The following statistics represent some of the challenges facing the church in the unfinished task of world evangelism:

• As of April 2012, there were approximately 7 billion people on Earth.
• Approximately 750 million (or about 11 percent) of those are willing to claim Jesus as personal Lord and Savior.
• About 2.6 billion people (or 38 percent of the world's population) have heard the gospel but have not accepted Christ yet.
• At present, just over 50 percent of the world's population (or 3.5 billion people) have not heard the gospel and most of them do not have a realistic opportunity to hear the gospel.
• Here's another way to look at the challenge of world evangelism: Of the 11,646 distinct people groups on the planet, 6,734 people groups (roughly 60 percent) contain between zero and two percent evangelical Christians. Many of these 6,734 people groups have no churches, no Bibles, no Christian literature, and no mission agencies who are seeking to share the gospel with them.