1.8 Billion and Counting!

According to the United Nations, there are an estimated 1.8 billion adolescents and youth in the world today, accounting for nearly a third of the world’s population, with just below 90 percent living in developing countries, a proportion that will increase during the next 20 years.  I have to admit that it is really difficult for me to conceptualize big numbers like that and a lot of my friends have told me the same thing.  I was recently teaching a college course on Global Youth Ministry and we began to look up ways to visualize the number billion.

Here is one way that uses time as the medium:

• A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
• A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
• A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.

Here is an image of what 1 billion pennies stacked up would look like (each block is the size of a schools bus):

So I guess what I am trying to say is that a billion is a huge number and there are now close to 2 billion adolescents and youth in the world. And on top of that, there is the reality that almost 90% of them live in developing countries where the majority don’t have access to the gospel they can understand and don’t have hope of a better life. This is so huge that it could be debilitating or paralyzing.  So where do we start?  How do we deal with such an enormous task?  Here are some of my thoughts:

• First of all, God is in charge and I am not asked to fix the whole problem.  Maybe that’s what Jesus was saying in Matthew 26:11  ”You will always have the poor among you.” (NLT).
• We are called to reach out to young people “one-at-a-time”.  Trying to do more is like trying to figure out what to do with a busload of pennies (like in the picture above).  The problem is too big if you look at it as a whole, but if each of us does our part, we will begin to see an impact.
• We can’t do this in a vacuum or assume to be the only ones doing it.  We have to partner strategically with others.  Whether they are similar global youth ministry organizations, schools, churches, governments, NGO’s, the point is that this huge of a task can only be approached with synergy as a principal methodology.  In math terms, we need to be multiplying, not just adding.

Take some time to pray today that God would help you to comprehend the enormity of the reality of the world’s youth and not be overwhelmed, but be motivated to become part of a team that is impacting global youth.  There is room on our team, you can check out the opportunities on our Get Involved page.