Well, we love global missions at desiringgod.org and missions is a huge priority for you, Pastor John.

In fact, I think as this episode will go live online at about the same time that you will be

traveling to Indianapolis to speak at the 2016 cross conference. So it's no surprise. We get a lot

of questions from missionaries in the field, a number of questions from missionaries and training,

and a fair number of questions from college students who are interested in giving their lives to

missions in the future. Today's question comes from a podcast listener named Amy who writes this.

Pastor John, I've recently noticed that the number of women going to the nations far outweighs men.

I look for more statistics on this and struggle to even find information. If this is the case,

what are your thoughts on this trend and what do you think are the most probable causes for it?

Well, whatever the case among Roman Catholics who have a peculiar views about celibacy,

whatever the case about Roman Catholics or liberal Protestants who by and large don't do missions

in order to convert people to Christ, the case among evangelicals and faith missions in particular

is as Amy hints contained in this joke. Two-thirds of active missionaries are married couples. Another

third are single women. The rest are single men. Well, if that went by too fast, two-thirds plus

one-third don't leave any room for single men. And it's only a joke in part because it's almost

that way. To be more accurate, the actual situation among most evangelical faith missions is that

between 80 and 85% of all single missionaries are women. It's a rare thing, like two out of every

10, for a single man to make missions his life vocation, which results in the overall statistics

being that one-third of those in evangelical in the evangelical world missions are married men,

one-third are married women, and 80% of the last third are single women, which means that

something just less than two-thirds of the total missionary force are women. Now, why is that?

And I think the most honest answer would be, I don't know. And if the research has been done to get

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