Jesus’s influence does not lie mainly in the past. Today a greater percentage of the world’s population than ever before is Christian, and Christianity adds to its ranks over fifty thousand persons a day, or just under nineteen million new people a year.3 Even in its beginnings, the movement of Jesus followers spread out in all directions outward from its Middle Eastern origins, not only to Europe but also to North Africa, to Turkey and Armenia, to Persia and India. “Christianity was a world religion long before it was a European one.”4 And today again, as we saw in chapter 7, Christianity is
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