WorldMap: Missions Atlas Program

October 23, 2008 – 10:47 am

World MAP: Missions Atlas Program is an excellent resource for analyzing and printing data regarding counties at large, language/population blocs within a country and major cities within the country. There is also a section that offers current news bites from the selected country.

The goal of the project is to make a Missionary Atlas, i.e. an atlas that serves the desires of missionaries and missions organizations. It seems that World MAP is off to a great start.

From the website ‘Welcome’ page:

This site contains various forms of information including maps, tabular data sets, and written descriptions. The information is helpful in assessing the current status of Missions progress throughout the world. It is a constantly expanding site that seeks to produce a strategically significant World Missions Atlas.

The WorldMAP consortium is comprised of Evangelical organizations.

and from their ‘Purpose Summary‘ page:

The current Missions Atlas Project (MAP) is an attempt to pick up the challenge Charles H. Fahs issued in 1925, namely to utilize the advances in computer and Internet technologies to establish an accurate base map of the world (at least a 1:1,000,000 projection).

On that base map will be built a depiction of all the inhabited cities, towns, and villages of the world, collate the most accurate data available for displaying the locations of all known evangelical churches in their habitat locations throughout the world, and integrate correlating data that yields strategic implications (such as languages spoken, population figures, identifiable people groups, ratio of churches to people by provincial levels and beyond).

We ought to be thankful for resources like World Map that we have at our fingertips as we strive to learn and prepare to be better senders and goers for the cause of the Great Commission.

HT: Missionary Scribbler