One of the values of being aware of the sorts of things Philip Jenkins, of Penn State University, writes about in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity is that it helps explode fatalistic thinking. Just when you thought you knew how the Christian mission and the world would end, and were yawning toward Armageddon, along comes Jenkins with a story of the last one hundred years that makes you realize you must have already fallen asleep.
The book is mainly about the shift of visible Christianity (Christendom) from the Northern hemisphere to the Southern—from Europe and America to Africa, Asia, and South America.
Over the past century . . . the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Already today, the largest Christian communities on the planet are to be found in Africa and Latin America. If we want to visualize a “typical” contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela. As Kenyan scholar John Mbiti has observed, “the centers of the church’s universality [are] no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, New York, but Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa and Manila.” (p. 2)
Who would have thought that the most powerful influences for sane doctrinal faithfulness in the global Anglican Communion would come not from the evangelical resurgence of British evangelicals (as wonderful as that is), but from African bishops who regard so-called gay marriage (for example) as the oxymoron that it is?
Who would have thought that thirty or so conservative Episcopalian congregations physically located in North America would now technically be part of the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Rwanda?
Who would have though that there would be twice as many Presbyterians today in South Korea as there are in the United States?
Who would have thought that China would be one of the largest “Christian” nations. In 1949, China had only four million Christians. Today the number stands at about eighty-two million. That's over a twenty-fold increase. Former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine David Aikman projects that within a few decades one-in-three Chinese could be Christian (Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power).
Who would have thought that, as Mark Noll says in Books and Culture (March/April 2002), “While European Christianity has become archaeology and North American Christianity hangs on as sociology, Christianity in ever-expanding sections of Africa, Latin America, and Asia is dynamic, life-transforming, and revolutionary—if often also wild, ill-informed, and undisciplined”?
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