Geneva was not a large city. During Calvin’s lifetime it reached a peak of slightly more than 21,000 by 1560, of whom a goodly number were religious refugees.
Nevertheless, it became the missionary centre of Europe in this period of the Reformation. Calvin sought to harness the energies and gifts of many of the religious refugees so as to make Geneva central to the expansion of Reformation thought and piety throughout Europe. This meant training and preparing many of these refugees to go back to their native lands as evangelists and reformers.
Revival in France
Understandably, Calvin was vitally concerned about the evangelisation of his native land, France, and his countrymen, the French. It has been estimated that by 1562 some 2,150 congregations had been established in France with around 2 million members, many of them converted through the witness of men trained in Geneva. That 2 million comprised 50% of the upper and middle classes, and a full 10% of the entire population. The growth is enormous when one reckons that at the time of Calvin’s conversion, in the early 1530s, there were probably no more than a couple of thousand Evangelicals in France. And many, if not the majority, of their pastors were trained in Geneva.
