From Taxonomy to Tapestry: Seeing Ourselves in an 8‑Billion‑Piece Puzzle (What I Learned from Gina Zurlo)

When I wrote The People of the Sign and The Hardness of the Heart, I was mostly trying to survive my own story—kidnapping, custody battles, sectarian religion, a church split, illness, divorce—by naming it. Putting words around chaos was a way of reclaiming it.

Talking with Dr. Gina Zurlo on Created in the Image of God felt like stepping back several hundred miles from my own little drama and looking at the whole human story from orbit.

If my books are about one life, her life’s work is about all of them.

Gina is the Senior Researcher and Lecturer in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School and the architect of the World Christian Database. She’s spent nearly twenty years building and curating a tool that does something at once deeply geeky and strangely sacred: it tries to place every human being on earth—by self‑identification—into a comprehensive picture of religion and non‑religion, past, present, and projected future.

She called it “an 8‑billion‑piece puzzle.”

And she said something only a true taxonomy enthusiast could say with a straight face:

“The beautiful thing about a taxonomy… is everyone fits. Everyone has a place. Everyone has a role.”

That line lodged in me. Because if you take seriously that we’re created in the image of God, then a disciplined attempt to see how every person, tradition, and region fits into the global picture isn’t just data work. It’s a kind of contemplative exercise.

You start seeing the tapestry, not just your thread.

What follows are some of the key takeaways I drew from Gina’s 30,000‑foot vantage point—each one a puzzle piece that changes how I see the whole.

1. Taxonomy as a Spiritual Practice: Everyone Fits Somewhere

I resonate with the word taxonomy. It sounds like something you memorize for an exam and forget, but I’ve always felt it can bring coherence. And listening to Gina describe it, I heard something closer to liturgy.

The World Christian Database:

Tracks 18 categories of religion and non‑religion in every country.
Breaks Christianity down by country and denomination (e.g., American Baptists in the U.S. are a denomination; American Baptists in Zambia count as another, because context matters).
Lets you ask questions like:
- How many Methodists are in Zimbabwe?
- How many Pentecostals are in Indonesia?
- How many Buddhists are in Norway?
- What did that look like in 1900? What might it look like in 2075?

Technically, it’s a huge classification project. Spiritually, it’s a way of saying:

No one is “extra.” No one is off the grid. Everyone belongs someplace in the map of faith and non‑faith.

Gina’s gold standard is self‑identification:

“If you call yourself a Christian, I count you as a Christian… Likewise with Buddhists, Muslims, ‘nones’…”

She doesn’t sit in judgment of who’s a “real” Christian or which groups are “cults.” She tracks how people understand themselves and the communities they affiliate with.

In a world where religious labels are often wielded as weapons, that simple commitment—to let people say who they are, and then pay attention—is quietly radical.

It’s also humbling. None of us, and none of our traditions, are the whole picture.

We’re pieces in a vast mosaic whose full pattern only God sees.

2. Unity in Diversity: World Christianity (Singular)

Scholars sometimes argue about whether we should speak of “world Christianity” (singular) or “Christianities” (plural). Given the enormous diversity—doctrinal, cultural, political—it’s a fair question.

Gina’s answer is refreshingly straightforward:

“World Christianity exists as a whole of the people who call themselves Christians.”

Yes, Christianity in rural Nigeria looks very different from Christianity in Norway or Brazil. Yes, people read the Bible in different languages, through different cultural lenses. Yes, there are real tensions: Catholic/Protestant, Pentecostal/historic, conservative/progressive.

But underneath all that, there’s a stubborn commonality:

People across the planet choose to self‑identify as followers of Christ.
They gather around the same Scriptures.
They struggle—in their own soil—to live those teachings out.

That choice, in her view, is enough to justify the singular: world Christianity.

As someone who grew up in a movement that saw itself as the tiny, pure remnant and everyone else as either deceived or compromised, this landed with force. I knew intimately the habit of narrowing the circle until only a handful were “in.”

Gina’s map blows that up. Without flattening differences, she insists that people who name the name of Christ—and order their lives in relation to Him in some way—are part of one global reality.

It’s a taxonomy that makes space for unity‑in‑diversity rather than coerced uniformity.

Which brings us to the next puzzle piece.

3. From Babel to Garden: Taxonomy vs. Tower‑Building

Early in our conversation, I shared my long‑standing fascination with the Tower of Babel story.

On one reading, it’s a cautionary tale about coercive unity:

Nimrod builds a city and a tower “to heaven.”
Everyone rallies under one human authority, one project, one imposed “we.”
God comes down, sees that this is not unity but domination, and scatters the project by confusing their languages.

I contrasted that with another biblical image: the garden, where different plants grow side by side, each according to its kind, rooted in the same soil, tended by the same gardener.

Unity in conformity vs. unity in diversity.

Gina’s work, to my mind, sits firmly on the garden side.

Her taxonomy does not impose theological conformity; it describes the astonishing variety of ways people seek and name God (or opt out of that language altogether). It recognizes Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox and Pentecostals and independents and messianic Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses and yes, “nones” and atheists, each as a distinct branch on the tree.

It’s a way of saying:

God is not threatened by complexity.
The Spirit has not limited Himself to one language, one culture, one rite.
We can map difference without making it an occasion for contempt.

When I asked about messianic Jews, or my own former group (which felt like “Messianic Jews in reverse”—Gentiles keeping Sabbath and holy days), she didn’t flinch. If they self‑identify as Christian, they’re in the Christian box. If they’re ethnically Jewish and religiously Christian, they’re counted that way in both dimensions.

Taxonomy, done well, keeps us from Tower‑building. It does not collapse everything into a single bland category; it gives us enough nuance to see the pattern without erasing the particulars.

4. The Southward Shift: The Center of Gravity Has Moved

One of the most important big‑picture insights Gina shared is what world Christianity scholars call the demographic shift to the global South.

A few numbers:

1900: Only 18% of all Christians lived in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania.
Today: About 69% of all Christians live in those regions.
By 2075 (projected): Around 83% of all Christians will live in the global South.

Africa in particular has become central:

Over the 20th century, Africa moved from about 9% Christian to roughly 49% Christian.
Sub‑Saharan Africa now has more Christians than any other continent.
The average age of African Christians is 19.

Those are not just trivia. They mean:

The “typical Christian” today is a young African, not an older European or North American.
The future of Christian theology, worship, and mission will be increasingly shaped by African, Latin American, and Asian contexts.
Western believers are no longer the default, if they ever were.

Gina is careful to note this shift has multiple drivers:

Colonial history and mission work (for good and ill).
The explosive rise of African independent churches—African‑led, not merely mission offshoots.
Demographics: higher birth rates and younger populations in the global South.
Decline and secularization in parts of Europe and North America.

For me, this underscores the need for listening and decentering. If the Spirit is doing something vital in Lagos and Kinshasa and São Paulo, then my taxonomy of “what Christianity is” must be large enough to include those voices as norm‑setting, not peripheral.

The puzzle looks very different from this angle.

5. Majority Female, Minority Led: The Gendered Reality

Another key piece of the puzzle is gender.

Gina resisted focusing on women for a long time. She didn’t want to be “the stereotypical woman in academia studying women.” As a young female quantitative scholar in a male‑dominated space, she felt she had to “run with the boys” just to be taken seriously.

But reality wouldn’t let her off the hook.

Her doctoral mentor, Dana Robert, calls world Christianity a women’s movement. Churches across continents are filled and sustained by women: mothers, grandmothers, aunties, catechists, worship leaders, intercessors.

Everywhere Gina traveled, people’s anecdotes matched the data: “My church is all women.” “My faith came through my mother, my grandmother.”

Yet when she looked around global Christian conferences, she saw almost no women on the main stage. And when she went to the data, she discovered a gaping hole: almost no one was tracking gender in any systematic way.

So she did what demographers do. She started counting.

First, she added a new variable to the World Christian Database: percent Christian female by denomination and country. Where data were missing, she used regional averages and kept refining as new information came in.

Then, with characteristic “go big or go home” energy, she hand‑researched where women are allowed to serve:

On decision‑making bodies (parish councils, boards, synods).
As ordained pastors or equivalent roles.

Some of what she found:

About 83% of the world’s Christians worship in churches where women can serve on some form of decision‑making body.
About 45% worship in churches where women can be pastors (formally).
The actual percentage of congregations led by women is much lower. In the U.S., for example, survey data show only about 12% of congregations are pastored by women—even though her research indicates that about 55% of North American Christians are in churches that officially allow women pastors.

The gap between “can” and “are” is what she calls the leaky pipeline:

Women drop out at multiple points: lack of models, lack of mentorship, lack of funds, marriage and child‑rearing expectations, subtle and overt discouragement.
Even when the policy is changed, the culture and habits often lag by decades.

All of this sits alongside another fact she highlighted: Christianity worldwide skews female. The pews are full of women. The leadership tables are not.

Gina’s willingness to finally embrace this topic—despite her initial resistance—shows how our own stories intersect with the big data. She had to overcome internalized doubts (“I’ll be taken less seriously if I do this”) to name what the numbers were already shouting:

There would likely be no such thing as world Christianity, in its current form, without women.

That reality still doesn’t get anywhere near the attention it deserves.

6. Nations, Faith, and the Temptation of Fusion

Another puzzle piece Gina has started working on is the relationship between Christianity and politics, especially in light of Christian nationalism.

Again, she describes rather than prescribes. But the picture is sobering:

Zambia is currently the only African country that has formally declared itself a Christian nation in its constitution.
In other places (Uganda, Brazil under Bolsonaro, the U.S., Hungary), Christians have sought or gained political power in ways that blur lines between church and state.

She’s beginning to trace the connective strands among these movements:

Shared media ecosystems and social media networks.
Theologies that sacralize nation and party.
Missionary and colonial networks that exported not just the gospel, but certain political imaginaries.

Here again, taxonomy helps. Distinguishing between:

Christian‑majority countries, where most people identify as Christian, and
States that legally enshrine Christianity, or where Christians seek to wield the machinery of state on expressly Christian terms.

The parallels to Islamic states vs. Muslim‑majority countries are obvious.

Spiritually, this brings us perilously close to Babel again: the old temptation to fuse divine legitimacy with human power, to build a tower and call it the Kingdom.

Gina is clear that, personally, she values pluralism, freedom of conscience, and choice. But as a social scientist, her primary task is to show us what is. It’s up to theologians, pastors, and ordinary believers to discern what should be in light of that.

At minimum, her data warns us that the desire to turn nations into religious projects is alive and well—and increasingly interconnected across borders.

7. Local Roots, Global Context

For all the aerial views and sweeping graphs, Gina kept circling back to one simple conviction:

“This whole project is about connecting the global and the local.”

The database is not a substitute for on‑the‑ground knowledge. It’s a context.

It can tell you that Africa has the youngest Christian population and the largest number of Christians.
It cannot tell you, by itself, what Christianity feels like in a Kenyan village, or how a Nigerian Pentecostal experiences the Holy Spirit, or how a Brazilian base community reads Luke’s Gospel.

That’s the work of historians, ethnographers, theologians, and, frankly, ordinary disciples.

But without the big picture, we risk provincialism—mistaking our corner of the garden for the whole.

For someone like me, who has spent a lifetime trying to piece together personal trauma and theological puzzles, Gina’s work offers a gift: a sense of scale. My story matters. My tradition matters. But they’re not the entire puzzle.

We’re tiles in a much larger mosaic God is patiently assembling.

In the end, what struck me most about Gina isn’t just that she sits on top of an enormous stack of data. It’s that she approaches that data with a kind of reverent curiosity:

How do 8 billion lives, each with its own story, fit together in this moment?
Where are we coming from? Where might we be going?
And how can knowing that—honestly, humbly—help us live more wisely, more justly, and more lovingly in our little corner?

Her closing invitation was simple:

“Ask me big questions. And if I don’t know them, we’ll find answers together.”

That, too, feels like a taxonomy worth emulating.

You are created in the image of God. And God loves His creation.

— Wade

If this reflection on puzzles, taxonomies, and the shape of world Christianity stirred something in you, subscribe or share it with someone who might benefit from seeing the bigger picture. And if you’re a data‑inclined seeker, explore Gina’s work at worldchristiandatabase.org or via her Harvard Divinity School profile.

Sneak Peek: Next on Created in the Image of God

Sunday May 10 at 7:00 AM US Central I’ll be interviewing Dalia Mogahed—scholar, researcher, and one of the leading voices on Muslim communities. She’ll share her journey from Cairo to the United States and how she came to understand herself as an American Muslim. We’ll talk about faith, identity, and pluralism in a world too often shaped by fear, headlines, and misunderstanding.
Tuesday May 12 at 8:00 PM US Central,I’ll be joined by Michael Gungor—musician, author, and creative mystic. We’ll explore his sense that we may be seeing reality upside down, and what it means to live in tune with something deeper: from creativity and suffering to love, being, and the quiet “yes” at the center of existence.

Join us live—and in the meantime, keep asking where you