Evangelicals are fascinated by the science of things. From the beginning, they were participants in the gentlemanly sciences. When William Carey sought to demonstrate the extent of Christianity and the world's crying need, it was only to be expected that he would choose to write in the form of the ‘gazetteer’ (a combined form of geographical and demographical work typical of the age). For evangelicals, numbers have the reassuring attributes of being rational, evidential and semiotic: they are pointers to the action of God in the world, evidences designed to impel Christian obedience. However, as Rodney Stark has pointed out with regard to the commonplace that early Christianity grew at a remarkable rate, such ‘evangelical’ statistics can lead one astray. ‘The “facts” justifying the miraculous assumption were wrong. The only reason people believed that there was an arithmetic need for mass conversion was because no one ever bothered to do the actual arithmetic.’ The picture that emerged for Stark when he did the ‘actual arithmetic’ was in fact far more interesting: early Christianity emerged as a successful, urban, transformative community in and through which marginalised people (particularly women) enjoyed influence and authority far beyond what was possible for them in the broader context. The facts were sufficiently striking without needing to appeal to a miracle. These are observations which can also be applied to the statistics describing global evangelicalism.