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34,000 separate Christian groups have been identified in the world.

* Persons with no religion, agnostics, freethinkers, humanists, secularists, etc.

U.S. Center for World Mission estimated in 1997 that the percentage of humans who regard themselves as Christians rose from 33.7% in 1970 to 33.9% in 1996. Its total number of adherents is growing at about 2.3% annually. This is approximately equal to the growth rate of the world's population. Islam is growing faster: about 2.9% and is thus increasing its market share.

"World Christian Encyclopedia: A comparative survey of churches and religions - AD 30 to 2200," estimates that as of 2000, Christians make up 33% of the world's population, with close to two billion followers.

Author Samuel Huntington disagrees: "The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 % in the 1980s, leveled off, is now declining, and will probably approximate to about 25% of the world's population by 2025. As a result of their extremely high rates of population growth, the proportion of Muslims in the world will continue to increase dramatically, amounting to 20 percent of the world's population about the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later, and probably accounting for about 30 percent of the world's population by 2025."

The UK Christian Handbook has lower figures. They estimate that 28.3% of the world's population identified themselves as Christians in 1990. They expect this to drop to 27.7% by the year 2000, and to 27.1 in 2010. They attribute the drop to the lower birth rate among Christians compared to followers of other religions.

Within Christianity, not all denominations have the same growth rate. Some annual growth rates are:

• Pentecostals: 8.1%
• Evangelicals: 5.4%;
• All Protestants: 3.3%
• Roman Catholics and Others: 1.3%

Since the growth rate of humanity is above 1.4%, the "market share" of Roman Catholicism appears to be dropping.

Reference books on world religion:

The ultimate reference book is the two volume monumental set, World Christian Encyclopedia, released in mid-2001, by Oxford University Press. It contains 1699 pages with information about religion in the 238 countries of the world:

David Barrett et al, "World Christian Encyclopedia: A comparative survey of churches and religions - AD 30 to 2200," Oxford University Press, (2001).

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