While all this should be encouraging news for believers in the U.S., numerous difficulties will confront Christians in the Global South over the next half century.

One of the most obvious challenges will be the sheer enormity of the unfinished task of fulfilling the Great Commission. "The growth of Christianity in the last two decades has been nothing short of miraculous," says Elisabeth Farrell, co-author of China: The Hidden Miracle. "Yet a whopping two-thirds of the world's population -- 3 billion people -- remains unreached."

As many missionary-minded believers know, a staggering 95% of these unreached people live in an area called "the 10/40 Window," which Farrell describes as "an imaginary rectangle between the 10th and 40th parallels north, stretching from Africa to Japan."

Part of the problem, Farrell suggests, is that 95% of missions' budgets apportion resources for areas outside the 10/40 Window. That represents a potentially disastrous -- or, at the very least, shortsighted -- misallocation of finances.

However, part of the reason for this lack of emphasis on the 10/40 Window is that there is, quite simply, tremendous resistance to the gospel there. Jenkins says that "the historically Muslim lands into which Christian missions have never penetrated ... remain impervious."

From a spiritual standpoint, one can see why the resistance is so strong in these nations: Farrell says "[a]ll the world's major non-Christian religions were founded there: Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Shintoism and Taoism."

Islam, however, will be Christianity's major religious competitor for the foreseeable future. By 2020, Jenkins says "Christianity will still have a massive lead [over Islam in terms of adherents], and will maintain its position into the foreseeable future. By 2050, there should still be about three Christians for every two Muslims worldwide. Some 34% of the world's people will then be Christian ...."

Nevertheless, Christianity and Islam will both prove themselves to be vigorous religions. "Muslim and Christian nations will expand adjacent to each other," says Jenkins, "and often, Muslim and Christian communities will both grow within the same country .... [W]e face the likelihood that population growth will be accompanied by intensified rivalry, by struggles for converts, by competing attempts to enforce moral codes by means of secular law. Whether Muslim or Christian, religious zeal can easily turn into fanaticism. Such struggles might well provoke civil wars, which could in turn become international conflicts."

The threat to humanity posed by potential religious wars between the two faiths could be, he added, horrifying, producing "a new age of Christian crusades and Muslim jihads. Imagine the world of the thirteenth century armed with nuclear warheads and anthrax."

The danger of persecution is no less acute. Jenkins says, "Even if the dominant religion is generally tolerant, it only takes an outbreak of fanaticism every half-century or so to devastate or uproot a minority, and that has been the fate of religious minorities across the Middle East in recent years. Although Christian communities survive across the region, their numbers are a pathetic shadow of what they were even in 1850, and whole peoples have been obliterated since that time."

Within the 10/40 Window, such troubles will probably continue for decades to come, perhaps squashing attempts to gain a solid Christian foothold in Muslim countries. In Pakistan, for example, a 1986 law subjects a citizen to the death penalty or life imprisonment if he "directly or indirectly by word, gesture, innuendo, or otherwise defiles the name of the holy prophet Muhammad."

"These laws," Jenkins says, "offer a potential death sentence for anyone evangelizing Muslims, or even considering conversion, and several Christians have been condemned to death for related offenses."

In nations like Pakistan, it is not uncommon for periodic outbreaks of riots and violence to occur against the minority Christian populace. Here, murder and rape are dangers that believers live with daily.

In Sudan, the Muslim government's attempt to subjugate Christians has led to almost indescribable persecution. According to the U.S. State Department Annual Report on Religious Freedom 2000, Muslim persecution has included "indiscriminate bombings, the burning and looting of villages, and the killings, abductions, rapes, and arbitrary arrests and detentions of civilians."

Nevertheless, for the Great Commission to be fulfilled, the 10/40 Window is where the Gospel will have to go. Can the churches of the West produce the necessary missionaries to accomplish this task? After all, Christians in Europe, North America and Oceania already have their hands full with spiritual problems at home: they are stinging from cultural setbacks over the last 50 years on issues ranging from abortion to homosexuality, and fighting to keep secularism from capturing even larger swaths of the populace.

It might be an odd concept, but missionaries to the 10/40 Window may very well come -- in fact, may have to come -- from the Global South.

Such nonwhite missionaries may even show up on our shores. As Veith muses, "What we need now are missionaries from Africa to convert the heathen in Europe and America."

Stranger things have happened.

© Agape Press. All rights reserved. Used with permission.