← The Unfinished Mission
Contents · 39 / 41
  1. Copyright and Edition Notice
  2. Introduction: The Mission That Is Not Finished
  3. The Mission
  4. The God Who Sends
  5. Blessed for the Nations
  6. Jesus and the Nations
  7. From Jerusalem to the Ends of the Earth
  8. What Does It Mean for the Mission to Be “Finished”?
  9. How Christianity Became Global
  10. From Apostles to a World Faith
  11. Mission, Empire, and the Modern Missionary Movement
  12. Christianity Moves South and East
  13. From “The West to the Rest” to “Everywhere to Everywhere”
  14. Mapping the Unfinished Mission
  15. What Does “Unreached” Actually Mean?
  16. Where Gospel Access Remains Least
  17. The Many Muslim Worlds
  18. South Asia: Religion, Caste, and Community
  19. Beyond the Religious Label
  20. The Secular and Post-Christian Frontier
  21. The Language and Scripture Frontier
  22. Cities, Migration, and the Moving Mission Field
  23. Why the Gaps Persist
  24. The Allocation Problem
  25. The Hard Places
  26. The Distance Problem
  27. When Mission Becomes Peripheral
  28. The Calling Question
  29. The Problem of Short Horizons
  30. When Mission Goes Wrong
  31. What Faithful Mission Requires Now
  32. The Local Church as the Missionary Horizon
  33. Contextualization: Faithful Gospel, Local Form
  34. Local Ownership and Global Partnership
  35. Missionary Formation and Member Care
  36. New Pathways Into the Missionary World
  37. The Whole Church and the Unfinished Mission
  38. Conclusion: Faithful Until the End
  39. Methodological Note: Statistics, Categories, and Source Freeze
  40. Glossary
  41. Selected Bibliography

Publication

Methodological Note: Statistics, Categories, and Source Freeze

~2 min read

This book combines biblical theology, mission history, contemporary demographic research, religious-freedom reporting, people-group databases, Scripture-access statistics, and missiological scholarship. Those sources answer different questions and should not be merged as though they describe one variable.

Religious-demography estimates describe affiliation under a source’s stated methodology. Pew Research Center’s 2025 global reconstruction, for example, estimates the religious composition of 2020 using censuses, surveys, registers, and related sources. World Christian Database uses a different modeled system and broader Christian categories. Their totals are therefore not interchangeable.

People-group databases are strategic research systems. Joshua Project and PeopleGroups.org use related but nonidentical definitions, counting systems, thresholds, and engagement categories. A people-group total is not a census of naturally bounded human units. Counts can change because populations change, because research improves, or because the classification system changes.

Gospel-access language in this book is analytical rather than a claim to direct measurement of individual spiritual opportunity. Informational, linguistic, relational, and ecclesial access are distinct dimensions, modified by factors such as legal freedom, social cost, geography, class, caste, migration, and digital surveillance. The book intentionally does not combine them into a single numerical score.

Persecution and religious-restriction sources also use different objects of measurement. Pew’s Government Restrictions Index and Social Hostilities Index describe country-level restrictions involving religion generally. USCIRF makes policy recommendations under U.S. statutory categories. Open Doors’ World Watch List measures pressure and violence experienced by Christians under its own methodology. These sources can illuminate the same environment without being equivalent datasets.

Scripture-access statistics are dynamic. Wycliffe Global Alliance and ProgressBible distinguish languages with at least some Scripture, languages with work in progress, and languages where work still needs to begin. Availability does not by itself measure comprehension, use, engagement, or ecclesial maturity.

The final volatile-data source freeze for this edition is 22 August 2026. Historical arguments do not depend on that date, but live counts and policy lists should be rechecked before any later edition or reprint. Rounded figures are preferred where methodological uncertainty is larger than the apparent precision of the underlying number.

The governing editorial rule is simple: a statistic may direct attention, but it must not pretend to know more than its source can measure.