A friend’s post recently got me thinking. She mentioned something that was very personal and dear to her heart, and some people actually took the time to respond back with complaints and negative comments about her post! I was shocked. But on the other hand, I also see people throw out empty, superficially nice comments with no real thought or meaning behind them. And we begin to thrive on those artificial likes. Overall, we have become a world of detached carelessness. We have lots of information at our fingertips but not so much wisdom or care. Those are things that can’t be googled or measured in the number of likes. One of my all-time favorite book quotes comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, “The Great Gatsby”. It was true 100 years ago and is still true today.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Recently I won a book in a raffle, called “Operation World, The Definitive Prayer Guide To Every Nation.” I figured God gave it to me for a reason, and the most obvious reason being to help pray for our world. The book has statistics and facts on every country in our world with a prayer guide for the year. So I’m going to try it. I plan to earnestly pray and care for the people in every country of our world – people just like you and me. We are all someone’s mother or husband, son or daughter or friend. We all matter individually and we all matter to God. Every one of us.
I hope you will follow along with me this year to learn a little about each country and something we can all do, which is to pray. Prayer is our direct communication with our Heavenly Father, and He hears us and listens to us, and in the process, it can change our hearts and others.
Here’s a few facts about our world to get started:
- The population of our world is a little over 7 billion and is anticipated to be 8 billion by 2030. For comparison, the population was only 2.5 billion in 1950 (which seems to contradict the argument from some that the world could not have been populated so quickly after Noah and the Flood).
- There are 16,350 distinct people groups and 6,909 languages spoken in the world. A third of these languages do not have any Bible translation.
- The largest religion is Christianity at 32%, then Muslim at 23% and then Hindu and Non-religious both at 14%. Jews are only .21%. (This is the remnant that God has always promised us, and they will be significant in leading the world during the End Times.)
- The world’s religions are leveling out. While Christianity used to be the biggest religion, by as early as 2030, the trend shows it will be decreasing while other major religions are increasing and evenly spreading among the population. Still, one-third of the population is not measured by any major religion.
- Catholicism is the largest Christian religion at 15% followed by Protestant at 7%. However, there has been recent dramatic growth in the post-denominational church, which has a variety of Christian beliefs and practices though it is still mainly evangelical. Evangelicals have been the driving force of the revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries and the expansion of non-Western Christianity.
God seems to be moving once again in the evangelical church, just in a different way. Perhaps we are coming back to the roots of the early churches and the original Apostle missionaries and early pastors of Peter, Paul, James, John and Timothy. We can only pray, and spread the hope to our world. I hope you will join me.
