Numbers have always been a part of the modern missionary enterprise. In fact, missionaries could be considered among the first of what we would now call social scientists.1 Highly educated, cross-cultural missionaries all over the world gathered data on religion, conducted population surveys, and reported findings to their home base of support. Data on religion served as measurements of success or failure as well as motivation for starting new missions. Part of their work was counting missionary personnel – tracking how many missionaries served abroad and keeping records of their activities. This article presents historical snapshots of quantification of Christian missionaries from the 19th century to today, with a focus on gender. Historical statistical efforts included separate counts of men and women in mission, but since the mid-20th century the overall task of counting missionaries has become convoluted and the gender variable has been overlooked. Christianity’s demographic shift to the global South has complexified the question of “who is a missionary” as new missiological models emerge from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific Islands. The connection of mission and migration adds yet another layer. These, and other, factors have contributed to a crisis in data availability. It is much harder to count missionaries now compared to a hundred years ago, which makes it nearly impossible to answer the question: how many missionaries today are women?

Quantifying Mission

For hundreds of years the Roman Catholic Church has maintained an impressive data collection enterprise with Annuario Pontificio, the statistical annual released by the Vatican every year (first edition in 1720), and Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae from the Central Statistics Office of the Church. These two texts include data on personnel in the Holy See as well as complete lists of all Catholic dioceses in the world, including data on congregations, women religious, mission stations, Catholic populations, seminarians, educational institutes, priests, baptisms, and marriages. Together, Annuario Pontificio and Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae provide a comprehensive demographic overview of the status of the Roman Catholic Church and represent one of the most organized efforts to quantify a religion in the world today. Data collection began with missionaries like the Jesuits who prioritized detailed record-keeping as part of their overseas responsibilities. These men produced documents that informed scholarship to help shed light on the cultural and social history of indigenous populations. Missionaries collected data on vital statistics, Catholic personnel, and other administrative information. Often these data were in the context of much larger works that recorded the history of missions in a region.

Data in Protestant mission had a slightly different function, where missionaries produced social scientific information for garnering support for the evangelization of non-Christian populations overseas. Missionaries and mission administrators described Christianity in numerical relationship to other religions to make converts and raise up more missionaries to serve abroad. The literature compared global missionary statistics in surveys, atlases, encyclopedias, and dictionaries with estimates for Christian adherents, missionaries, converts, clergy, and other personnel. These turn-of-the-century works were the historical catalyst for launching an entire discipline of missionary surveys and statistics.

British missionary William Carey (1761–1834) produced quantitative data on religion to encourage – or perhaps shame – Protestants to engage more fully in global missions. His 1792 book, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, set the stage for the development of the modern Protestant missionary movement.2 Carey did not provide specific estimates for the number of missionaries in the world, though he did present one of the earliest quantitative surveys of religion worldwide for Christians, Jews, “Mahometans,” and “Pagans.” He critiqued Jesuit missions in China and Japan for their “reverence” of Confucius and mused that Asian interactions with Catholic missionaries in fact worsened, not bettered, their situation.3 He chided Greek and Armenian Christians as “ignorant and vicious” as Muslims; Lutherans in Denmark were ignorant hypocrites.4 He held that Christians of his time did not take up the evangelistic task with the same zeal as New Testament Christians. Carey made no explicit mention of women in this document and appears to assume that the missionary task is reserved for men. An Enquiry is clearly a product of its historical time but nevertheless set the stage for number-crunching in Protestant missions, which became a significant aspect of the growing worldwide mission enterprise in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In the United States, James S. Dennis (1842–1914) was the premier missionary statistician of the turn of the 20th century.5 The supplement to his three-volume Christian Missions and Social Progress (1899–1906) was a comprehensive collection of carefully tabulated statistics of societies engaged in foreign missions, including figures on educational activities, literacy, medicine, and missionary training institutions.6 He commented that foreign missions required unique and personal commitment from both men and women, and included data on missionary wives as foreign staff in their own right, not as auxiliaries to men. Harlan P. Beach (1854–1933) made further contributions to quantifying Protestant mission with a vast collection of maps and atlases, including A Geography and Atlas of Protestant Missions: Their Environment, Forces, Distribution, Methods (1901–1903), which included detailed information on mission stations worldwide from hundreds of U.S. societies with descriptions of their work, numbers of foreign missionaries, indigenous missionaries, and missionary wives.7 Beach was editor of the Statistical Atlas of Christian Missions (1910) as a member of the Edinburgh 1910 Continuation Committee’s sub-committee on missionary statistics. He also edited the World Atlas of Christian Missions (1911) and World Statistics of Christian Mission (1916).8 The 1910 Statistical Atlas of Christian Mission included a map with tiny red dots indicating Protestant mission stations around the globe.

British missionary statistician David B. Barrett (1927–2011) compiled the most comprehensive global assessment of religious affiliation to date and published his results in the World Christian Encyclopedia (1982), which contained an analysis of Christian affiliation at the denominational level in each country. For the first time, all of the world’s Christians were quantified and included together in a single book, featuring new African Christian movements, among which Barrett lived and worked in Kenya. He reported 249,000 “foreign missionaries and personnel” plus an additional 32,500 “Third-World” foreign missionaries worldwide.9 Building off the work of Dennis, Beach, and others, Barrett observed a decline in missionary sending from Europe and North America (particularly Catholics), and increases from global South countries, commenting on the latter: “They are rapidly increasing each year in numbers and in the geographical extent of their service.”10 Yet, despite years of collecting and analyzing data, travel to 212 countries, and creating formulas to measure the extent of evangelization worldwide, Barrett neglected to include a gender variable in his analyses – especially ironic and unfortunate since gender was a prominent variable in missionary statistics dating to the 19th century. Data on the gender makeup of religious communities and mission societies was admittedly difficult to obtain but so was nearly all the data Barrett collected during the 13-year production of the World Christian Encyclopedia. While he was the first to attempt quantification of missionary sending from the “younger” churches of the global South, he dropped the gender variable entirely.11

Quantifying Women in World Christianity

The contemporary home of Barrett’s research legacy, the team behind the World Christian Database, sought to remedy the omission of gender in the third edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia, which made efforts to feature women in the narrative of World Christianity.12 The Encyclopedia includes examples of highly organized women’s movements worldwide and describes women who provide education, combat HIV/AIDS, advocate for women’s rights, and serve their congregations and local communities to ensure their survival and flourishing. This research sparked increased interest in the role of women in churches around the world and the desire to include, for the first time, a gender variable in the World Christian Database. As a result, the Women in World Christianity Project produced a dataset of the gender makeup of every Christian denomination in every country of the world.13 The project revealed that global church membership is 52% female, and that Mongolia reports the highest share of Christian women (63%). Although this study was innovative, it was severely limited by a lack of available data. Christian organizations collect all kinds of information on their members and activities on a regular basis, ranging from how many people attend services to the size of their social media following. Yet, those churches, denominations, and Christian networks either do not collect data on gender at all, or they do not publicly report it. Significant discrepancies exist between data obtained from government censuses and data sourced from religious communities. While a census might report that Presbyterians, for example, are 52% women, data from the Presbyterians themselves (if available) are typically much higher, upward of 70%. Consider the following statements from qualitative research on gender in congregational life in West Africa:

• On the Catholic Church in Benin: “Women are very active in the Church, [she boasted]. For instance, women are the majority in Church attendance everywhere. Women do everything! Coming to the Church, you will find out that the population of women is greater. Women could be about 80%, while men would be something like 20% in attendance.”14
• On the Church of Pentecost among the Birifor people: “A high percentage of the church members are women. We cannot know the number, but what we can say is that when you go to a place and there are five men, women would be more than 30. So women outnumber men. Everywhere women outnumber men. It is not even among the Birifor alone, but in the whole Church of Pentecost, women outnumber men.”15
• On the Catholic Church in Cameroon: Sr. Anastasie Bekono of the Servants of the Holy Heart of Mary stated, “Yes. Women are part of the church. You can see that at the church services, all the contributions women make. As a matter of fact, at Sunday Mass you generally see many more women than men. They pray, they’re very active in the church, they give their time and services to the church.”16

World Christianity is certainly far more female than 52%, but there is not enough quantitative data like these examples by country nor denomination to show the true gender gap.

Quantifying Women in Mission

In her landmark work American Women in Mission (1997), Dana Robert made two quantitative statements about women in mission history.17 First, she estimated that 60% of the American mission force in 1890 was female. Second, she stated that in the 20th century, without women, there would have been no faith missions because women outnumbered men two to one.18 These statements were both passing comments, brief mentions to provide the reader with a sense of scope regarding women’s impact on American missions. Women were not just excellent fundraisers, creative communicators of the gospel, and highly effective teachers, nurses, and evangelists. They were also the majority! It is still a common refrain today that women make up the majority of missionaries – both American and global – but there is even less data now to back up that claim than what Robert used to make her statements in the 1990s.

As seen above, quantitative researchers of the early-20th-century Western missionary movement like James Dennis and Harlan Beach paid attention to gender. They included multiple gender variables in their analyses, typically reporting on missionary physicians with separate categories for men and women, male lay missionaries, married women missionaries, unmarried women missionaries, and other kinds of women missionaries. In 1902, James Dennis included data on 134 US mission organizations in his Centennial Survey of Foreign Missions. He reported 5,588 total foreign missionaries, 64% of whom were women. Harlan Beach’s 1903 statistical atlas covered 318 US societies, reporting 3,344 women missionaries, 57% of all American missionaries. The 1910 Statistical Atlas of Christian Mission included 170 U.S. and Canadian missionary sending bodies, consisting of 3,924 women, or 59% of all missionaries. Dana Robert scoured these and other similar sources to arrive at her figure of 60% female for the American missionary movement at the turn of the century.

No researcher has completed a comprehensive study of the percentage share of women in mission today. It is more difficult to do this kind of research now than it was at the turn of the 20th century because of the decline of Catholic and mainline Protestant missionary sending and the rise of Independent, Evangelical, and Pentecostal/Charismatic missions. The less tied to institutions, the harder it is to track. Christianity’s demographic shift to the global South has also made counting more difficult. Earlier generations of researchers could simply read annual reports of Western sending bodies and tally up personnel records. That is not possible anymore with the proliferation of mission societies worldwide. Missionaries are no longer sent from the West to the rest; they are from everywhere to everywhere. It is beyond the scope of any researcher to contact every single missionary sending body in the world and add up their personnel counts.

Furthermore, who is a missionary in the 21st century? The definition of “mission” has changed dramatically over the last 100 years. The delegates of the Edinburgh 1910 World Missionary Conference could not have foreseen the explosion of short-term mission, massive migration movements, nor models like business as mission and digital mission. To be a missionary was to be funded and sent by a church or denominational board to engage in full-time church planting and ministry in another country. Four categories of potential missionaries give a sense of scope and complexity to missions today. The first category is Christians in diaspora, many of whom engage in some kind of ministry in their host countries. The World Christian Database reports figures for Christians on the move via its ethnolinguistic peoples database and some scholars have made assumptions regarding the connection between missions and migration.19 Measuring mission by this approach can provide estimates for Christians working abroad but it raises questions as to whether each of these Christians can be appropriately considered a missionary. Furthermore, the gender variable is difficult for this category. An estimated 47% of migrants worldwide are Christians,20 48% of migrants are women,21 and 52% of Christians are women.22 But it is unknown what share of migrants are Christian women.

The second category is organizational missionary sending, such as from the Roman Catholic Church, the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as sending from mission organizations such as Frontier Ventures and Ethnos360.23 However, as discussed above, it is not possible to contact every single missionary sending organization in the world and assemble their statistics to create national, regional, and global totals. It is simply too large a task. One method could be to choose an organization as a representative of sorts for a particular country or region, but that would indeed be painting with a very broad brush and only provide a glimpse of the reality.

The third category is individual congregational missionary sending, which is the least trackable but likely makes up a large portion of sending worldwide. This is sending from churches, not through a mission organization or denomination, that is largely “off the map” from researchers. There are over four million congregations worldwide, and many commission missionaries independently of an outside body.

The final category is what has historically been called “national workers” or “home missionaries,” defined as Christians working cross-culturally within their own countries, such as South Indians working in North India or Nigerian Christians from the South working among Muslims in the North. Appropriate critiques have been raised as to how different this kind of missionary work is compared to someone arriving from another country, but the one coming from abroad is called a “missionary” and the local Christian a “national worker” or “evangelist” – though each doing the same work, and the local arguably more efficiently and effectively. The World Christian Encyclopedia (2019) reported 425,000 missionaries worldwide – foreigners crossing geo-political boundaries. Yet, it also reported 13 million national workers – indigenous evangelists doing mission in their own country.24 The questions about quantifying foreign mission seem less relevant considering most of the work of spreading the Christian message worldwide is undertaken by local evangelists, missionaries, ministers, and volunteers in their own contexts.

The second, third, and fourth categories of missionary described here also suffer from a data problem: there is not enough data, the data that do exist is extremely difficult to obtain and collate, and most of it does not include gender. For example, the largest data collection for North American missions is organized by Missio Nexus, who released the last print edition of the North American Mission Handbook in 2017 and switched to online reporting in 2021.25 The 2017 handbook included 992 Protestant missionary-sending organizations in the United States and Canada, but the 2021 data only included 367 organizations, reflecting the increased difficulty in data collection. For each sending organization, the online members-only directory contains information on date of founding, previous names, denominational affiliation, primary activities, total income, number and kinds of staff, and years of service (short vs. long-term workers). The public database does not contain a gender variable. In 2021, Missio Nexus reported 36,323 long-term missionaries (defined as at least two years), 53% of whom are women, with a much higher proportion of women among single missionaries, 74% female vs. 26% male. Conversations with personnel at Missio Nexus revealed difficulties in data collection: (1) gender has not been traditionally included in past mission handbooks (published since 1953); (2) today, only some organizations provide gender data (that is, the above figures are incomplete); and (3) those that do track gender, tend to do so only for single missionaries. For married couples, usually only the husband is considered the employee, not his wife.

Here are some other snippets of data on missionary sending. These data are a combination of publicly available information, which is usually the number of missionaries and within how many countries they work. For the gender estimates, data was gathered via contacts in each organization unless otherwise cited. The gender makeup of leadership was calculated from their websites.26 Each organization uses different terminology, definitions, and sources, which makes comparison difficult.

SIM International (formerly Sudan Interior Mission)

• 2,059 “missionary workers” in 70 countries; 56% female
• Leadership: 57% female

All Nations

• 300 “missionary field workers” in 44 countries; 50% female
• Leadership: 62% female27

International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention

• 3,526 “field personnel” in 21 countries; 54% female
• Leadership: 13% female

Roman Catholic Church, via United States Catholic Mission Association28

• 674 “missionaries,” 54% female
• Leadership: 50% female

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

• 54,539 “missionaries” in 411 missions;29 33% female, up from 17% female in 200230
• Leadership: 100% male31

The data could be perceived as somewhat surprising, given the historical trends of women in mission (at least 60%). While each of these organizations (except Latter-day Saints) report more women missionaries than men, the figures are not as high as expected. This is partly because Christian women have more opportunities available to them compared to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Women can be ordained ministers in many Protestant denominations and have made tremendous progress working outside of the home and church in the last century. Overseas mission is no longer one of very few options for women to exercise their talents and fulfill their passions. The leadership figures are perhaps a testament to this, with high proportions of women leaders in SIM, All Nations, and the United States Catholic Mission Association. However, these organizations may be outliers.

The 2023 Mission CEOs Report from Missio Nexus paints a much different picture.32 The survey asked 61 mission leaders from North America a series of questions on the role of the CEO and its board, staff effectiveness, navigating change, collaboration, challenges, and funding, among other topics. The report does not include the actual questionnaire, nor does it provide descriptive statistics of respondents, so basic demographics of respondents like age, race/ethnicity, or education levels are unknown. Respondents were 87% male (54 respondents) and 13% female (8 respondents). Half of organizations surveyed reported they had more women in leadership now than three years ago (pre-COVID-19), whereas 45% had the same number and 2% had fewer. The report does not state how many women are in leadership among these 61 organizations except for the eight women CEOs taking the survey. There is a reference (but not a citation) to a 2019 Missio Nexus study of 169 mission agencies where 27% reported having women in “Second-in-Command” positions like Chief Operating Officers, Chief Financial Officers, and Vice Presidents.33 It does not state what share of CEOs of those 169 organizations were women. In the 2023 report, under a quarter (23%) of respondents stated that providing pathways for women in leadership was a high organizational priority that will contribute to staff effectiveness in the next 1–3 years; this figure was down from 32% in the prior survey. Thirty-six percent of respondents stated that having women in leadership would help organizational development over the next three years, 29% said prioritizing women in leadership would have a low impact. Overall, women in leadership was ranked the least useful marker (15%) of organizational progress, as well as the marker least measured and acted upon (30%). Just under half (49%) of leaders stated that their organization is prepared for potential change in the area of women in leadership; only 12% felt “fully ready” for such a change. In sum, the report seems to suggest that advancing women in leadership is simply not a priority for most of these organizations. Vague commentary about attitudes toward women leaders reinforces the survey’s findings of not only a lack of support for women, but a lack of willingness to change. The report paints a rather bleak picture and offers few resources for attitudinal adjustment. None of the additional resources linked in the report are authored or produced by women. The list of recommended books for leadership development includes 56 authors, just five of whom are women (9%), with books by Evelyn Hibbert, Ruth Haley Barton, Cathy Ross, Kate Coleman, and Jean Johnson.34 Although women appear to still be the majority of missionaries on the ground, they are the minority of leaders and missiological scholarship. It continues to be acceptable for women to be the “worker bees” of the missionary enterprise, as Dana Robert has called them, but not advance into leadership positions.

Further Research

It is not possible to quantify missionary sending and receiving today like Dennis, Beach, and Barrett did in the past. It would not be possible to create a database of all missionary-sending organizations worldwide – including independent churches that are not connected to formal sending bodies – and then individually contact them to ask how many missionaries they send and to where, and what share are men or women. Even if it were possible, the lack of gender consciousness in many Christian organizations suggests the data do not even exist. At the same time, the topic cannot be abandoned altogether, as missionary sending remains an important feature of Christian life and commitment around the world. A total reassessment of the missionary enterprise requires reviewing literature, discerning trends, revising definitions, and operationalizing a constantly changing phenomenon.

Much has been learned since Dana Robert’s research on women in mission in the 1990s. There are more scholars asking questions about gender and taking seriously the differences in experience and perspective between men and women in mission and World Christianity. However, there are still substantial gaps in our understanding of the gendered dynamics of mission, requiring further research. Mission organizations, which are largely run by men, are not asking, or they are not reporting, on the relevant questions related to gender. The data on gender are not as publicly available as they were at the start of the 20th century. The discussion here has been largely centered on sending from the West, but Christianity is a majority global South faith, and mission probably is, too. New assumptions, data sources, and methods are needed to track these trends. At the very least, Christian men must be more comfortable talking about and to women, working equally alongside them, and respecting them as leaders, both within and outside the church.

Dana Robert asked the question about centering women in World Christianity studies in 2006 – “What would the study of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America look like if scholars put women into the center of their research”?35 Cathy Ross asked the same question of missiology in 2012 – “How different would missiology be if women were at the center?”36 How different would all of mission be if women were at the center? If women were not just the “boots on the ground” but also the decision-makers and the researchers? Ross opines that mission would be more comforting, consoling, healing; more hospitable, relational; and more about sight, embrace, and flourishing. In 1902, the introduction to James Dennis’s statistical table included a comment from Rev. Charles Cuthbert Hall, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he stated, “The study of missions in the colleges is bringing out a type of manhood which is full of heroic beauty, enthusiasm, and faith.”37 Perhaps this is the way to describe women’s contributions to the study and practice of mission over time, and their potential for the future. By 2050, an estimated 77% of all Christians will likely live in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.38 It may not be possible to estimate how many missionaries today are women. But what is certain is that women in the global South will take on increasingly visible leadership roles in mission and the church, grounded by their faith and in service to their present communities and the next generations. The future of mission appears to be dependent on them.

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1. 1 See Gina A. Zurlo, “’A Miracle from Nairobi: David B. Barrett and the Quantification of World Christianity, 1957–1982” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University School of Theology, 2017); Gina A. Zurlo, “The Task of Counting Missionaries: History and Present Challenges,” Overseas Ministries Study Center, The Occasional, https://omsc.ptsem.edu/the-task-of-counting-missionaries-history-and-present-challenges/.

2. 2 William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens; In Which the Religious State of Different Nations of the World, the Success of Former Undertakings, and the Practicability of Further Undertakings, are Considered (Ann Ireland, 1792).

3. 3 Carey, An Enquiry, 64.

4. 4 Carey, An Enquiry, 66. Carey’s low opinion of many Christians denominations revealed his anti-state-church perspective.

5. 5 For more examples of quantification in mission including the Missions Education Movement, the Missionary Review of the World, and other 19th century atlases and encyclopedias, see Zurlo, “A Miracle from Nairobi,” chapter 2.

6. 6 James S. Dennis, Centennial Survey of Foreign Missions: A Statistical Supplement to “Christian Missions and Social Progress,” Being a Conspectus of the Achievements and Results of Evangelical Missions in All Lands at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (Fleming H. Revell Company, 1902); James S. Dennis, Christian Missions and Social Progress: A Sociological Study of Foreign Missions, 3 vols. (Fleming H. Revell Company, 1899–1906).

7. 7 Harlan P. Beach, A Geography and Atlas of Protestant Missions: Their Environment, Forces, Distribution, Methods, 2 vols. (Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, 1901–1903).

8. 8 World Missionary Conference, Statistical Atlas of Christian Missions (World Missionary Conference, 1910); James S. Dennis, Harlan P. Beach, and Charles H. Fahs, World Atlas of Christian Missions (Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, 1911); Harlan P. Beach and Burton St. John, World Statistics of Christian Missions (The Committee of Reference and Counsel of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, 1916).

9. 9 David B. Barrett, World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions in the Modern World AD 1900–2000 (Oxford University Press, 1982), 17–19.

10. 10 Barrett, World Christian Encyclopedia, 17.

11. 11 For more on Barrett, see Gina A. Zurlo, From Nairobi to the World: David B. Barrett and the Re-Imagining of World Christianity (Brill, 2023).

12. 12 Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo, World Christian Encyclopedia (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

13. 13 The Women in World Christianity Projected (2019–2021) was funded by the Louisville Institute and the Religious Research Association. For more findings from the project, see Gina A. Zurlo, Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023) and Gina A. Zurlo, “Gender Gaps in World Christianity: Membership, Participation, Leadership,” Review of Religious Research 66, no. 44 (2024): 512–36.

14. 14 Rose N. Uchem, “Overcoming Women’s Subordination in the Igbo African Culture and in the

    Catholic Church: Envisioning an Inclusive Theology with Reference to Women” (Ph.D. diss.,

    Graduate Theological Foundation, 2001), 101–2.

15. 15 Ini Dorcas Dah, Women Do More Work than Men: Birifor Women as Change Agents in the

    Mission and Expansion of the Church in West Africa (Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana) (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2017), 122.

16. 16 John L. Allen, Jr., “A Quick Pulse of Women Religious in Africa,” 23 May 2009. https://www.ncronline.org/news/quick-pulse-women-religious-africa (accessed 1 August 2021).

17. 17 Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Mercer University Press, 1997), 130.

18. 18 Robert, American Women in Mission, 253.

19. 19 See, for example, Jehu Hanciles, Migration and the Making of Global Christianity (Eerdmans, 2021) and Harvey Kwiyani, Africa Bears Witness: Mission Theology and Praxis in the 21st Century (Langham, 2024).

20. 20 Gina A. Zurlo, ed., World Christian Database (Brill, 2025).

21. 21 Guy J. Abel, “Gender and Migration Data,” Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD) Paper 44 (World Bank Group, 2022), 10.

22. 22 Zurlo, World Christian Database.

23. 23 Latter-day Saints are considered Christian in this analysis on the grounds of self-identification. Any person claiming to be a Christian, regardless of theological beliefs, is considered a Christian. For more, see Johnson and Zurlo, World Christian Encyclopedia, 897–913.

24. 24 Johnson and Zurlo, World Christian Encyclopedia, 32.

25. 25 Despite representing the largest such data collection, the North American Mission Handbook is not comprehensive of all sending agencies. It does not include, for example, Latter-day Saints, Catholics, and sending from megachurches and other independent churches.

26. 26 These data are as of January 2023.

27. 27 All Nations is one of just a few global mission organizations led by a woman.

28. 28 Received partial data, with collection beginning in 2015; source stated, “Either it [the spreadsheet] was not finished or it was not published but at least it gives some data.” The Catholic Church reports on the number of sisters and brothers around the world, but it does not report how many Catholic missionaries are sent from the U.S. (nor any other country), nor their gender makeup. However, there are more Catholic sisters worldwide than brothers, and women religious make up 57% of all brothers and sisters. See Secretaria Status, Rationarium Generale Ecclesiae, Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae: Statistical Yearbook of the Church (Libreria Editrice Vatican, 2020).

29. 29 The LDS church does not report number of countries, but there are 146 countries with LDS family history centers and 188 with LDS humanitarian aid work, so that may provide an indication.

30. 30 Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church (Oxford University Press, 2019), 154. In 2012, the minimum age for missionary women was lowered from 21 to 19, which resulted in a massive spike in the number of women missionaries. The statistics of gender in mission by generation reveals the increased prominence of women over time: 45% of female Mormon millennials have served on a mission (66% of men), 28% of female Gen X Mormons (53% of men), and 13% of Boomer Mormons (49% of men).

31. 31 Missions overseas are led by a married couple where the man is the “mission president” and the woman is a “companion.”

32. 32 Michael VanHuis, ed. 2023 Mission CEOs Report (Missio Nexus, 2023).

33. 33 VanHuis, 2023 Mission CEOs Report, 81.

34. 34 VanHuis, 2023 Mission CEOs Report, 19.

35. 35 Dana L. Robert, “World Christianity as a Women’s Movement,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 30, no. 4 (2006): 180.

36. 36 Cathy Ross, “’Without Faces’: Women’s Perspectives on Contextual Missiology,” in Putting Names with Faces: Women’s Impact in Mission History, ed. Christine Lienemann-Perrin, Atola Longkumer, and Afrie Songco Joye (Abingdon Press, 2012), 361–81.

37. 37 Dennis, Centennial Study of Foreign Missions, 8.

38. 38 Zurlo, World Christian Database.