World Christian Encyclopedia
- World Christian Encyclopedia
"World Christian Encyclopedia" is a reference work published by Oxford University Press, known for providing membership statistics for major and minor world religions in every country of the world, including historical data and projections of future populations.
The first edition, by David B. Barrett, was published in 1982. The second edition (ISBN 978-0195079630), by Barrett, George Thomas Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, was published in 2001. The research team was originally based in Nairobi, Kenya, and later relocated to Richmond, Virginia. [cite journal |last=Garrison |first=David |year=2004 |month=Fall |title=Church Planting Movements: The Next Wave? |journal=International Journal of Frontier Missions |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=118 |url=http://www.ijfm.org/PDFs_IJFM/21_3_PDFs/118_Garrison.pdf |accessdate= 2007-11-28]
Despite the name, the encyclopedia includes membership data for numerous non-Christian religions. However, the work has been described as serving as "an informational undergirding for Christian missionary work". [cite news |first=Richard N |last=Ostling |title=Researcher tabulates world's believers |work= |publisher=Associated Press |date=2001-05-19 |accessdate=2007-11-28 |url=http://www.adherents.com/misc/WCE.html]
The data incorporated into the "World Christian Encyclopedia" have been made available online at the [http://worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/about/more.asp World Christian Database] . While controversial in some respects, the results have been studied and found "highly correlated with other sources of data" but "consistently gave a higher estimate for percent Christian in comparison to other cross-national data sets" according to one study. [Citation
last = Hsu
first = Becky
last2 = Reynolds
first2 = Amy
last3 = Hackett
first3 = Conrad
last4 = Gibbon
first4 = James
title = Estimating the Religious Composition of All Nations
journal = Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
year = (accepted for publication) December 2008
url = http://www.princeton.edu/~bhsu/Hsu%20et%20al%20JSSR%202008.pdf
doi =
id = ]
References
External links
*Richard N. Ostling, " [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,953480,00.html Counting Every Soul on Earth] ", "Time", 1982-05-03.
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