sword project records that Iraq held nearly 1.5 million Christians before the 2003 U.S. invasion, falling to about 700,000 by 2006 and fewer than 250,000 by 2021, more than 80 percent gone. ISIS accelerated it: when the group seized Mosul and the Nineveh Plains in 2014, Christians were told to convert, pay a tax, or die, and the cities emptied. Even after ISIS's 2017 defeat, many have not returned, deterred by insecurity and militias. Source: Under Caesar's Sword (University of Notre Dame).

Nicaragua: the church as the opposition

Persecution does not only come from other religions; here it comes from the state, in a historically Catholic country. After mass protests in 2018, Daniel Ortega's government turned on the Catholic Church, which had sheltered protesters and criticized the crackdown. Its most outspoken critic, Bishop Rolando Álvarez, was placed under house arrest in 2022 and sentenced to 26 years in February 2023; on January 14, 2024 he and 18 other clergy, a second bishop, 15 priests, and two seminarians, were expelled to Rome. Expelling or barring the re-entry of priests has become routine policy. Source: Christian Solidarity International.

Egypt's Copts: the Middle East's largest church

Not every Middle Eastern story is one of disappearance. Egypt's Coptic Christians, about 10 million strong, are the largest Christian community left in the Middle East, an ancient church that dates its calendar from the "Year of the Martyrs" (AD 248). The picture is genuinely mixed: Pope Tawadros II said in 2021 "there is no persecution" in the bald sense, and the government has legalized many churches and built a grand new cathedral, yet rights groups document church-construction restrictions, closures, sectarian mob violence, and past ISIS attacks. Resilience and pressure at once. Source: Hudson Institute.

Churches full in the heart of Arabia

In Islam's birthplace, a surprising thing has happened: brought by millions of migrant workers from the Philippines, India, and beyond, Christianity is one of the Gulf's larger faiths, and its churches, as one account puts it, are "bursting at the seams, overflowing into rented hotels and movie theaters." Seventeen Gulf cities now provide government land for more than 40 church buildings, in the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. The great exception is Saudi Arabia, which still bans all non-Muslim houses of worship. Christianity Today argues the honest word for the wider Gulf is not "persecution" but "tolerance, with all its limitations," real worship, but no proselytizing Muslims. Source: Christianity Today.

Ethiopia's ancient church

Some of the church's deepest roots are African, not Western. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church traces its founding to about 330 AD, when, by tradition, St. Frumentius brought the faith to the Kingdom of Aksum and Emperor Ezana made it the state religion, centuries before much of Europe was Christianized. With roughly 36 million members, it is the largest of the Oriental Orthodox churches (which separated after Chalcedon in 451), about 44 percent of Ethiopia's population. Source: CNEWA.

The first Christian nation

Before Rome, before most of Europe, there was Armenia. By tradition in the year 301, after St. Gregory the Illuminator cured and converted King Tiridates III, Armenia became the first state in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion (modern historians often date it nearer 314). Nearly 1,700 years later the Armenian Apostolic Church remains the heart of Armenian identity, and the country stays overwhelmingly Christian, the great majority belonging to that ancient church. A small nation has kept the longest unbroken claim to Christian statehood on earth. Source: World History Encyclopedia.

The church that went east

Christianity did not only travel west to Rome; it also went far east, and is largely forgotten for it. The Church of the East, the so-called "Nestorians," carried the gospel along the Silk Road, and in AD 635 the missionary Alopen reached the Tang capital of Chang'an (modern Xi'an), where an emperor welcomed him; a stele erected in 781, rediscovered in 1623, records Christian "temples filling a hundred cities." By tradition the same Syriac stream reached India even earlier, the St. Thomas Christians of Kerala trace their church to the Apostle Thomas himself. For centuries, much of the world's Christianity lay east of Jerusalem, not west of it. Source: Christianity Today.

South Sudan: a nation born Christian

Faith can also help draw borders. South Sudan, the world's youngest country, declared independence on July 9, 2011 after nearly 99 percent voted to break from Muslim-majority Sudan, a split that ran largely along a religious and ethnic line. About 60 percent of its roughly 12 million people are Christian (Catholics the largest group), the fruit of 19th-century missions. But independence did not bring peace: a civil war from 2013 to 2018 left nearly 400,000 dead, a reminder that a Christian majority is no guarantee of unity. Source: Africanews.

Sudan's war and its ruined churches

Just to the north, the world's largest displacement crisis is also crushing a small church. Since civil war broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese army (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), at least 165 churches have been shuttered. Both sides have hit them: a December 2024 SAF strike on a Khartoum church killed 11 people, eight of them children; in June 2025 the RSF bombed three churches in El Fasher. Christians, only about 5 percent of Sudan's ~50 million people, have little protection from either Muslim-majority force. One Omdurman parish that once served over 2,000 families is down to 675. Source: Christianity Today.

The Holy Land: fewer Christians at the source

In the land of the faith's birth, the Christian share keeps shrinking. Christians were over 10 percent of the population around Israel's founding and are roughly 1 to 2 percent today; the Catholic relief agency CNEWA reports that since 1967 about a third of Palestinian Christians have emigrated. The causes are real and disputed, and honesty requires naming the mix rather than one villain: economic collapse and high unemployment, the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict and military occupation, building and land restrictions, social marginalization, and an educated "brain drain" all push families to leave. Source: CNEWA.

The Bible in the world's tongues

The work of translation keeps widening access to Scripture. As of June 2026, the full Bible existed in 801 languages, the New Testament in a further 1,835, and portions of Scripture in another 1,516, while 3,241 languages still had no Scripture at all, roughly one in five people worldwide. Source: Wycliffe Bible Translators.

"The Chosen": Jesus, crowdfunded

A different kind of church story: a multi-season series about the life of Jesus, financed not by Hollywood but by its viewers. The Chosen has drawn more than 280 million viewers across 175 countries since 2019, raised over 37 million dollars in donations, and is being translated toward 600 languages, with the stated aim of reaching a billion people. Source: Deseret News.

Faith at the box office

The same studio behind The Chosen, Angel Studios, also produced 2023's surprise theatrical hit. "Sound of Freedom," made for about 14 million dollars, grossed more than 250 million worldwide and finished among the ten highest-grossing films in the United States that year, ahead even of the Taylor Swift concert movie. Whatever one makes of the film, its success signaled real box-office appetite for faith-oriented stories, part of a wider 2023 wave of religious films finding mainstream audiences. Source: The Christian Post.

Alpha: an introduction to the faith, everywhere

One of the most widely-run entry points to Christianity crosses nearly every tradition. The Alpha course, a series of talks and meals exploring basic questions of faith, began at Holy Trinity Brompton in London in 1977 and was reshaped by Nicky Gumbel in 1990. By 2018 more than 24 million people had taken it, in over 100 countries and 112 languages, run by Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches alike. Source: Wikipedia.

When the church meets AI

The technology Pope Leo warns about is already arriving in sanctuaries. From August 23 to October 20, 2024, St. Peter's Chapel in Lucerne, Switzerland ran "Deus in Machina," an AI avatar of Jesus installed in a confessional booth that answered visitors' questions in 100 languages. Its creators, a research lab with the parish and the University of Lucerne, were careful to call it an art and research project, not a real confession, meant to provoke thought about the limits of technology in faith. Source: Immersive Realities Center, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences.

What the church sings now

How congregations worship has quietly consolidated. Worship Leader Research found that of the 38 songs that reached the CCLI and PraiseCharts Top 25 from 2010 to 2020, 37 were written or popularized by just five megachurches, Bethel, Hillsong, Elevation, Passion, and North Point. A handful of churches and affiliated artists now shape what a vast number of congregations sing on Sunday, across denominational lines. Source: Worship Leader Research.

The Christian bookstore disappears

A familiar fixture of American Christian life has all but vanished. Family Christian Stores, with 240 locations, liquidated in 2017; then in March 2019 LifeWay announced it would close all 170 of its brick-and-mortar stores, citing falling traffic and the move to online shopping. The two chains alone shut more than 400 stores in three years. The faith hasn't stopped buying books, it has gone digital: LifeWay noted its online platforms reached five times more customers monthly than its stores did. Source: Fox Business.

The prosperity gospel's rise

A teaching that God rewards faith with health and wealth has spread worldwide, from the U.S. to Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and it is growing inside American churches too. Lifeway Research found that in 2022, 52 percent of U.S. Protestant churchgoers said their church teaches that God will bless them if they give more money (up from 38 percent in 2017), and 45 percent believed they must do something for God to receive material blessings (up from 26 percent). Lifeway's director called the latter a "heretical belief," and the prosperity gospel draws heavy criticism for downplaying suffering and exploiting the poor. Source: Lifeway Research.

The "young, restless, Reformed" wave

A different current reshaped American evangelicalism from the inside. In the early 2000s a "New Calvinism," dubbed "young, restless, and Reformed," drew younger Christians to Reformed theology's stress on God's grace, paired with intellectual rigor and a contemporary style; Time named it one of its 2009 "10 ideas changing the world." Its figures, John Piper, Tim Keller, Al Mohler, Mark Driscoll, dominated evangelical conversation for a decade. It has since faded, weakened by leadership scandals (Driscoll and others) and Keller's death in 2023. Source: Word&Way.

Christian Zionism, and a generational shift

For decades, "Christian Zionism," strong evangelical support for the state of Israel rooted in end-times (premillennial dispensationalist) theology, has shaped American evangelical politics. But it is fracturing along generational lines. Surveys by scholars Bumin and Inbari found that support for Israel among U.S. evangelicals under 30 fell from about 68 percent in 2018 to 33.6 percent in 2021, while their support for Palestinians rose from 5 to 24 percent. Behind it is a theological shift: more young evangelicals are thinking, in one researcher's words, "less and less about the role of Israel and the Jewish people in the End Times." Source: The Christian Post.

The classical Christian school boom

One of the quieter growth stories is in education. Classical Christian schooling, rooted in "truth, goodness, and beauty," the great books, and moral formation, has expanded from just 10 schools nationwide in 1993 to 153 a decade later and more than 250 Association of Classical Christian Schools members teaching tens of thousands by 2017, with broader estimates of 200,000 to 300,000 students once homeschools and non-member schools are counted. Families cite academic rigor and a desire for explicitly Christian formation; the movement has kept growing fast since. Source: The Gospel Coalition.

Seminaries behind bars

One of the church's quieter works is in prison. At Louisiana's Angola penitentiary, a Bible college launched in 1995 with the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary trains inmates as "field ministers" who counsel, run funerals, and serve fellow prisoners; the program is credited with helping cut inmate violence sharply. The model has spread, Texas opened its own prison seminary at the Darrington Unit in 2011 (its first class of 39 chosen from 600 applicants, funded privately, not by the state). Source: Fox News.

A billion Bibles in a pocket

Scripture engagement has gone digital at scale. YouVersion's Bible App passed one billion device installs in November 2025, offering more than 3,600 Bible translations in over 2,300 languages since its 2008 launch; its family of apps is now opened a billion times every 39 days, with installs up 12 percent year over year. Source: YouVersion.

When the Bible topped the charts

Old-fashioned Scripture has become unlikely viral content. Father Mike Schmitz's "The Bible in a Year" podcast, 365 daily episodes through the whole Bible, launched in 2021 and promptly hit No. 1 on Apple's overall podcast chart; it has ranked first in Religion and Spirituality for most years since, reached listeners in more than 150 countries, and is described as the most successful religious podcast in the world, approaching a billion downloads. The Catholic prayer app Hallow, for its part, became the first religious app to reach No. 1 on Apple's App Store. Source: Catholic Review.

Church on a screen, after the pandemic

COVID forced worship online, and some of that stuck. By early 2023, about 89 percent of surveyed U.S. churches ran a hybrid model, in-person plus livestream, and Pew found that 22 percent of Christians said they watch online services more often than before the pandemic, even as overall in-person attendance dipped (white evangelical attendance down about 5 percent and Black Protestant down 15 percent from 2019 to 2022). The pew and the screen now coexist. Source: Christianity Today (reporting Pew).

Two billion Bibles, two a second

The quiet machinery of Bible distribution runs at remarkable scale. The Gideons, the group famous for hotel-room Bibles, report giving away more than 2 billion Bibles and New Testaments since 1908, the first billion took 93 years (to 2001), the second under 14 (by 2015). Today, through some 300,000 members in 200 countries, they hand out over 80 million Scriptures a year, more than two every second, in over 90 languages. (Figures are the Gideons' own.) Source: Gideons International.

The most-translated film ever is about Jesus

Some of the widest reach comes on screen. The JESUS Film, produced in 1979 by Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru), holds the Guinness record as the most-translated film in history, available in more than 2,100 languages, the 2,100th being Waorani, spoken by about 3,000 people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Cru estimates it has been seen billions of times across the world and credits showings with more than 633 million decisions to follow Christ, and it is now using AI to speed translation further. (Conversion figures are the ministry's own.) Source: Daily Citizen (Focus on the Family).

Are Americans reading the Bible?

The American Bible Society's annual "State of the Bible" tracks the answer. After a slide, the share of "Bible Users" ticked up from 38 percent in 2024 to 41 percent in 2025, about 10 million more adults, with notable jumps among men (up 19 percent) and millennials (up 29 percent) that narrowed the long-standing gender gap; Scripture engagement among Gen Z rose from 11 to 15 percent. The hunger outruns the habit: 51 percent of Americans say they wish they read the Bible more. Source: American Bible Society.

"He Gets Us": a billion-dollar bid for Jesus's image

One of the most expensive evangelism efforts ever: the "He Gets Us" campaign, a planned 1 billion dollar push (including roughly 20 million dollars for two 2023 Super Bowl ads), aims to "humanize Jesus" for "spiritually open skeptics," asking how "the world's greatest love story became known as a hate group." It is funded by The Signatry / Servant Foundation, with Hobby Lobby's David Green and about 50 mostly-anonymous families. It is also widely criticized, from the left over its funders' politics, and from some Christians who say it "minimizes" Jesus's divinity. Source: KCUR.

The one place public faith is still normal: sports

For all the talk of secularization, elite sport remains, as one writer put it, "the last refuge of acceptable public faith." At the 2024 Olympics athletes openly thanked God in explicitly Christian terms, almost a "competition within the competition," like sprinter Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone after a world record: "Praise God. I was not expecting that, but he can do anything." Behind them is a long-built ecosystem of sports ministries, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (founded 1954), Athletes in Action, team chaplains, that has made the locker room a quietly evangelistic place. Source: Christianity Today.

Bibles are selling, even as attendance falls

One counter-current: U.S. Bible sales rose about 20 percent in 2024 over 2023, and another 14 percent through 2025 (roughly 18.4 million sold that year), tracked by the industry monitor Circana and driven by first-time buyers and Gen Z seeking answers in anxious times. Honestly, it has not translated into fuller pews; as one analyst put it, "the people who are left are actually more religious." Source: The Christian Science Monitor.

Do Catholics believe in the Real Presence?

The finding that helped spark the U.S. Eucharistic Revival: a 2019 Pew survey reported that only 31 percent of U.S. Catholics said the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. But the number is disputed on method, Pew's answer choices "weren't even mutually exclusive," and Catholic teaching holds the elements are true Presence and symbol at once. A later CARA study that reworded the question found 64 percent affirming the Real Presence. The honest summary: belief is shakier than the Church would wish, but probably not as low as the headline 31 percent. Source: Catholic Standard (reporting Pew 2019 and CARA).

The world's most-visited shrine

Beneath the statistics is a more visceral kind of faith: the pilgrimage. The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City is the most-visited Marian shrine on earth, drawing more pilgrims even than the Vatican; in early December 2022 a record 12.5 million arrived for the feast of Guadalupe, many walking for days. Across the Atlantic, the Marian shrines of Lourdes in France and Fatima in Portugal each draw millions more every year. For all the talk of secularization, tens of millions still travel, on foot, to pray. Source: Catholic News Agency.

The long walk back: the Camino revival

An old road tells the same story. The Camino de Santiago, the medieval pilgrimage to the tomb of St. James at Santiago de Compostela and one of Christianity's three great destinations alongside Rome and Jerusalem, set a record in 2024 with 499,239 pilgrims collecting their completion certificates, the third record year running, up from 446,000 in 2023. The intriguing twist: only about a third walk explicitly for the Catholic faith, with another third "spiritually motivated" and the rest seeking culture, nature, or themselves, a medieval Christian road that the secular and the searching now walk together. Source: Catholic Review.

Church news feed

Phase 2 (scaffold below). A live, dated feed of church and world developments, drawn from the roster in FAITH_TRACKER_SOURCES.md and balanced across traditions, built on the same pattern as the site's other trackers. Each item carries the specific outlet it was fetched from; verify-or-skip, never asserted from memory.

Seeded feed (newest first), drawn from the verified events above to show the format; the continuous auto-pull is Phase 2.

2026-06-15 · Persecution · Multi

Pew: governments harassed religious groups in 185 of 198 countries

Pew's June 2026 report found religious harassment by governments in 98 percent of countries studied in 2023, with social hostilities elevated in 55. Source: Pew, via OSV News.

2026-06-10 · Votes & splits · Protestant

Southern Baptists vote to bar churches with women pastors

The SBC passed the "Truth and Unity Amendment" with about 74.66 percent, the first of two required votes. Source: The Christian Post.

2026-05-25 · Vatican · Catholic

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical warns on artificial intelligence

Magnifica Humanitas cautions against letting AI dominate humanity and calls just-war thinking "outdated." Source: National Catholic Reporter.

2026-03-17 · Revivals · Catholic

An American "Easter boom" of adult converts

U.S. dioceses reported sharp rises in adults entering the church through OCIA, some calling it a regional revival. Source: OSV News.

2026-01-14 · Persecution · Multi

Open Doors' 2026 World Watch List: Nigeria the deadliest

Open Doors reports 3,490 Christians killed in Nigeria, ~72 percent of the global total; the UN cautions the violence is not only religious. Sources: Open Doors via EWTN, UN News.

2025-11-07 · Orthodox · Orthodox

Orthodox bishops report a "flood" of converts in the US

The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops describes an "accelerated growth" of converts, especially among the young. Source: Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops.

[Phase 2: live auto-pulled items append here, newest first, roster-sourced and balanced]

A balanced, multi-tradition page by design: it names the splits and the gatherings, the discouraging news and the encouraging. Every claim above is either established pre-modern history or is backed by a source actually retrieved and quoted; current developments are held for the Phase-2 live feed. Sources retrieved and linked inline: the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (Article VI), the Christian Post, CNN, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, the National Catholic Reporter, CBS News, EWTN Vatican, Catholic News Agency, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops, Anadolu Agency, Pew Research Center, the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, The Good Newsroom, The Leaven, Relevant, the Lausanne Movement, The World (PRX), The Gospel Coalition, Operation World, Christian Today, OSV News, Gallup, WBUR On Point, LSE Religion & Global Society, Open Doors, UN News, The Wire, Christian Solidarity International, Under Caesar's Sword (Notre Dame), CNEWA, the Hudson Institute, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Gideons International, The Christian Science Monitor, the Catholic Standard, Deseret News, YouVersion, KCUR, Lifeway Research, PRRI, The Conversation, UM News, the Global Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Church of England, the Anglican Church in North America, Aleteia, America Magazine, Catholic Review, Crux, the Carnegie Endowment, the Constitution of Zambia, the Constitution of Samoa (2017), Gulf News, the 2018 Moscow–Constantinople schism, the 2023 Asbury revival, the Billy Graham Library, Euronews, the Immersive Realities Center (Lucerne), Worship Leader Research, Human Rights Watch, the World Council of Churches, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Methodist Council, the World Communion of Reformed Churches, the Mennonite World Conference, the Assemblies of God, the Catholic Herald, Premier Christianity, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, ReligionUnplugged, the Langham Partnership, the Joshua Project, the USCCB, the World History Encyclopedia, and Fox News. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. Related: Loving the Church You Disagree With, Covenant, The Creeds.