At the last IMB Trustee Meeting, the following new information was reported:
— engaged a total of 1,170 people groups worldwide, three-quarters of whom are classified by mission researchers as unreached (less than 2 percent of the population claiming evangelical Christian faith).
— engaged for the first time 104 people groups, 73 of whom are unreached, with a combined population of nearly 100 million.
— engaged 120 unreached urban centers, including 12 for the first time.
— started 23,486 churches and more than 10,600 "outreach groups" (potential future churches). That brought total partner churches worldwide to 135,252, with a combined membership of 8.8 million, and outreach groups to 55,723.
— baptized 475,072 new believers – about 1,300 each day or one each minute.
— involved nearly 510,000 new believers in discipleship training, in addition to more than 1.1 million existing church members in discipleship groups. Those are "solid indicators showing the excitement and hunger for the Word of God," Holste said. "As people are introduced to the Bible and come to know Christ, they are baptized and nearly all are discipled in their first year of Christian growth. For the first time in our reporting history, the number of church members in discipleship training has risen above the 1 million mark."
— trained more than 150,000 Christian leaders in nonresidential settings (extension and correspondence course, short-term courses, on-the-job training) and more than 20,000 in residential pastoral programs.
— worked with 1,772 international missionaries sent out by overseas Baptist partners to other people groups and 3,400 home missionaries reaching out to people groups within their own countries.
You can learn more at http://www.imb.org/core/story.asp?StoryID=4818&LanguageID=1709