2008: A Year of Expansion for the Church

Over the past few weeks, I have found around a dozen blogs from missionaries and mission presidents from around the world. Places these missionaries are serving in range from the Ukraine to the Democratic Republic of Congo. They have provided valuable information concerning the growth and status of the Church throughout the world.

One overlying theme I have found in these blogs, especially within the last several months, is the expasion the Church into new cities, particularly in Eastern Europe. Africa has also seen this expansion of missionary work and congregations into areas where the Church was not organized. Below is a list of countries in Europe with the number of new cities opened within the past 14 months. Again, this is only the number of cities I have found; there could be more.

• Albania: 1
• Croatia: 1
• Estonia: 1
• Hungary: 4
• Latvia: 1
• Slovakia: 1
• Ukraine: 4
• Romania: 1

What makes this impressive is the lack of new cities which were opened for missionary work over the past decade. Most of these countries have only seen one or two new cities have congregations established in them during that time. For example, the only city opened in Estonia since the late 90s was Narva.

Below is a map of Albania and the Baltic Countries. These are a couple countries I do not have maps of posted yet and have seen missionary work expand into new cities recently. The green squares are branches and the red dots are large cities without known branches or missionaries.