The New Shape of World Christianity E-Book

Mark A. Noll

• Herausgeber: IVP Academic
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 338

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

- 2010 Christianity Today Book Award winnerWith characteristic rigor and insight, in this book Mark Noll revisits the history of the American church in the context of world events. He makes the compelling case that how Americans have come to practice the Christian faith is just as globally important as what the American church has done in the world. Noll backs up this substantial claim with the scholarly attentiveness we've come to expect from him, lucidly explaining the relationship between the development of Christianity in North America and the development of Christianity in the rest of the world, with attention to recent transfigurations in world Christianity. Here is a book that will challenge your assumptions about the nature of the relationship between the American church and the global church in the past and predict what world Christianity may look like.

Leseprobe

The New Shape of World Christianity

How American Experience Reflects Global Faith

Mark A. Noll

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com E-mail: [email protected]

© 2009 by Mark A. Noll

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Design: Cindy Kiple

Image: ©poco_bs/iStockphoto            ©narvikk/iStockphoto

Dedicated to

Andrew Walls

Don Church

John Jauchen

Contents

Tables and Figures

1: Introduction

2: The New Shape of World Christianity

3: Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Identity, Power and Culture as Anticipating the Future

4: Posing the Question

5: What Does Counting Missionaries Reveal?

6: Indictment and Response

7: American Experience as Template

8: American Evangelicals View the World, 1900-2000

9: What Korean Believers Can Learn from American Evangelical History

10: The East African Revival

11: Reflections

Guide to Further Reading

Notes

Index

About the Author

Endorsements

Tables and Figures

Table 2.1 Christian Adherence by U.N.-Defined Region (in millions)

Table 2.2 Evangelical and Pentecostal-Charismatic Adherents (in millions)

Table 3.1 World Population and World Christian Population: 1800, 1900, 1914

Table 3.2 Foreign Missionaries, Native Workers and Christian Adherents (1911)

Table 5.1 Overseas Missionary Personnel (World and United States)

Table 5.2 Number of U.S. Agencies Founded

Table 5.3 Missionary Force 1972: U.S. Protestant, U.S. Roman Catholic, British Protestant

Table 5.4 U.S. Protestant Missionaries Serving Overseas (A) Mainline Protestant Denominations (B) Evangelical Denominations (C) Interdenominational Agencies

Table 5.5 Evangelical Proportion of U.S. Protestant Missionary Force

Table 5.6 U.S. Protestant Missionary Agencies

Table 7.1 U.S. and Non-U.S. Personnel in Evangelical Missionary Agencies, 1999/2001

Table 10.1 The Countries Most Affected by the East African Revival

Figure 10.1

1 Introduction

The new world situation for the Christian religion demands a new history of Christianity. Naturally, with the startling changes that have taken place over the last century in the church worldwide, quite a bit more is needed than just a new history, especially since those changes have been as dramatic as anything experienced by the worldwide body of Christ since its very earliest years.

Older histories of Christianity remain irreplaceable; their insights are still valuable for readers with the time and energy to study them. The problem is not that earlier historical accounts are necessarily erroneous or misleading. It is rather that they presume a core Christian narrative dominated by events, personalities, organizations, money and cultural expectations in Europe and North America—and then surrounded by a fringe of miscellaneous missionary phenomena scattered throughout the rest of the globe. Such a historical picture was all but inevitable given conditions, say, in 1900 when over 80 percent of the world Christian population was Caucasian and over 70 percent resided in Europe.[1]

But today—when active Christian adherence has become stronger in Africa than in Europe, when the number of practicing Christians in China may be approaching the number in the United States, when live bodies in church are far more numerous in Kenya than in Canada, when more believers worship together in church Sunday by Sunday in Nagaland than in Norway, when India is now home to the world’s largest chapter of the Roman Catholic Jesuit order, and when Catholic mass is being said in more languages each Sunday in the United States than ever before in American history—with such realities defining the present situation, there is a pressing need for new historical perspectives that explore the new world situation.

Christian theology is also being asked to address new issues that are important to the world’s new Christian communities. For example, urgent questions about the place of unevangelized ancestors in the kingdom of God or about battles between angels and demons are now taking the pride of place among believers worldwide that was once given to debates concerning human free will, the changelessness of God, the subjects and mode of baptism, or the status of the papacy.

These changes now affecting all aspects of Christian life include a shifting balance in missionary activity. Today more Christian workers from Brazil are active in crosscultural ministry outside their homelands than from Britain or from Canada. More than 10,000 foreign Christian workers are today laboring in Britain, France, Germany and Italy—more than 35,000 in the United States.[2] Obviously, once-fixed notions of “sending country” and “receiving country” have been tossed into the air.

Again, the new world situation is witnessing unprecedented educational opportunities and unprecedented educational dilemmas. In the Majority World, vast numbers of eager Christian students strain thin economic resources, while in the West some well-endowed establishments are begging for students.

Throughout the rapidly expanding Christian world—as also in the old Christian heartlands—change and changed perceptions have become the order of the day. Among many other results, the tidal wave of change is also raising important questions about how it all got this way. Thankfully, as the Guide to Further Reading at the end of this book indicates, an increasing supply of detailed writing is now becoming available for almost every part of the Christian world.

Rather than duplicating the gratifying increase of solid work on the non-Western world, this book attempts to mediate between older and newer histories. Its focus is on Christianity in the United States, but against the background of the world. For that purpose, it is vital to understand how “American Christianity” developed out of European experience, how it was transplanted to the new world, and then how it absorbed distinctive traits from the course of American experience. But the point of this book is not primarily to shed light on the history of Christianity in North America. It is, rather, to address the question of what American Christianity means for the worldwide Christian community. How, in other words, should responsible participants and observers understand the role of American Christianity in the great recent transformations of world Christianity? What has been, is and should be the relationship between Christian development in North America and Christian development in the rest of the world?

To answer that question, this book examines connections between American religious life and key developments in the recent world history of Christianity. It probes the American role in the tumultuous cascade of events that have so rapidly altered the character of worldwide Christianity. And it tries to interpret that role as both a positive and negative force. The book hopes to show why such questions are important, both because of what the United States has done in the world, but even more because of what kind of Christianity we Americans practice.

The book’s major argument is that Christianity in its American form has indeed become very important for the world. But it has become important, not primarily because of direct influence. Rather, the key is how American Christianity was itself transformed when Europeans carried their faith across the Atlantic. The American model rather than American manipulation is key. Without denying the importance of American churches, money, military might, educational institutions and missionaries for the Christian world as it is now constituted, I am suggesting that how Americans have come to practice the Christian faith is just as important globally as what Americans have done.

The chapters that follow set out this argument in some detail, but the main points can be summarized in this introduction. First, the proper start for understanding the United States in relation to world Christianity is to understand what happened in the United States itself beginning in the late eighteenth century.[3] From that point in time and over the next century one of the most successful missionary ventures of all time took place, and it took place in the United States of America (and to only a slightly lesser extent in Canada).

Second, this remarkable missionary work was accomplished through voluntary means. In North America, the older pattern of European state churches was set aside and Christian faith advanced (or declined) and flourished (or decayed) as believers took the initiative to do the work themselves. The formal and legal intermingling of church and society that had defined European Christendom for more than a thousand years faded away as a new way of organizing churches and Christian activity took its place.

Third, the type of faith that resulted when North Americans traded Christendom for voluntary Christianity was not completely different from all that had gone before. Some parallel movements in Europe have indeed shared some of the American traits, if never to the same degree.[4] Yet visitors from outside the United States have always noticed several characteristic features about the American form of Christian faith that set it apart from European forms:

It was much more oriented to the Bible and the individual conscience as ultimate norms of religious authority than to tradition or history.

It was much more pragmatic and commonsensical than formal and dogmatic.

For successful leaders, it looked much more to entrepreneurs selecting themselves than to figures designated by a hierarchy.

Its strong investment in the building of Christian communities relied much more on self-motivating creativity than on inherited patterns of operation.

Its strength lay with the enterprising middle classes rather than the privileged upper classes or subservient lower classes.

And it enjoyed an elective affinity with free-market initiatives rather than with controlled economic practice.

Fourth, it is important to remember that these American developments led to both positive and negative results. Whether they resulted in a net improvement in understanding and living out the gospel is a complex question. Some things doubtless got better. For example, by comparison with Europe, American churches witnessed much increased participation by laymen and laywomen in carrying out the tasks of the gospel. But some things doubtlessly worsened. For example, the laity and many clergy came to ignore the riches of the Christian past and the practical lessons of godliness, discipleship and effective service taught by that history. Although further evaluation of this American style is attempted at the end of the book, its main point is not evaluative but descriptive. Over the course of the nineteenth century a new style of Christianity flourished in the United States. Then—and the book is trying to underscore this latter development—over the course of the twentieth century what had become standard American religious practice grew increasingly representative of what was taking place around the world.

Finally, different explanations can be offered for why American styles of religion have become more important in the world at large. It is possible to view this development in terms of direct influence—that is, much of the rest of the Christian world now looks more and more like the Christianity in North America because North Americans have pushed it in that direction. Without denying a substantial American influence in the world, however, I will stress the advantage of seeing the newer regions of recent Christian growth as following a historical path that Americans pioneered before much of the rest of the Christian world embarked on the same path.

How This Book Came to Be Written

This book can be no more than an interim report, since what it is trying to describe is changing so rapidly. Even more, my own limited grasp of recent world history must keep conclusions provisional. Yet because of a series of influences and opportunities, I am convinced that even an interim report may stimulate other North American believers to ponder more seriously the great ongoing drama of world Christian transformation. As a reader, I have been greatly stimulated by a host of authors whose works have discerningly probed the major changes under way, especially Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Dana Robert, David Martin and Philip Jenkins.[5] I have also benefited greatly from informative personal conversations with Christian workers and Christian scholars with special knowledge about China, India, South Korea, Romania, Russia, Chad, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines and the South Pacific. In addition, for several years it has been my privilege to teach a course on “the twentieth-century world history of Christianity” at Wheaton College, Regent College—Vancouver, Calvin College and the University of Notre Dame. Although I have much appreciated how students in these classes have responded to what I tried tell them, I have appreciated even more their papers, reports and experiences from around the globe. I have also been privileged to have the able assistance of my friend and coauthor Carolyn Nystrom for this project. In recent years I have been asked to write papers and deliver lectures on themes related to the new shape of world Christianity. And I have received articles, books, insights and much more from friends and colleagues whose generous contributions are acknowledged in the notes.

These duties, contacts and experiences have emboldened me to prepare this book. It puts to use much material that was prepared for the classroom and other assignments, but rethought and rewritten for these pages. In what follows, I am hoping to communicate to others some of the great challenges and great encouragement that I have received for my own faith from attending seriously to the new shape of world Christianity.

The book is aimed primarily at my fellow evangelical Christians, with several of the chapters focused directly on American evangelicals in relation to the world at large. There is no need to apologize for that focus, since evangelical Christianity has always been the main bridge for American believers to the non-Western world—and, with Roman Catholicism, the main religious bridge back to Europe. Still, if I could have treated the subject completely, the book would have included much more on Catholics, mainline Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Mormons and other groups, since American representatives of these bodies also sustain rich connections to the world at large.

The Shape of the Book

The central section—chapters four through seven—develops the argument that American form rather than American influence has been the most important American contribution to the recent world history of Christianity. But as a context for that contention, the first section begins in chapter two with a short sketch of the Christian world as it exists today and with a brief attempt to outline some of the challenges posed by this new reality. Then chapter three describes several developments among evangelicals during the nineteenth century that pointed in the direction of what would happen more widely in the world during the twentieth century.[6]

The second section is the heart of the volume. Chapter four first expands on the question about American influence in the world. Then chapter five provides a numerical history of twentieth-century missionary activity as a concrete way to chart American activity overseas. In the same vein, chapter six examines criticism that has claimed to see a controlling American hand behind modern Christian development throughout the world, and it sketches responses to that criticism. Chapter seven uses the material from the preceding chapters for returning to the main argument—that the way Christianity developed in North America during the nineteenth century has been much more characteristic of contemporary world Christianity than the older forms of European Christendom. In this second section as a whole I try to flesh out the corollary point that it is not convincing to explain the new shape of world Christianity in terms of direct American influence.[7]

The book’s third section, which contains several case studies, is somewhat looser in organization. Its goal is to draw spiritual and historical lessons from the interactions of American Christianity and world Christianity. The first of these chapters examines American evangelical perceptions of the world from 1900 to 2000.[8] It surveys American evangelical magazines that were published in 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975 and 2000 in order to ask how American perceptions related to global realities. The next chapter takes up the question of what a “young church” (in this case, in South Korea) might learn from the history of Christianity in America.[9] The third case study provides an overview of the East African Revival, which began in the 1930s and continues to affect churches from the headwaters of the Nile to the southeastern African coast and in far-flung places throughout the globe. Its main point is to ask why, if so many features of this revival seem so directly related to features of American (and European) church life, it should be considered an indigenous expression of African Christianity.[10] A short concluding chapter summarizes the book’s main contentions about the great recent changes in world Christianity and then reflects on the larger meaning of these developments for believers and Christian organizations in the United States. It represents a historian’s efforts to highlight the Christian meaning of the dramatic events of recent Christian history. In this last chapter, as well as at earlier points, I make use of some of the insightful things that foreign observers have had to say about the development and character of American Christianity.

* * *

As this book was going to press, students of world Christianity were deeply saddened by the untimely death of Ogbu Kalu (1943-2009), the Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity and Mission at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Ogbu’s friendship, his vast learning about Christianity in Africa, his insightful guidance for historical writing on the new shape of world Christianity, and his specific insights that are used in chapter seven below—all these and more make me one of the great number who mourn his passing and thank God for his life.

The book is dedicated to three individuals who have been a special encouragement in my efforts to explore the new shape of world Christianity. Andrew Walls first opened my eyes as a historian and my mind as a Christian to the immensity of what was happening in the contemporary world. Don Church, with gentle persistence, got me to briefly set aside suburban predictability for experience on the ground in Eastern Europe, and then has remained an inspiration through the wealth of his own world Christian connections. John Jauchen, whose treasured friendship goes back more than forty years, has opened up to me the difficulties and the dilemmas, but also the nearly indescribable joy, of God’s ongoing work in the non-Western world. For what these mentors have given to me this book is a meager, but heartfelt, return.

2 The New Shape of World Christianity

A good way to begin an inquiry about the American factor in the new shape of world Christianity is to provide a brief sketch of that new shape. And the most important thing to realize about the current situation of Christianity throughout the world is that things are not as they were. A Christian Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep under a tree midway through the twentieth century and then woke up this past week to the sound of church bells (or a synthesizer with drums) on a Sunday morning, would not recognize the shifted shape of world Christianity. It is as if the globe had been turned upside down and sideways. A few short decades ago, Christian believers were concentrated in the global north and west, but now a rapidly swelling majority lives in the global south and east. As Rip Van Winkle wiped a half-century of sleep from his eyes and tried to locate his fellow Christian believers, he would find them in surprising places, expressing their faith in surprising ways, under surprising conditions, with surprising relationships to culture and politics, and raising surprising theological questions that would not have seemed possible when he fell asleep.

The Magnitude of Recent Changes

The magnitude of recent changes is the first thing, though not necessarily the most important thing, to grasp about the new world situation. A series of contrasts can underscore the great changes of the recent past:

This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called “Christian Europe.” Yet in 1970 there were no legally functioning churches in all of China; only in 1971 did the communist regime allow for one Protestant and one Roman Catholic Church to hold public worship services, and this was mostly a concession to visiting Europeans and African students from Tanzania and Zambia.

This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined—and the number of Anglicans in church in Nigeria was several times the number in those other African countries.

This past Sunday more Presbyterians were at church in Ghana than in Scotland, and more were in congregations of the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa than in the United States.

This past Sunday there were more members of Brazil’s Pentecostal Assemblies of God at church than the combined total in the two largest U.S. Pentecostal denominations, the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ in the United States.

This past Sunday more people attended the Yoido Full Gospel Church pastored by Yongi Cho in Seoul, Korea, than attended all the churches in significant American denominations like the Christian Reformed Church, the Evangelical Covenant Church or the Presbyterian Church in America. Six to eight times as many people attended this one church as the total that worshiped in Canada’s ten largest churches combined.

This past Sunday Roman Catholics in the United States worshiped in more languages than at any previous time in American history.

This past Sunday the churches with the largest attendance in England and France had mostly black congregations. About half of the churchgoers in London were African or African-Caribbean. Today, the largest Christian congregation in Europe is in Kiev, and it is pastored by a Nigerian of Pentecostal background.

This past Sunday there were more Roman Catholics at worship in the Philippines than in any single country of Europe, including historically Catholic Italy, Spain or Poland.

This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. Most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia.

And for several years the world’s largest chapter of the Jesuit order has been found in India, not in the United States, as it had been for much of the late twentieth century.

In a word, the Christian church has experienced a larger geographical redistribution in the last fifty years than in any comparable period in its history, with the exception of the very earliest years of church history. Some of this change comes from the general growth of world population, but much also arises from remarkable rates of evangelization in parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the islands of the South Pacific—but also from a nearly unprecedented relative decline of Christian adherence in Europe.

The result of population changes—in general for the world, specifically for the churches—is a series of mind-blowing realities: More than half of all Christian adherents in the whole history of the church have been alive in the last one hundred years. Close to half of Christian believers who have ever lived are alive right now. Historian Dana Robert has summarized the demographic implications with a telling statement: “The typical late twentieth-century Christian was no longer a European man but a Latin American or African woman.”[1] The magnitude of recent change means that all believers, including those in the former Christian heartlands of Europe and North America, are faced with the prospect of reorientation. But the scale and pace of recent developments means that more than just history needs to be reoriented; the awareness of where North American and European believers now fit within that history requires reassessment as well.

Table 2.1

Christian Adherence by U.N.-Defined Region (in millions)

(approximate % of population in parenthesis)

1800

1900

2008

Africa

4.3 (4.8%)

8.8

423.7 (47.7%)

Asia

8.4 (1.4%)

20.8

355.0 (9.1%)

Europe (incl. Russia)

171.7 (91.8%)

368.2

556.4 (76.7%)

L. America

14.9 (92.0%)

60.0

530.2 (95.0%)

N. America

5.6 (35.0%)

59.6

220.4 (66.4%)

Oceania

.1 (5.0%)

4.3

22.8 (65.0%)

Source: David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, and Peter F. Crossing, “Status of Global Mission, Presence, and Activities, AD 1800-2025,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 32 (January 2008): 30.

Table 2.2

Tables 2.1 and 2.2 present only cold numbers, but even if they can only be “best estimates,” they indicate changes of stunning proportion.

The Multiplicity of New Christian Expressions

Almost as stunning as the magnitude of change in recent Christian history is a dramatic multiplication of the forms of Christian faith that are now found on the planet. Over the course of the last century, the Christian entrance into local cultures has accelerated as never before. Many factors have contributed to this acceleration, but the most important is translation. First came translations of the Bible into local languages, but translation has also carried liturgies, hymns, theology and devotion from the vast cultural archives of the Christian West into the emerging discourses of the world. Lamin Sanneh, an African from Gambia, was born a Muslim and as a youth memorized the Qur’an. He converted to Christianity as a young adult and then studied and taught Islamic history on several continents before taking up his current position at Yale as a professor of African studies, history and world Christianity. In a seminal book published in 1989, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, Sanneh articulated an argument that he has fleshed out considerably since that time. In his depiction, the activity of Christian translation has brought unique spiritual empowerment to those who, often for the first time, hear the message of Scripture in their mother tongues.[2] Africans, for example, are drawn into stories about Jesus and are not surprised when Jesus speaks to them in dreams and visions—as, according to the New Testament, he did to the early apostles.

Before 1900, portions of the Christian Scriptures had been translated into about seven hundred of the world’s languages; in the past century alone, more than sixteen hundred new languages have received at least part of the Bible. Evangelical Protestants have been in the forefront of this translation effort, but Roman Catholics have not been far behind.

Results from this unprecedented effort in Bible translation have been—at one and the same time—conservative, ironic, liberating and chaotic. They have been conservative because once marginalized people are given literature in their own language, they receive a tool that anchors them to their own past, their own traditions and their own culture. One of Sanneh’s key arguments is that while the spread of Islam has drawn ever-increasing numbers to the globalizing influence of Arabic, the spread of Christianity binds ever-increasing numbers to their own local languages. Ironically, although missionaries may have been very clear about what they intended when they set out to translate the Scriptures, local people have often found in their newly translated Bibles things that the missionaries did not want them to see. In one such irony, straight-laced Victorians did not realize how much unintended support they brought to the ancestral African practice of polygamy by putting the stories of patriarchs like Abraham and David into local languages.

This wave of translations has also been liberating, especially because it has given to peoples all over the world a sense of being themselves the hearers of God’s direct speech. Thus, in a world where fewer and fewer can escape modern electronic technology and the reach of “imperial” languages associated with that technology—Chinese, French, Spanish and especially English—the chance to hear the Christian message in one’s own mother tongue takes on even greater significance. This contrast between universal languages from outside the community and new Christian material translated into a community’s traditional language makes an evangelistic tool like the Jesus Film from Campus Crusade for Christ extremely important. Now available in over one thousand languages and having been viewed by a total count exceeding the number of people in the world, this cinematic version of the gospel of Luke offers the first high-tech voices that many native peoples have ever heard in their own language. The fact that these voices offer the Christian story has had a transformative influence in many parts of the world.[3]

Translation, by strengthening the Christian presence in many new locations has, however, also weakened some bonds of cohesion in worldwide Christianity and pointed in the direction of religious chaos. According to David Barrett, the great enumerator of modern world Christianity, about one-fifth of the world’s two billion believers are “independent,” that is, not associated with the churches, denominations and traditions that have long been equated with the essence of Christianity itself.[4] This kind of independence often provides little sense of connection with past Christian wisdom or the present-day concerns of believers in other places. When new believers read the Bible in the local language within their own cultures, one of the dangers is always “syncretism,” the excessive intermingling of a culture’s non-Christian elements with the Christian message.

As many observers have pointed out, however, syncretism has become a difficult charge to apply with precision. It is often a question of the beholder’s eye as well as what the beholder sees. Some believers in rural China may seem to incorporate a lot of ancestral superstition into their new-found faith; but such ones are also in position to ask why many Western Christians have, for example, so readily adapted themselves to the commercial Sunday, which from an orthodox Christian perspective can look an awful lot like simply caving in to non-Christian elements of modern Western culture.

If syncretism is a danger when Christian concepts, as well as Christian books, are translated into a new culture, the translation process also says something powerful in and to the new culture. Translation implies that the receiving cultures, with their languages, histories and assumptions, are worthy of God’s attention; they are valuable entities that the entrance of God’s word can change into something even better.

The contemporary multiplicity of world Christianity reveals itself in a rainbow of variations throughout the world. Germany still reflects the ancient church-state establishments of Europe where a majority of the population still designates a portion of their income tax to the churches, but where only 5 to 10 percent of the people actually attend church. But among those 5 to 10 percent are some very serious believers indeed. When they are moved to evangelize the increasingly pagan populations of Europe, their first step—as a matter of built-in cultural instinct—is to form a committee. But when the same motive arises among believers in the Philippines, the first step is to just get at it. In the Philippines, organizational structures for guiding the process come later, if they come at all.

Likewise in some Christian movements among high caste Brahmins in India, strong charismatic healing ministries are present among people who refuse to organize as a church. Meanwhile, also in India believers of the Mar Thoma Church practice ancient forms of liturgy descended from the very first Christian centuries, perhaps even from Thomas, the disciple of Jesus, whom the Mar Thoma Christians look upon as their founder. Yet today there are also many congregations of Indian Mar Thoma Christians in greater Chicago and other U.S. metropolitan regions.

And so it goes in the new configuration of world Christianity, with many now deeply rooted Christian practices that do not conform to traditional Western norms:

Some Korean Christians treat respect for ancestors—both living and dead—as a Christian duty, even though to outsiders it might look suspiciously like ancestor worship.

In West Africa, suburban Christians on the way to the pharmacy for medication might pause to pray earnestly for divine healing—then resume the trip, fill the prescription and take the pills.

In East Africa, a normal part of worship might include public and personal confession of sin along with repentance—a pattern growing out of the East African Revival that began in the 1930s and continues in different forms to this day.

Meanwhile in Shanghai, members of the Local Church, or Little Flock, who are spiritual descendents of the ministry of Watchman Nee, also confess their sins to one another. Like the East African Revival, this broad stream represents local Christian appropriation of some elements of the Keswick movement, with its focus on higher spiritual life, which began in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Brazilian television features the preaching of numerous Pentecostal preachers, who proclaim their messages in loud flamboyant tones; but also on Brazilian television are channels where Roman Catholic priests provide much the same fare.

In a word, today’s Christian situation is marked by multiplicity because of how deeply the Christian message, fully indigenized in local languages, has become part of local cultures. The new shape of world Christianity offers a mosaic of many, many varieties of local belief and practice. Immigration, the modern media, global trade and the ease of contemporary travel have stirred this mixture. In many places it is possible to find traces—or more—of American influence. But the multiplicity goes far beyond what any one influence can explain, except the adaptability of the Christian faith itself.

The Material Conditions of the New World Christianity

A subject with clear connections to the American presence in the world concerns material goods, or the realm of things that can be purchased. The rapid diffusion of Christian adherence into parts of the world where churches barely existed 150 years ago has left a skewed distribution of resources. Today, unlike almost any other earlier period, the money and the strong educational institutions of Christianity are in one part of the world, while a majority of the active believers are located elsewhere. The result is that a Western Christian minority continues to mean a great deal for the Christian majority of the non-West. To be sure, theological education is now being offered to Nepalese in the Philippines, to Ukrainians in Romania, to West Africans in Kenya, to Latin Americans of all nationalities and traditions in Brazil, and to Chinese in Singapore. But Rome, London, Paris, Tübingen, Chicago and Boston remain destinations of choice for Christians from all over the world who seek out the highest forms of higher education.

This Western concentration of educational resources creates some odd blends of educational opportunity and inopportunity. Funding for studying the economic difficulties in modern Liberia, as an example, might be available at the University of Chicago, but probably not in Liberia. At Cambridge University, Boston University or Fuller Theological Seminary, a student wanting to study the East African Revival could find willing mentors and the possibility of fellowship support, but not as easily in Uganda and Rwanda, where such revivals actually began. As a specific example, the last few years have seen several excellent general histories of Christianity in Africa, which are cited in the “Guide to Further Reading,” but not until 2005 was a thorough study produced by Africans.[5] For the most part, scholarly understanding of the world’s new Christian configurations remains unbalanced. While there is a rapidly growing quantity of first-rate information-gathering for the whole world, the oversight and much of the control of that information remains with the world’s established educational systems.

Another sign of global diversity is the universalization of missionary service. Sometimes this new character is a direct product of the disproportionate distribution of resources that now characterizes the world church. In Africa prior to World War II, missionaries were often the featured speakers at revival meetings that could draw several hundred Africans to a single gathering. But after the war, most revival efforts in Africa were spearheaded by Africans, with dramatically multiplied numbers and greatly altered cultural expectations. With Africans in charge, few worried about one bed per body or one chair per person. Rather, these gatherings became more like the revivals of the early American frontier where families simply made do—for transportation, for sleeping, for cooking, for seating. Africans influenced by such African-led revivals now carry to other countries their commitment to the gospel—usually first to other Africans who have left the homeland, but then increasingly to populations at large. To note comparisons over time as I try to do in chapter five is to chart the magnitude of such changes. The proportion of American, and more generally Western, missionaries in the world total of Christian missionaries is sinking fast.

But missionary funding is not the same thing as missionary recruiting. Wealth and missionary service remain connected. Even with the very rapid growth in world missionary activity, the preponderance of funding for missions still comes from the West.

What is true for missions is also true for the elusive construct called “Christian civilization.” While it is impossible to define “Christian civilization” exactly, its general sense includes internalized self- discipline encouraging stable living and the postponement of immediate gratifications. It means a respect for the law, which in the West was long taken to be an objective reflection of God’s righteousness. And it includes organized public support (with funds) for looking after those least able to care for themselves.

To greatly oversimplify the situation that now exists in the world, some marks of “Christian civilization” continue to persist where few people go to church while they are often absent where Christian adherence abounds. To put it graphically, if on a Sunday you want to attend a lively, well-attended, fervent and life-changing service of Christian worship, you want to be in Nairobi, not in Stockholm. But if you want to ensure that your family is well provided for if you lose your job or if you don’t want to worry about how rising food prices might keep you from feeding your children, then you want to be in Stockholm, not Nairobi. In a word, the material conditions of Christianity’s new world picture are opening up great opportunities, but they also pose great challenges to churches wherever they are.

Political Implications

The new situation of world Christianity also carries important political implications. At this level, the role of the United States as the major player in many of the world’s markets, alliances and hotspots is clearly related to the movements of Christian history.

A first and most obvious implication is that both Christianity and Islam have been expanding with great rapidity precisely in those areas of the world that have been most buffeted by the forces of colonization, decolonization and now economic globalization. These terms are important enough to pause for brief definition.

Colonization refers to what took place in the expansion of Europe from early modern times (sixteenth century), with much greater intensity in the period of early industrialization (nineteenth century), and with continuing force past the mid-twentieth century. As a consequence of this expansion, much of Asia, Africa and Latin America came to be occupied, governed and economically exploited by various countries of Europe.

Decolonization took place at the end of the colonial period—for example, with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, the great burst of independence for African states beginning in the late 1950s and, one might say, with the triumph of Mao Tse-Tung’s Communism in China in 1949.