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When I was a young boy, my parents bought a richly illustrated children's encyclopedia. The happy event occurred about the time that I had become old enough to enjoy exploring books on my own. Those hours soaking up all that information constitute some of my warmest early memories, and I've had a tendency to think of reference books as brain candy ever since.

Five recent reference works offer much more than mere brain candy for Christians who love data. Heavyweights in more than one sense, they retail at nearly $660 and weigh 50 pounds. You may not have the budget for these treasures, but you may want to know where to find them in your favorite public or seminary library.

The first edition of The World Christian Encyclopedia, published in 1983, enjoyed the highest praise in William M. Johnston's Recent Reference Books in Religion (InterVarsity, 1996), a magisterial, heavily annotated reference book about reference books.

The new and long-awaited second edition strives to be the definitive work in the demography of global religion. Volume One presents its worldwide findings by countries, by churches, by ministries, and by adherents. Volume Two divides by segments (religion profiles, cultures, language groups, metropolitan areas) and by topic (through a glossary and bibliography). The data appear in many tables, charts, diagrams, photographs, a directory of names and organizations, and an index.

World Christian Encyclopedia delivers an astounding mass of information. It is easy to find yourself absorbed by any one of its 1,700 pages.

This will not appeal to everyone, of course. Library Journal, for instance, has expressed impatience with the volume's overwhelming data. Some people gain energy in a library, others tire quickly. Do you enjoy discovering facts for yourself, or would you rather have them presented to you in an entertaining fashion? World Christian Encyclopedia is written by researchers for researchers. Careful interpreters will mine a vast wealth of information from this treasure.

The authors created new terminology (or adapted existing words) to describe the innovative associations made by their findings: religiometrics (the profiling of religions); cosmochronology (the chronology of world evangelism); martyrology (the demographics of Christian martyrdom); missiometrics (the science of measuring global Christian mission work); and geostrategies (identifying 1,500 global plans to evangelize the world).

Michael Jaffarian of the World Christian Encyclopedia team says that this volume represents "the first time anyone has broken down the ethno-linguistic people groups for every country of the world and supplied the related evangelistic demographics." Consequently, World Christian Encyclopedia will help researchers answer such questions as:

• Which nations send the most missionaries?—United States, 118,700; Italy, 31,500; and France and Spain, 30,500 each.
  
  
• Which nations receive the most missionaries?—United States, 33,200; Brazil, 25,000; Russia, 19,000; and France, 16,000.
  
  
• Which nations have the highest number of unique people groups?—Papua New Guinea, 861; Indonesia, 744; Nigeria, 491; and India, 439.
  
  

Asia and Africa now account for 96 percent of the world's Muslims. Of the ten countries with the most Muslims in 2000, the top six were in Asia (Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Iran, in that order) and the next four were in Africa (Egypt, Nigeria, Algeria, and Morocco). Of Islam's global growth in the 1990s, 96 percent was by natural increase (high birth rate) and only 4 percent by conversion. The corresponding figures for Christianity were 90 percent and 10 percent.

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April 22 2002, Vol. 46, No. 5