The question of who qualifies as an evangelical and how many evangelicals exist worldwide continues to puzzle scholars, church leaders and mission researchers alike. That was the central theme of a Sept. 2 webinar hosted by the World Evangelical Alliance and released publicly Sept. 5, featuring two leading voices in global religious demography.
Dr. Gina A. Zurlo, editor of the World Christian Database and a lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, and Jason Mandryk, longtime editor of Operation World, outlined both the difficulties and the necessity of measuring a movement that is increasingly diverse and shifting rapidly toward the Global South.
Both experts agreed that unlike Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or even Pentecostalism, evangelicalism has no universally agreed-upon definition. This makes the task of counting adherents unusually complex. Yet, they stressed, reliable figures are crucial for understanding how Christianity is changing worldwide.
Mandryk opened with a blunt assessment: “There is no such thing as the evangelical.”
Data from 2 studies show evangelical Christianity’s center of gravity has shifted from the US & Europe to African, Asian & Latin American regions.
— Julie Roys (@reachjulieroys) September 10, 2025
Estimated to be approaching 1 billion globally, the evangelical population in China has now surpassed the UShttps://t.co/6B8knAxydH