The average Christian today is a poor Nigerian or Brazilian woman.
Soon, the phrase “a White Christian” may sound like a curious oxymoron, as mildly surprising as “a Swedish Buddhist.” Such people can exist, but a slight eccentricity is implied.
—Philip Jenkins, from his book The Next Christendom
In terms of the languages and ethnic groups affected, as well as the variety of churches and movements involved, Christianity is also the most diverse and pluralist religion in the world. More people pray and worship in more languages and with more differences in styles of worship in Christianity than in any other religion. Well over three thousand of the world’s languages are embraced by Christianity through Bible translation, prayer, liturgy, hymns, and literature. More than 90 percent of these languages have a grammar and a dictionary at all only because the Western missionary movement provided them, thus pioneering arguably the largest, most diverse and most vigorous movement of cultural renewal in history. At the same time, the post-Western Christian resurgence is occurring in societies already set in currents of indigenous religious pluralism. In addition to firsthand familiarity with at least one other religion, most new Christians speak a minimum of two languages. It is not the way a Christian in the West has been used to looking at the religion, but it is now the only way…Mission is ambicultural today.
—Lamin Sanneh, from his book Disciples of All Nations
Tomorrow (December 27, 2009) is the first day of the triennial Urbana missions conference, which I will be attending along with twenty Biola students. It is the largest Christian conference in America, approximately 20,000 people, and it is mainly for college students. This is not without precedence: the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) for Foreign Missions was huge in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. However, the way that mission is done today is vastly different from how the SVM understood it, or even how your parents’ generation understood it. Why?
The center of gravity of Christianity has shifted to the non-Western world in the last 50 years.
In 1900, 80% of Christians in this world lived in Europe or North America. Today, 70% of Christians in this world now live in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. However, the percentage of professing Christians (1/3 of the world’s population) has not changed. It is an astounding shift in Christianity’s geographical center in a very short time. This has a number of implications.
-Christianity is now a truly global religion, as it was meant to be from the beginning (it’s no surprise that Israel is located at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe). Christianity is the only religion in the world that has no one geographic center, and as such is the earth’s only true World Religion.
-If it were not for the growth of Christianity in the non-Western world, Christianity would be a severely declining religion, and Islam would reign supreme.
-The vast majority of non-Western Christians are more conservative morally than Western Christians. It is the Anglican bishops in Africa (who outnumber the Anglican bishops in Europe) who are keeping the worldwide Anglican communion from sliding into total apostasy and moral degeneration. Also, the #2 man in the Church of England, the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, is from Uganda.
-Nominalism has been rampant in the West for a long time. Part of this is due to comfortability. When Christianity is an accepted part of the culture, there is nothing to keep anyone from becoming lax in their faith or succumbing to peer pressure. When Christianity is under oppression, persecution, fighting for space with other religions, or is a minority, then those who profess the faith are usually genuine. So even though the percentage of Christians in the world is the same today (33%) as it was a century ago, there is perhaps more authentic pure faith worldwide. However, there is the danger, now that Christianity is becoming the majority in many parts of the non-Western world, that the non-Western world may likewise succumb to nominalism. Only time will tell.
-Africa is the heartland of Christianity today. The population of Christians there went from 9 million in 1900, tripled to 30 million in 1945, tripled again to 115 million in 1970, and once more to 360 million in 2000. When Empire left, Christianity grew! This goes counter to the idea that Christianity is inextricably linked with the West and colonialism.
-Most Christians today are poor, young, and uneducated.
-The largest church in London is Nigerian.
-China’s Christian population is almost going to surpass that of the U.S.
-India has the world’s largest Roman Catholic Jesuit order.
-Brazil has more cross-cultural missionaries than Britain or Canada.
-Korea is the largest missions-sending nation in the world per capita.
-Only a small proportion of non-Western Christian and church leaders have had any theological education.
-Christian institutional structures are largely missing in post-Western Christianity.
-There is less focus on orthodoxy (not that non-Western Christians are unorthodox in their theology, but the place of propositional truth is not as relevant to their situation, since they are largely Premodern, not Modern).
Typical theological debates in the West:
mode of baptism; status of the papacy; Calvinism vs. Arminianism; God’s transcendence; Cessationism/Dispensationalism vs. the continuing of the gifts of the Spirit
Typical theological debates in the non-Western world:
fate of dead ancestors; spiritual warfare; the relationship between poverty and faith; God’s immanence; conversion to Christ in a religiously pluralistic world (can you be a Muslim Christian, i.e. convert to Christ but not to Christianity? Or a “crypto-Christian”?)
What do we do with all these changes? One thing is for sure: we cannot rest on our old paradigm of how Christianity is “done.” We must think of new and creative ways to engage the world with our Christian faith. This is not mission as your parents knew it!
Philip Jenkins sums it up in The Next Christendom:
These newer churches preach deep personal faith and communal orthodoxy, mysticism and Puritanism, all founded on clear scriptural authority. They preach messages that, to a Westerner, appear simplistically charismatic, visionary, and apocalyptic. In this thought-world, prophecy is an everyday reality, while faith-healing, exorcism, and dream-visions are all basic components of religious sensibility. For better or worse, the dominant churches of the future could have much in common with those of medieval or early modern European times. On present evidence, a Southernized Christian future should be distinctly conservative.
And Lamin Sanneh in Disciples of All Nations:
To a surprising extent, the cosmopolitan characteristics of classical Christianity have few parallels in the post-Western developments. There have, for example, been no heresy trials, no bloody battles of theological difference, no spectacles of killing of religious enemies, and no campaigns of state-sponsored military conversion. On the contrary, World Christianity is remarkable for its civil character, its relative peacefulness, and its nonreliance on the state instrument.
