Muslim women perform a morning prayer marking the start of the Islamic feast of Eid al-Fitr, at Istiqlal mosque in Jakarta, Oct. 13, 2007. Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country. (AP Photo/Irwin Fedriansyah)
Posted on 03/30/2008 4:48:31 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
"For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us," Monsignor Vittorio Formenti said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. Formenti compiles the Vatican's yearbook.
He said that Catholics accounted for 17.4 percent of the world population - a stable percentage - while Muslims were at 19.2 percent.
"It is true that while Muslim families, as is well known, continue to make a lot of children, Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer," the monsignor said.
Formenti said that the data refer to 2006. The figures on Muslims were put together by Muslim countries and then provided to the United Nations, he said, adding that the Vatican could only vouch for its own data.
When considering all Christians and not just Catholics, Christians make up 33 percent of the world population, Formenti said.
Spokesmen for the Vatican and the United Nations did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment Sunday.
Guess we need to do more breeding.
Christianity is projected to stay on par or ahead of Muslim growth for the foreseeable future, too, contrary to what you hear out of the mouths of the MSM or Muslim apologists. Christianity is exploding in growth in Africa and Asia. The Muslims are bemoaning the fact of how Islam is withering on the vine in Africa as Christianity overtakes it.
Satan's religion of Islam will never triumph. People will come to the light and reject the darkness.
Christians need to start making more babies.
Right now.
Will the MSM now consider Islam the biggest threat in the world now instead of Christians? Finally?
Considering how crappy the treatment Christians (and Catholics) have gotten as a threat to 1) democracy, 2) liberty, 3) civil rights, 4) free speech, 5)immorality, according to the media, maybe we can finally get some obsessive news coverage of exactly how threatening islamic ‘faith’ is to America and the free world?
Yup, a fairer comparison would be to compare Catholic numbers to those of the most numerous Sunni sect, not to compare all of Islam to the just the most numerous Christian sect.
Maybe we should urge NOW to work with Muslim women to become pro-abortion!
Remember being a Christian is voluntary, Islam maintains its congregation at the point of a sword.
What’s the actual population of Muslims if you subtract the ones who remain in the religion only because they are afraid of being killed in the most disgusting ways imaginable should they decide to openly convert to some other religion?
A few well placed nukes can change that proportion drastically.
It’s not the quantity....it’s the quality that counts.
Actually, Christianity IN TOTAL is growing faster ( if you INCLUDE non-Roman Catholic denominations and Evangelical churches).
See here :
http://townhall.com/Columnists/ChuckColson/2008/03/24/they_want_jesus_instead_why_muslims_convert
Key paragraphs :
“According to the website Islam Watch, in Russia, some two million ethnic Muslims converted to Christianity last year. Ten thousand French Muslims converted, as did 35,000 Turkish Muslims. In India, approximately 10,000 people abandoned Islam for Christianity.
In his book Epicenter, author Joel Rosenberg details amazing stories of Muslims converting to Christianity. In Algeria, the birthplace of St. Augustine, more than 80,000 Muslims have turned to Christ in recent years. This, despite the stiff opposition from Islamic clerics who have passed laws banning evangelism.
In Morocco, newspaper articles openly worry that 25,000 to 40,000 Muslims have become followers of Christ in recent years.
The stories are even more amazing in the heart of the Middle East. In 1996, the Egyptian Bible Society sold just 3,000 video copies of the JESUS film. In the year 2000, they sold an incredible 600,000 copies.
In Sudan, as many as five million Muslims have accepted Christ since the early 1990s, despite horrific persecution of Christians by the Sudanese government. What is behind the mass conversions? According to a Sudanese evangelical leader, “People have seen real Islam, and they want Jesus instead.”
In Iraq, “More than 5,000 Muslim converts to Christianity have been identified since the end of major combat operations,” says Islam Watch. And just a few days ago, the first-ever Roman Catholic church was consecrated in Qatar, a Sunni Muslim state where the Wahhabi brand of Islam is practiced. This was the first time Christians in Qatar have been allowed to practice their faith openly. Ten thousand people attended the opening mass.
These conversions have not escaped the notice of Islamic leaders. In 2001, Sheikh Ahmad Al Qatanni, a leading Saudi cleric, delivered the disturbing news on Al-Jazeera: Every day, he said, “16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity . . . every year, that is six million Muslims becoming Christians . . . A tragedy has happened.” It is possible the sheikh was inflating his numbers to incite a reaction against Christianity. But clearly, something is happening.”
I’m trying to do my part. I have six head of young’uns.
Also, Christianity is growing in the most populous country in the world, BY LEAPS AND BOUNDS.
And this growth is due to VOLUNTARY CONVERSION ( not coercion ). This inspite of possible persecution people face when they convert.
See here :
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/IH07Ad03.html
Christianity finds a fulcrum in Asia
By Spengler
Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, according to a stunning report by the National Catholic Reporter’s veteran correspondent John Allen, and 200 million Chinese may comprise the world’s largest concentration of Christians by mid-century, and the largest missionary force in history. [1] If you read a single news article about China this year, make sure it is this one.
I suspect that even the most enthusiastic accounts err on the downside, and that Christianity will have become a Sino-centric religion two generations from now. China may be for the 21st century what Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and America has been during the past 200 years: the natural ground for mass evangelization. If this occurs, the world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it. Islam might defeat the western Europeans, simply by replacing their diminishing numbers with immigrants, but it will crumble beneath the challenge from the East.
China, devoured by hunger so many times in its history, now feels a spiritual hunger beneath the neon exterior of its suddenly great cities. Four hundred million Chinese on the prosperous coast have moved from poverty to affluence in a single generation, and 10 million to 15 million new migrants come from the countryside each year, the greatest movement of people in history. Despite a government stance that hovers somewhere between discouragement and persecution, more than 100 million of them have embraced a faith that regards this life as mere preparation for the next world. Given the immense effort the Chinese have devoted to achieving a tolerable life in the present world, this may seem anomalous. On the contrary: it is the great migration of peoples that prepares the ground for Christianity, just as it did during the barbarian invasions of Europe during the Middle Ages.
Last month’s murder of reverend Bae Hyung-kyu, the leader of the missionaries still held hostage by Taliban kidnappers in Afghanistan, drew world attention to the work of South Korean Christians, who make up nearly 30% of that nation’s population and send more evangelists to the world than any country except the United States. This is only a first tremor of the earthquake to come, as Chinese Christians turn their attention outward. Years ago I speculated that if Mecca ever is razed, it will be by an African army marching north; now the greatest danger to Islam is the prospect of a Chinese army marching west.
People do not live in a spiritual vacuum; where a spiritual vacuum exists, as in western Europe and the former Soviet Empire, people simply die, or fail to breed. In the traditional world, people see themselves as part of nature, unchangeable and constant, and worship their surroundings, their ancestors and themselves. When war or economics tear people away from their roots in traditional life, what once appeared constant now is shown to be ephemeral. Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society, calling individuals out of their tribes and nations to join the ekklesia, which transcends race and nation. In China, communism leveled traditional society, and erased the great Confucian idea of society as an extension of the loyalties and responsibility of families. Children informing on their parents during the Cultural Revolution put paid to that.
Now the great migrations throw into the urban melting pot a half-dozen language groups who once lived isolated from one another. Not for more than a thousand years have so many people in the same place had such good reason to view as ephemeral all that they long considered to be fixed, and to ask themselves: “What is the purpose of my life?”
The World Christian Database offers by far the largest estimate of the number of Chinese Christians at 111 million, of whom 90% are Protestant, mostly Pentecostals. Other estimates are considerably lower, but no matter; what counts is the growth rate. This uniquely American denomination, which claims the inspiration to speak in tongues like Jesus’ own disciples and to prophesy, is the world’s fastest-growing religious movement. In contrast to Catholicism, which has a very long historic presence in China but whose growth has been slow, charismatic Protestantism has found its natural element in an atmosphere of official suppression. Barred from churches, Chinese began worshipping in homes, and five major “house church” movements and countless smaller ones now minister to as many as 100 million Christians. [2] This quasi-underground movement may now exceed in adherents the 75 million members of the Chinese Communist Party; in a generation it will be the most powerful force in the country.
While the Catholic Church has worked patiently for independence from the Chinese government, which sponsors a “Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association” with government-appointed bishops, the evangelicals have no infrastructure to suppress and no hierarchy to protect. In contrast to Catholic caution, John Allen observes, “Most Pentecostals would obviously welcome being arrested less frequently, but in general they are not waiting for legal or political reform before carrying out aggressive evangelization programs.”
Allen adds:
The most audacious even dream of carrying the gospel beyond the borders of China, along the old Silk Road into the Muslim world, in a campaign known as “Back to Jerusalem”. As [Time correspondent David] Aikman explains in Jesus in Beijing, some Chinese evangelicals and Pentecostals believe that the basic movement of the gospel for the last 2,000 years has been westward: from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Europe, from Europe to America, and from America to China. Now, they believe, it’s their turn to complete the loop by carrying the gospel to Muslim lands, eventually arriving in Jerusalem. Once that happens, they believe, the gospel will have been preached to the entire world.
Aikman reports that two Protestant seminaries secretly are training missionaries for deployment in Muslim countries.
Where traditional society remains entrenched in China’s most backward regions, Islam also is expanding. At the edge of the Gobi Desert and on China’s western border with Central Asia, Islam claims perhaps 30 million adherents. If Christianity is the liquidator of traditional society, I have argued in the past, Islam is its defender against the encroachments of leveling imperial expansion. But Islam in China remains the religion of the economic losers, whose geographic remoteness isolates them from the economic transformation on the coasts. Christianity, by contrast, has burgeoned among the new middle class in China’s cities, where the greatest wealth and productivity are concentrated. Islam has a thousand-year presence in China and has grown by natural increase rather than conversion; evangelical Protestantism had almost no adherents in China a generation ago.
China’s Protestants evangelized at the risk of liberty and sometimes life, and possess a sort of fervor not seen in Christian ranks for centuries. Their pastors have been beaten and jailed, and they have had to create their own institutions through the “house church” movement. Two years ago I warned that China would have to wait for democracy. [3] I wrote:
For a people to govern itself, it first must want to govern itself and want to do so with a passion. It also must know how to do so. Democracy requires an act of faith, or rather a whole set of acts of faith. The individual citizen must believe that a representative sitting far away in the capital will listen to his views, and know how to band together with other citizens to make their views known. That is why so-called civil society, the capillary network of associations that manage the ordinary affairs of life, is so essential to democracy. Americans elect their local school boards, create volunteer fire brigades and raise and spend tax dollars at the local level to provide parks or sewers.
China’s network of house churches may turn out to be the leaven of democracy, like the radical Puritans of England who became the Congregationalists of New England. Freedom of worship is the first precondition for democracy, for it makes possible freedom of conscience. The fearless evangelists at the grassroots of China will, in the fullness of time, do more to bring US-style democracy to the world than all the nation-building bluster of President George W Bush and his advisers.
While I agree that Satan’s religion is not going to triumph any more than Satan himself will, that doesn’t mean a heck of a lot of people aren’t going to suffer and die and I think those days are coming very soon.....
Not enough people are connecting the dots - all of the awful television that brainwashes the people in the Middle East (just check on palestinianmediawatch.org) or other good sites; the mosques right here in the US where 1 out of 8 is preaching hideous anti-American propaganda; the prisoners who are converting to Islam; the baby boom that continues with the Muslims; the fact that there is a lot of money in the Middle East to finance the terrorists; and on and on....
America is asleep and apathetic. Not only are people too ignorant to vote but they are too ignorant to know what is going on or they are just complacent because they are not suffering.
Finally, while I’m on my stump, one of my biggest peeves is “Where are the men?” Why aren’t mean stepping up to the plate in our churches and synagogues and in our schools and in our communities? Where are the men? You don’t see them anywhere. I think too many men are spending way too much time with sports and other pursuits. They need to be like the watchman at the gate.
This is fantastic. Thank you for posting.
Six more and you’ll have a dozen !
They’re ‘cheaper by the dozen’ you know !
Actually, not these days.
I dunno - I’m no spring chicken. God’s been good to bless us with what we have, that’s for sure.
This is bogus.
Islam is a religion with numerous denominations from Shiites to Sufis.
Catholicism is a denomination of Christianity, which is a religion. There are many more Christians than Islamics.
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