The Encyclopedia of Protestantism: Volume 2 D–K
Quantifying 45 Dimensions of Evangelism
Evangelism is the activity, individual or collective and usually organized, by which Christians set forth and spread their beliefs and practices. The quantification of evangelism boils down to measuring the various modes of contact that persons or populations have had with evangelizers. In short, it means enumerating the duration, quality, and intensity of all conversations and awareness resulting from this contact with Christians, Christianity, Jesus Christ, and the Gospel.
With the foregoing definitions and methodology in mind, we can reduce evangelism to 45 major areas or components, which are listed in Table 2. Here, we label them for shorthand purposes as “ministries.” This article provides a brief description of each of these ministries, with relevant statistics for each placed separately in the Appendix as Table 5, giving the total number of evangelism-hours per annum that each type of ministry worldwide generates, the factor by which the media multiples these hours, and the number of persons that each type of evangelism thus reaches.
These are given there as each ministry’s description, as follows:
• Evangelism-hours originated per year. This is the actual number of hours put in by evangelizers of all Protestant and associated confessions, in each type of ministry each year. For example, a part-time evangelist who preaches for one hour twice a week, each week throughout the year, originates 104 evangelism-hours per annum.
• Media factor. This is a multiplying factor representing the audience exposed to one hour of each variety of ministry.
Table 1. The origins and present ministries of evangelism in (a) Christ's Great Commission, and (b) the richest biblical word Evangelize!
