Data source: Gina A. Zurlo and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Database (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2024).
| Glossary item | Definition |
|---|---|
| basic communities | Small ecclesial communities or groups that have sprung up in the churches, stressing community, renewal, charismatic gifts, prayer, Bible study, evangelism, et alia; spontaneous communities, underground communities, et alia. |
| basic data | Raw data, crude data, primary data. |
| Basilians | Used of Eastern monks in general. |
| basilica | In Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiology, a canonical title of honor with liturgical privileges given to churches distinguished either by their antiquity, dignity, historical significance, or by their role as international centers of worship and relation to a major saint, or historical event, or (in Orthodoxy) a national patriarch. In Catholicism, they are of 2 kinds (a) major basilicas (St Peter’s, St John Lateran et alia in Rome), (b) minor basilicas (as in USA, Canada, et alia). |
| Basque | An isolated European ethnolinguistic family. |
| Baster | A Eurafrican or Colored people in Namibia. |
| beachhead | The initial planting of indigenous fellowships in an otherwise unreached people or unevangelized population segment. |
| belief | Statistics of personal belief have been widely investigated in public-opinion polls and surveys. Typical questions, with nation-wide adult percentage of ‘Yes’ responses: ‘Do you believe in a God? (1948) Brazil 96%, Australia 95%, Canada 95%, USA 94%, Norway 84%, UK 84%, Finland 83%, Netherlands 80%, Sweden 80%, Denmark 80%, France 66%; (1968) UK 74%; (1970) Netherlands 81%; (1973) Canada 67%, UK 77%; (1975) UK 72%; (1979) UK 73%. ‘Do you believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God?’ (1957) USA 90%, UK 71% , (1975) Spain 61%. ‘Do you believe that Jesus Christ will ever return to earth?’ (1960) USA 55%. ‘Can a person be a Christian if he does not go to church?’ (1957) UK 85%, USA 78%. ‘Have you been born again through committing yourself to Christ?’ (1976) USA 34%. |
| believer | One who believes or professes a religious faith; often used only of Christians, but sometimes of all religions. |
| believer’s baptism | Adult baptism, by immersion, on profession of faith. |
| believers | Term in wide use in secularized or nonreligious societies or regimes for describing followers of religion. |
| believing Christians | See committed Christians. |
| bell-ringing | Campanology (qv). |
| Belorussian | White-Ruthenian, a sub-rite of the Byzantine rite (qv); suppressed and with no jurisdictions (1980). |
| Berber | Middle Eastern ethnolinguistic family, with 30 languages. |
| Bezirk | (German: District). An administrative region of the New Apostolic Church, which has 30 Districts across the world. |
| Bible | For Christians, the revealed Word of God, Holy Scriptures, with 66 Books (39 OT, 27 NT). |
| Bible | This term is always used to describe only the whole or complete Bible of 66 Books (sometimes plus Apocrypha). |
| Bible correspondence courses | See correspondence courses. |
| Bible distribution | Distribution (free, subsidized, commercial): copies of the whole Bible per year. |
| Bible organizations | There are over 370 major Christian organizations at work in this field. |
| Bible schools | Centers for the training of Christian workers usually of less than secondary education, often for the ordained ministry in Third-World countries, more usually for lay ministries. In Latin American Protestantism the term tends to be synonymous with seminaries (qv). |
| Bible smuggler | Western tourist or courier from Europe or North America who enters Communist or non-Christian lands with numerous copies of the Bible for illegal distribution |
| Bible Student movement | A schismatic movement out of Jehovah’s Witnesses which has produced a number of new denominations. |
| Bible studies | In Jehovah’s Witnesses’ statistics, the number of Bible studies conducted each year by publishers in the course of house-to-house visiting. World total: (1959) 606,075, (1974) 1,351,404, (1998) 4,302,852. |
Data on 18 categories of religion, including non-religious, by country, province, and people.
Data on all religions, Christian activities, and trends.
Membership data, year begun, and rates of change.
Population and religion data on all major cities & provinces.
Detailed information covering religion, culture, and geography.
A repository of historical data, including a chronology of Christianity from the 1st to 21st centuries.