The Global Christian Forum is a recent development responding to a new situation among Christians. For more than a century, mainline churches, Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, have been involved in the modern ecumenical movement, and after centuries of division, have achieved new levels of unity and reconciliation. Together these mainline churches represent about 1.8 billion Christians. But a new development especially in the 21st century is that some of the fastest growing Christian communities in the world are Pentecostal (more than 600,000,000 million) and evangelical groups who have generally not been involved in the ecumenical movement, and in some ways have even been hostile to that movement. The Global Christian Forum (GCF) was conceived fifteen years ago, to bridge this gap by finding ways of bringing mainline Christian churches and growing numbers of Pentecostals and Evangelicals into contact with each other. The GCF is supported by the Vatican Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the World Council of Churches, the Orthodox churches and many others. Increasingly the Pentecostal and Evangelical organizations are supporting it as well.