Last month, I wrote a post using Church-published membership data (generously scraped and shared by latter_data_saint on Reddit) to look at which US states have seen more or less growth—or even shrinkage—in the years before and since the pandemic began in early 2020. Today I’m looking at the same data for countries in Africa. I apologize for my slowness; I was never the most productive of bloggers, and the holiday season makes me even slower.
I prepared the data the same way as I did with the US data. You’ll remember, of course, the caveat about how these are reported membership counts, so active membership is likely to be quite a bit lower. Also, the growth rate has been so much faster in Africa than in the US that I used different bin boundaries for the growth colors to be able to show some differences. Here’s the pre-pandemic growth rate by country.
Note that the map doesn’t include Cape Verde; when I downloaded it from Wikimedia commons, I must have chosen too low a resolution. And while I’m giving credits, I chose the color schemes using ColorBrewer.
What’s most striking to me, as someone who’s not all that geographically literate, is how much the Church is confined to sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the grayed-out countries that I didn’t color for having fewer than 5000 members have data reported (see the table at the end of the post), but most don’t. I’m guessing that at least some of these are Islamic countries that ban Christian proselytizing.
Here’s the post-pandemic growth rate:
Growth sped up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mozambique, but mostly slowed down compared to pre-pandemic, although still remaining far higher than US rates.
Here’s the map showing membership counts. For this one, I kept the same bin boundaries for the count colors as in the US, as they still showed meaningful differences.
Again, I’m just surprised how much Church membership is concentrated in a relatively small area in West Africa, with Nigeria having the most members of any country on the continent, but also Togo, Benin, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
Here’s the summary table. Like I said above, the growth rate is down since the pandemic, but still, 7.2% per year is pretty strong growth.
