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CHRISTIANITY EXPLODING WORLDWIDE; 3RD WORLD SENDING MISSIONARIES [V ENCOURAGING DOC]
ANDREW STROM VIA MERI BURLINGAME EMAIL LIST ^ | 28 APR 2005 | WORLD NET DAILY

Posted on 05/04/2005 10:53:04 AM PDT by Quix

"CHRISTIANITY EXPLODING Worldwide"

"THIRD WORLD sending MISSIONARIES"

[from 'WorldNetDaily'- http://www.worldnetdaily.com ]

Christianity taking over planet?

New book makes case it's fastest growing faith on Earth.

[-April 28, 2005 © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com ]

What is the fastest-growing religion on Earth?

Most news reports suggest it is Islam.

But a new book makes a compelling case it is a new, or, perhaps, old form of biblically inspired evangelical Christianity that is sweeping through places like China, Africa, India and Southeast Asia.

In "Megashift," author Jim Rutz coins a new phrase to define this fast-growing segment of the population. He calls them "core apostolics" - or "the new saints who are at the heart of the mushrooming kingdom of God."

Rutz makes the point that Christianity is overlooked as the fastest-growing faith in the world because most surveys look at the traditional Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic Church while ignoring Christian believers who have no part of either.

He says there are 707 million "switched-on disciples" who fit into this new category and that this "church" is exploding in growth.

"The growing core of Christianity crosses theological lines and includes 707 million born-again people who are increasing by 8 percent a year," he says.

So fast is this group growing that, under current trends, according to Rutz, the entire world will be composed of such believers by the year 2032.

"There will be pockets of resistance and unforeseen breakthroughs," writes Rutz. "Still, at the rate we're growing now, to be comically precise, there would be more Christians than people by the autumn of 2032, about 8.2 billion."

According to the author, until 1960, Western evangelicals out-numbered non-Western evangelicals - mostly Latinos, blacks and Asians - by two to one. As of 2000, non-Western evangelicals outnumbered Westerners by four to one. He says by 2010, the ratio will be seven to one.

"There are now more missionaries sent from non-Western nations than Western nations," he writes.

This trend, says Rutz, has been missed by Westerners because the explosive growth is elsewhere.

Hundreds of millions of these Christians are simply not associated with the institutional churches at all. They meet in homes. They meet underground. They meet in caves. They meet, he says, in secret.

And what is driving this movement?

Miracles, he says.

"Megashift" attempts to document myriad healings and other powerful answers to the sincere prayers of this new category of believer, including, believe it or not, hundreds of dramatic cases of resurrections - not near-death experiences, but real resurrections of actual corpses.

"When I was a kid in Sunday school, I was really impressed that 3,000 people were saved on the Day of Pentecost," he writes. "I thought, 'Wow, that'll never happen again!"

But, Rutz says, it now happens around the globe every 25 minutes.

"By tomorrow, there will be 175,000 more Christians than there are today," he writes.

The essence of Rutz's book is about how Western Christians can tap into what he sees as a mighty work of God on Earth.

"Very few people realize the nature of life on Earth is going through a major change," he writes. "We are seeing a megashift in the basic direction of human history. Until our time, the ancient war between good and evil was hardly better than a stalemate. Now all has changed. The Creator whose epic story flows through the pages of Scripture has begun to dissolve the strongholds of evil. This new drama is being played out every hour around the globe, accompanied sometimes by mind-bending miracles."

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TOPICS: Activism; Catholic; Charismatic Christian; Current Events; Evangelical Christian; General Discusssion; History; Mainline Protestant; Ministry/Outreach; Moral Issues; Other Christian; Prayer; Religion & Culture; Religion & Politics; Religion & Science; Theology; Worship
KEYWORDS: 3rdworld; appliedbible; christianexplosion; christianity; holyspirit; miracles; missionaries; ntchristianity
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To: mike182d

Dear Mike, it's not a problem for me. I take it as the truth. I don't examine it intellectually but I have faith that what it says is what it means.


141 posted on 05/09/2005 11:00:03 AM PDT by Marysecretary (Thank you, Lord, for FOUR MORE YEARS!!!)
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To: Quix
I wonder what God thinks of your throwing rocks at their Christianity.

Actually, that's not true. I don't wonder what God thinks about it.

A lot of people have invested their lives in an extreme form of pre-millenialism that denies the gospel any power anwhere other than between the ears of the individual believer. Frequently failures in their own lives, such folks can only take a sour satisfaction in selected factoids that reinforce their sense of being spectators at history's train wreck. Like the drawrves in C. S. Lewis's book The Last Battle, they are blind to wonders of grace all around them. Immune to good news of God's gracious interventions. Convinced that wholesome fare is stable dung.

142 posted on 05/09/2005 11:04:42 AM PDT by TomSmedley (Calvinist, optimist, home schooling dad, exuberant husband, technical writer)
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To: TomSmedley

Perhaps so.

Not my experience to run into many of those folks for some reason.

I don't even cater to naysayers on my side of the theological spectrum.


143 posted on 05/09/2005 11:13:13 AM PDT by Quix (LOVE NEVER FAILS.)
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To: mike182d

You'll have to ask them, my friend. But protestants and born again Christians don't believe you have to eat his flesh and blood in order to have enternal life. Christ died for our sins and Christ only can forgive us our sins. I don't need to go through a man to have that done. I can confess my sins to someone else, I suppose, but s/he doesn't have the power to forgive them. Only Christ can do that. I know you believe Peter was the first Pope but most of the protestants I know do not. We disagree on so many things. Too bad.


144 posted on 05/09/2005 11:36:49 AM PDT by Marysecretary (Thank you, Lord, for FOUR MORE YEARS!!!)
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To: Salvation

Thanks, Salvation. I know I can't change anyone's mind but....M


145 posted on 05/09/2005 11:39:20 AM PDT by Marysecretary (Thank you, Lord, for FOUR MORE YEARS!!!)
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To: Marysecretary

Sorry for all the burps! My machine is slllllooooowwwwww today. And I'm impatient (smile).


146 posted on 05/09/2005 11:42:00 AM PDT by Marysecretary (Thank you, Lord, for FOUR MORE YEARS!!!)
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To: JockoManning

bookmark


147 posted on 05/13/2005 1:33:02 PM PDT by JockoManning (www.biblegateway.com)
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To: JockoManning

Off Topic

Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find
They're blind to own failings, others' skills

Erica Goode, New York Times





There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent. On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well. ``I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn't know it,'' Dunning said. One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence. The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. ``Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,'' wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning. This deficiency in ``self-monitoring skills,'' the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market -- and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.


In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to ``grossly overestimate'' how well they had performed. In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates. Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile. Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to ``identify grammatically correct standard English,'' and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile. On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects' ratings were matched against those of an ``expert'' panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers said, the results were less conclusive. Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were -- a phenomenon psychologists term the ``false consensus effect.'' When high-scoring subjects were asked to ``grade'' the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities. ``Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,'' the researchers concluded. In a final experiment, Dunning and Kruger set out to discover if training would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable subjects. In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance realistically, they found.


The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's assertion that ``he who knows best knows how little he knows.'' And the research meshes neatly with other work indicating that overconfidence is common; studies have found, for example, that the vast majority of people rate themselves as ``above average'' on a wide array of abilities -- though such an abundance of talent would be impossible in statistical terms. This overestimation, studies indicate, is more likely for tasks that are difficult than for those that are easy. Such studies are not without critics. Dr. David C. Funder, a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside, for example, said he suspects that most lay people have only a vague idea of the meaning of ``average'' in statistical terms. ``I'm not sure the average person thinks of `average' or `percentile' in quite that literal a sense,'' Funder said, ``so `above average' might mean to them `pretty good,' or `OK,' or `doing all right.' And if, in fact, people mean something subjective when they use the word, then it's really hard to evaluate whether they're right or wrong, using the statistical criterion.'' But Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated there are many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their competency and not be aware of it. In various situations, feedback is absent, or at least ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite laughter. And faced with incompetence, social norms prevent most people from blurting out ``You stink!'' -- truthful though this assessment may be.


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/18/MN73840.DTL

###


148 posted on 05/17/2005 3:06:43 PM PDT by JockoManning (www.biblegateway.com)
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To: JockoManning

Marker.


149 posted on 08/23/2005 8:53:09 PM PDT by JockoManning (http://www.biblegateway.com)
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