Global gospel: Christianity is alive and well in the Southern Hemisphere

Christian Century, July 17, 2002 by Sara Miller

The world as most Christians in the South experience it strikingly resembles the world of the New Testament.

CHRISTIANS THROUGHOUT history may be justly accused of many failures, but it appears neglecting evangelism is not one of them. Observers of Christian growth have been suggesting over the last few decades that the faith is experiencing a significant migratory moment, not unlike the first explosive venture outside the tribe of the Jews into the unfamiliar world of the gentiles. That movement internationalized Christianity, then Hellenized it and eventually Europeanized it. The point historians of religion make is that Christian expansion was not just a matter of adding more people but of adding other people and cultures to its family. The point missiologists would add is that evangelization did not succeed by assimilating local cultures but by converting them. That is how a religion with a Palestinian homeland came to be associated with a European heartland.

Now the map has changed again, and in this geographical shift lies the future of Christianity. Historian Philip Jenkins of Penn State University believes the recent burgeoning of Christianity in the non-Western world could represent a seminal moment in Christian history, perhaps even world history. Jenkins has marshaled the statistical evidence and the scholarship in his new book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.

A capsule of his findings would include the following facts: Over the past century, Christian populations in the West have either been holding steady or declining, while in Africa, Asia and Latin America--the "global South" in current geopolitical coinage--the numbers have been rising significantly and in some cases dramatically. Today there are more Christians living in the global South than in Europe, North America, Russia and Japan. Roughly two-thirds of all Protestants live outside Europe and North America. This is partly a reflection of general population trends in both the South (rising) and the West (steady at best), and of the triumph of secularism in Western nations.

But the statistics also reveal something far more meaningful: a boom in conversions across the South and the rise of new and independent churches. Not only are there more people in the developing world but more of those people are becoming Christian. In 1965 the Christian population in Africa was around 25 percent of the continental total. Today it is 46 percent. In 1920 there were some 300,000 Christians in Korea; today there are between 10 and 12 million, approximately 25 percent of the total population.

Add to this the fact that many of the largest and fastest growing megacities, among them Sao Paulo, Manila, Mexico City, Kinshasa and Kampala, already boast large and in a few cases majority Christian populations--and these are swelling too. In some cities churches can't be built fast or big enough. Moreover, while this growth is occurring across denominations, and within the mainline churches as well as newer, independent churches, some of the most striking gains are occurring within the Pentecostal or charismatic fold. Even the traditional churches--Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and so on--have themselves developed a more "spirited" style since the great missionary period, first in convergence with local religious expression, more recently in response to evangelical pressures. If Pentecostal groups, independent churches and charismatic movements continue to gain converts, the traditional denominations may lean even further in that direction. For Jenkins this all adds up to the possibility that the Western model of Christianity, for so long a conceptual affair, could soon be superseded by a decidedly charismatic Southern model.

There are worlds of difference between Korean Pentecostal movements and African independent churches, between mainline Catholicism in the Philippines and evangelical Protestantism in Brazil, Jenkins observes. African Christianity by itself is a many-splendored thing, with prophet-healing churches, radical charismatic sects, new Pentecostal groups, plus strong traditional congregations. But there are some common characteristics. "The most important one," Jenkins says, "is the idea of the direct, divine intervention in daily life. The idea that religion can provide healing of mind, body and soul, and the three can't be separated, is an absolutely fundamental notion in the South."

"That's obviously not an idea that's unfamiliar in the West," he adds. "You can go to many Pentecostal churches and say, `I'm sick,' or even, `I'm possessed,' and they will try to cure you. If you go to an Episcopal or Catholic church they will point you to an emergency ward, and they might even point you to a psychiatric emergency ward. And I think that's the fundamental difference."

The mainstream tendency to discount or rationalize the supernatural leads to all sorts of Western anxieties when confronting the spectacle of world Christianity. "I think there is a genuine embarrassment/horror when people in the West look at, for instance, some of the Pentecostal traditions, and I'm always very worried when people look at Asian or African religion and present it as a kind of syncretism, as a kind of survival of the pagan," says Jenkins. "In virtually every case you can see exactly where they're getting these ideas: they're getting them from the New Testament. That may be the single biggest factor that people writing on Third World Christianity often miss, which is the completely biblical nature of a lot of what's happening."