Christians are still the largest religious group in the world number 2.2 billion in total, according to a new study. 
The research, compiled by the Pew Research Forum on Religion & Public Life, shows that most Christians now live in Africa, Asia and the Americas rather than Europe.
Around one-quarter of the world’s Christian’s live in Europe today compared to two-thirds a century ago when the European share of the world’s population was much higher than it is today.
Sub-Saharan Africa has seen the biggest increase in its Christian population over the past century, going from about nine million Christians in 1910 to about 516 million today, the study shows.
The US, Brazil, Mexico and Russia are the countries with the largest number of Christians.
The study’s authors said Brazil has twice as many Roman Catholics as Italy, while Nigeria has double the number of Protestants as Germany, where the Protestant Reformation began, author’s of the study said.
Islam is the world’s second-largest religion with about 1.6 billion people or slightly less than a quarter of the global population following the faith.
The Global Christianity report was compiled using national censuses, population surveys and estimates from church groups of numbers attending services.
The data was compared to surveys taken in 1910 including data from the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.
Europe may have been the mainland for Christians a century ago but researchers said that the population is now so widely spread across the world that no specific region can be described as the centre of the faith.
Conrad Hackett, Demographer at the Pew Forum and lead researcher for the Global Christianity report, told The Christian Post: ‘We set out to provide data on the number of Christians around the world as part of a series of reports focusing on the global populations of major religious groups.
‘As we note in the report, there is no single region or continent that is indisputably the centre of global Christianity anymore’.
The smallest concentration of Christians can be found in North Africa – where the faith began – and where they make up only about four per cent of the population today.
Egypt has the largest Christian population in the region, with about 4.3 million Christians who have been victims of violence specifically since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak.
About five per cent of China’s population or 67 million people are Christian, according to the study’s authors.
It is difficult to be accurate, however when estimating China’s Christian population due to the mixture of government-sanctioned churches and grassroots operating illegally across the country.