Book 3: The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

by

A United Methodist Insight Exclusive

"Is Christianity Dying?" read the headline.

The humorous article was printed in the magazine Christianity and Crisis (1941-1993). It is the first piece I remember that called attention to the decline of the church. The title was “The Last Presbyterian.” It was based upon then-current statistics that showed the main Presbyterian denomination had been declining in membership for a number of years, while at the same time monetary giving to the denomination continued to climb. The writer, St. Hereticus, the pseudonym for theologian Robert McAfee Brown, did some projections and gave a year in the future purporting that the denomination was down to a Mrs. So-and-so who gave a huge sum of money to her church.

Thus, the perception has been around for a long time that Christianity is on the decline. And the drumbeat data of decline have been with us ever since.

But in 2014 a book was written that shatters that perception. In "The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity," author Philip Jenkins shares global statistics to refute the decline. Jenkins is professor of the humanities in history and religious studies at Penn State University and distinguished senior fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University.

If one looks only at the West, meaning mainly Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, the decline in church membership has been going on for some years. But if we look at the issue on a global scale, we find something different. There has been no such decline in the Global South. What is termed the Global South includes Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

 “Whatever Europeans or North Americans may believe, Christianity is doing very well indeed in the global South—not just surviving but expanding….Even if Christians just maintain their present share of the population in countries such as Nigeria and Kenya, Mexico and Ethiopia, Brazil and the Philippines, there are soon going to be several hundred million more Christians from those nations alone.” (Page 2)

Let’s continue in letting him lay out his statistics, which he has borrowed from World Christian Database.

“In 1900 Europe was home to two-thirds of the world’s Christian population; today, the figure is about 25 percent, and by 2025 it will fall below 20 percent…. The number of African Christians is growing at around 2.5 percent annually, which would lead us to project a doubling of the continent’s Christian population in thirty years. If we extrapolate these figures to the year 2025, the Southern predominance becomes still more marked. Assuming no great gains or losses through conversion, then there would be around 2.6 billion Christians, of whom 695 million would live in Africa, 610 million in Latin America, and 480 million in Asia.”

He makes use of a chart from the World Christian Database, of the number of Christians beginning with 1900 and projecting into 2050.

The number of Christians globally in 1900 was a third of the world’s population. It is a third now and it will be a third in 2050.

“Christianity should enjoy a worldwide boom in the coming decades, but the vast majority of believers will be neither white nor European, nor Euro-American.”

There you have it: the only part of the globe where membership is falling is in the West. 

And in our narrowness of our perspective, we think the church is dying and maybe God is too. On the other hand, maybe Bosch had a vital insight in following what the missiologists think when they talk about missio Dei: that the church is not the main actor in bringing about God’s dream – God is.

It makes me have some sympathy for the early Christians in Jerusalem who sulked when Paul started bringing all those Gentile barbarians into “our” faith. Now the shoe is on the other foot. It is we who, in our Western civility, query ‘how odd of God to choose the…Global South."

Jenkins is well aware that many of the Global North shudder when they think of what many of the churches in the Global South are like. Many of us are aware of the struggles that the Anglican family has had recently. It was over the issue of human sexuality, like we United Methodists have had.

Every ten years, all the bishops and archbishops of the 80-million-member strong Anglican family gather to make decisions at what they call the Lambeth Conference. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who is nominally their head, presides over the conference. When the American Episcopal Church ordained openly gay Eugene Robinson as bishop, the Lambeth Conference, behind the African archbishops’ leadership, barred the American Episcopal Church from participation in their decision making.

Beyond the church in Africa, many African nations there have come down hard on LGBTQ+ persons, some to the point of making same sex activity subject to capital punishment.

For the Left, attracted by visions of liberation, the rise of the South suggests that Northern Christians must commit themselves to social and political activism at home, to ensuring economic justice and combating racism, to promoting cultural diversity. Conservatives, in contrast, emphasize the moral and sexual conservatism of the emerging churches, and seek to enlist them as natural allies.

To make his point that that the Christian Church has always had difficulty accepting the new boy on the block, especially that God may be acting through that new one, Jenkins imagines a conversation taking place.

“We picture a meeting of church leaders who have gathered to hear a report from a traveler from a not so antique land, from the remote barbarian world of Western Europe.

"The traveler delights his listeners by telling them of the many new conversions among the strange peoples of England or Germany, and the creation of whole new dioceses in the midst of the northern forests. Impatiently, the assembled hierarchs press him to answer the key question: this new Christianity coming into being, is it the Christianity of Edessa or of Damascus ?

"Where do the new converts stand on the crucial issues of the day, on the Monothelite heresy , on Iconoclasm ? When the traveler tells them, regretfully , that these issues really do not register in those parts of the world , where religious life has utterly different concerns and emphases , the Syrians are alarmed . Is this really a new Christianity, they ask , or is it some new syncretistic horror ? How can any Christian not be centrally concerned with these issues ? And while Syrian Christianity carried on debating these questions to exhaustion, the new churches of Europe entered a great age of spiritual growth and intellectual endeavor.”

"Who in that age could have foreseen the global expansion of that poor hatchling, Western Christianity?"

In this new and substantially expanded Third Edition, Philip Jenkins continues to illuminate the remarkable expansion of Christianity in the global South – in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Drawing upon the extensive new scholarship that has appeared on this topic in recent years, he asks how the new Christianity is likely to affect the poor, among whom it finds its most devoted adherents.

How should we interpret the enormous success of prosperity churches across the Global South?

Politically, what will be the impact of new Christian movements? Does Christianity liberate women, or introduce new scriptural bases for subjection?

Will Christianity contribute to liberating the poor, to give voices to the previously silent, or does it threaten only to bring new kinds of division and conflict?

Contents:

Publisher’s statement

Preface

Maps

1  The Christian Revolution  

2  Disciples of All Nations

3  Missionaries and Prophets

4  Standing Alone

5  The Rise of the New Christianity

6  Coming to Terms

7  God and the World

8  The Next Crusade

9  Coming Home

10  Seeing Christianity Again for the First Time

The Rev. H. A. "Bud" Tillinghast is a retired clergy member of the California-Nevada Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. He serves as curator of the special project, Preparing a Digital Resource Library for the UMC's Future, sponsored by United Methodist Insight. Please email Insight for permission to republish this content elsewhere.