By 2000, about two-thirds of the world’s Christians came from countries where western missionaries worked a century earlier, and there was an explosion of interest in mission work among Christians from Asia, Africa and Latin America, according to Robert.

At a church on the New England coast 200 years ago, five young men became ordained as Congregational missionaries and set off on cargo ships to India as the first organized group of American missionaries to travel overseas.

Their departure signaled the start of the U.S. missionary movement, and today the United States sends more Christian missionaries abroad than any other country, experts say.

The United States sent out 127,000 of the world’s estimated 400,000 missionaries abroad in 2010, according to Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.

In distant second place is Brazil, which sent 34,000 missionaries abroad in 2010, he said.

The United States receives the most missionaries as well, with 32,400 in 2010, he said. Many are Brazilians – Catholic, Protestants and Pentecostals – who largely work in Brazilian communities in the Northeast, Johnson said.

Two of the original American missionaries — Adoniram Judson and his wife Ann Hasseltine Judson — settled in Burma, the Southeast Asian country now known as Myanmar, where Adoniram Judson remained for decades and translated the Bible into the local language.

The Judsons defied expectations that the group would never return, coming home to the United States before leaving again. But he died at sea, and she succumbed to smallpox and spotted fever in Burma.

Roughly half of the original group and their families died at sea or abroad.

Christians credit Judson and his wife with laying the foundations of the American missionary tradition and this month held events in Massachusetts, from lectures to tours of historic sites, to mark the 200th anniversary of the couple’s four-month sea journey in 1812.

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