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.
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".
The data incorporated into the World Christian Encyclopedia have been made available online at the World Christian Database (WCD). One study found that the WCD's data was "highly correlated with other sources that offer cross-national religious composition estimates" but the database "consistently gives a higher estimate for percent Christian in comparison to other cross-national data sets".
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or christian:
“It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.”
—William Golding (b. 1911)
“If you are well off and can afford to spend ten or twenty-five dollars a day to hire some patient soul to listen to your troubles you can be readjusted to the crazy scheme of things and spare yourself the humiliation of becoming a Christian Scientist. You can have your ego trimmed or removed, as you wish, just like a wart or bunion.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)