The Americas

The Americas stretch from Greenland’s frozen Arctic to Cape Horn in the far south, encompassing 55 countries and territories ranging from major powers such as the United States, Canada and Brazil to small Caribbean islands such as Barbados and Dominica. It is a continent shaped by successive waves of Indigenous peoples, European colonization, and African and Asian migration, creating one of the most diverse cultural and religious landscapes on the planet.

The gospel reached the Americas early, first through Iberian Catholic colonization and then through Protestant missions in North America, and today the continent has 20.4% evangelicals, one of the highest proportions among the world’s continents. At the same time, it is now the point of departure for thousands of missionaries to other parts of the globe, especially from Brazil, the United States and Central American countries.

But this missionary strength coexists with pockets of real need: among the 1,504 people groups identified on the continent, 356 are still considered unreached, with no established church among them. And of the 1,673 languages spoken in the Americas, 1,055 still have no part of the Bible translated, a figure revealing how much translation work remains in the continent’s forests, islands and borderlands.

From the Amazon to North America’s Indigenous reservations, from urban ghettos to the small Caribbean islands, the Americas are both a seedbed of strong churches and a field of forgotten peoples. Intercede for this continent that has already sent so much and still has so much to reach within itself.