It is with thanksgiving and joy that Operation World is celebrating 60 years since our very first edition. It comprised of 32 pages, with hand-drawn maps, and was printed in apartheid-era South Africa on a hand cranked Gestetner machine.
Since then, Operation World has seen seven global editions. It has published four children’s titles, as well as ‘The Church is Bigger Than You Think’ and ‘The Future of the Global Church’. Numerous derivative works, including the free mobile app, have been produced. Thousands of different data visualizations were developed, first on overhead transparencies and then in digital formats. OW resources have been translated into more than 20 languages and account for as many as three million total units.
Believers, churches, prayer movements, mission organizations, and theological institutions have been impacted all around the world. Many leaders in mission and ministry from the majority world* and beyond attribute the birth of their global vision to encounters with Operation World.
Amazing to think that all of this began with a pair of cardboard boxes in the back of a ministry van that trundled around South Africa in the early 1960s. Those boxes functioned as the filing system for the research work of a young English missionary by the name of Patrick Johnstone. It was 30 years ago that I first encountered Patrick, and life sure hasn’t been the same since then!
*‘Majority World’ refers to essentially the same countries called ‘the Global South’
Jason Mandryk