I. INTRODUCTION#
During the twentieth century, globalization with its economic interdependence has accelerated more rapidly than anyone could have anticipated. The current wave of globalization emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War and has been driven by a worldwide shift to free-market economic systems, creating a myriad of new opportunities for international trade and investment.
The astonishing advance of the Internet and communications technology have made the world smaller, or “flatter,” as economist Thomas Friedman would say. Globalization has extended the reach of the individual by equalizing opportunity and allowing many more people to “connect, compete, and collaborate.”
While globalization is primarily regarded as an economic concept, one must also recognize that it is inevitably accompanied by environmental, cultural, and political implications. Even the Silk Road was not merely an avenue of economic trade, but also an avenue of cultural exchange.
Globalization has the potential to reshape religious ideas and realities in a way not seen before. For example, Pentecostal churches in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have become avenues of economic renewal in impoverished societies. The emergence of global Pentecostalism in particular has played a decisive role in shifting the balance from what is called the “global North” to the “global South.” In those nations most impacted by the expansion of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere, religious identities have supplanted political loyalties. The twenty-first century has all the ingredients for a global transformation of unprecedented dimensions.
One of the seminal events of twentieth-century missions occurred in 1910 at the World Missionary Conference (WMC) held in Edinburgh, Scotland. Championed by the Student Volunteer Movement with its inspirational slogan, “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation,” the conference was presided over by the American Methodist layman John R. Mott.
In contrast to earlier missionary assemblies, the Edinburgh conference had a more comprehensive vision, attracting the full spectrum of Protestants engaged in foreign missions. More than 1,200 delegates from various mission agencies attended to discuss such topics as Bible translation, mobilization of church support, and the training of indigenous leadership. Among other things, the conference launched a new journal, the International Review of Missions, to enhance scholarly discussion.
Another significant achievement was the establishment of an infrastructure to encourage internationally coordinated missionary efforts in the future. To that end the WMC created what would become the International Missionary Council (formally established in 1921), with Mott as the chairman. The IMC sought to establish international missionary networks as well as to encourage research into the key issues and practices in missionary outreach. Over the next years, Mott traveled widely and was able to stimulate the creation of some thirty national Christian councils around the globe. The purpose of these national councils was to highlight the ecclesiastical issues of that particular nation, encourage indigenous leadership, and promote unity and cooperation among the various Christian communities.
The Edinburgh Missionary Conference set a trajectory that would shape the future of Protestant missions for much of the twentieth century. Mott’s leadership also signaled a transition from British to American dominance in global missions.
Another notable achievement of the conference was laying the groundwork for the modern ecumenical movement. This bore fruit in 1961 when the International Missionary Council was renamed the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism and was incorporated into the World Council of Churches.
One of the historic hallmarks of Christianity has been the conjunction of Bible translation and missionary activity. As early as the second and third centuries, the New Testament was translated into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. An astounding achievement in the Eastern Church was the work of the Greek brothers Cyril and Methodius, who invented the Glagothic alphabet (precursor to Cyrillic) in the ninth century in order to translate the Bible into Slavic, thus paving the way for the Christianization of the Slavs.
From Cornelius Ruyl to John Eliot, William Carey, and Robert Morrison, translation of the Bible into the language of the people has been a Christian commitment and especially identified with Protestant missions.
This Protestant propensity was taken to a new level by William Cameron Townsend with the founding of Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT) in 1934. The WBT and its field organization, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, have made a significant contribution to the translations of the New Testament into nearly 1,200 language communities and the entire Bible in over 400 language communities. Portions of the New Testament have been translated into more than 2,300 languages.
Technological advances promise to accelerate Bible translation even more in the coming decades. New computer programs have made it feasible to translate Scriptures into some cognate languages in a relatively brief time. Significantly, certain cultural benefits accompany Bible translation. It not only speeds a church’s growth, but often enhances literacy and enhances the cultural identity of a particular people group. It also ensures that Christian information becomes a permanent part of the native culture and literature.
II. NEW CENTERS OF GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY#
By the mid-1980s one of the most significant developments of twentieth-century Christianity occurred — namely, the center of gravity in global Christianity had shifted from the Western to the non-Western world.
Christianity is currently experiencing a precipitous decline in much of the West (especially Europe) — the global North (North America and Europe) — and a majority of Christians now live outside the West in what is called the “global South” (Africa, Latin America, and Asia). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Christians represented about one-third of the world population.
Europe and North America have about 820 million Christian adherents.
The global South has about a billion Christians: 480 million in Latin America, 360 million in Africa, and 313 million in Asia.
By all estimates this pattern will only accelerate —with Christians in the global South numbering 1.7 billion by 2025.
A. Africa#
It is sometimes forgotten that Africa figures significantly in the story of Jesus. Egypt was not only a refuge for the infant Jesus and his family during Herod’s murderous rampage, but also a fulfillment of Hosea’s prophecy: “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1; see Matt. 2:13–15).
Although Christianity has often been portrayed as an alien intrusion from the West, it has a continuous history on the continent of Africa of nearly two thousand years.
The Coptic tradition identifies Mark, the writer of one of the Synoptic Gospels, as the first Christian missionary in North Africa.
The continent was the scene of some of the greatest theological controversies in the history of the church: Arianism, Donatism, and Pelagianism.
North African theologians such as Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Cyprian, Athanasius, and Augustine of Hippo decisively shaped the early development of Christianity.
Having entered North Africa through Egypt, Christianity then spread to ancient Nubia (largely modern Sudan and parts of southern Egypt) and Ethiopia. With the advance of Islam in the seventh century, Christianity began its long retreat in North Africa. Nubian Christianity eventually succumbed to Islam (in the fifteenth century), but Christianity did manage to survive as a minority religion in Egypt and Ethiopia.
Christianity made its first appearance in sub-Saharan Africa with the arrival of Portuguese missionaries in the fifteenth century. Catholicism gained a tenuous foothold in West Africa, but floundered over time. For the next several centuries the relationship between Europe and Africa centered on the slave trade, dominated at first by the Portuguese, then supplanted by the Dutch and then by the British and French.
With the Wesleyan revival in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, there was a renewed Protestant interest in missions, but with a staunchly abolitionist stance. The missionary-explorer David Livingstone traveled extensively throughout East Africa, preaching the gospel, exploring virgin territory, and bewailing the suffering of Africans subjugated by slavery.
One of the other farsighted missionary leaders, Henry Venn, famously advocated that the missionary task was to assist in the establishment of a self-governing, self-financing, and self-propagating church. Venn believed that each missionary endeavor had a terminus point at which the indigenous leadership took the reins of national churches.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Europeans were still largely oblivious to the continent of Africa. Europeans had confined themselves to trading mainly along the coast. Inland, the trading of slaves and commodities was handled by African and Arab merchants. By the end of the third quarter, France, Britain, Portugal, and Germany had established spheres of influence in different parts of Africa, largely in alliance with their commercial interests. Britain, in particular, and Germany were content with informal influence rather than the burden of formal annexation.
Things began to change as a result of political restlessness in Europe during the period 1876 to 1880. There was a sudden flurry of colonial activity by the Portuguese. From 1876 onward, Portugal dispatched a series of expeditions that by 1880 resulted in the annexation of Mozambique. Also, France revived its colonial initiatives in both Tunisia and Madagascar. This expansionist mood pressed both Britain and Germany into their own colonialism, leading to their annexations in southern, eastern, and western Africa. By the early 1880s, the scramble for territory was well under way, and with it came the inevitable threat of territorial disputes.
It was in the first frenzy of competing colonialism that the idea of an international conference emerged. In response to competing territorial claims in the Congo region, Portugal, fearful of losing its stake in Africa, initially suggested the need for a conference, and this was later taken up by the German Chancellor Bismarck.
The conference was held at Berlin between November 15, 1884, and November 26, 1885. Ostensibly, it was not the initial intention of the conference to attempt a general partition of Africa. Nevertheless, it ended up disposing of territory and establishing “the rules to be observed in future with regard to the occupation of territory on the coasts of Africa.” In effect, the continent of Europe had arrogated to itself the right of occupying and partitioning the territory of another continent.
During the next two decades Africa was divided among the major European powers. In this scramble for Africa, tribal rulers were induced to sign treaties in which they surrendered sovereignty in return for protection. Between 1885 and 1914 much of Africa came under the control of European powers: Britain controlled nearly 30 percent of Africa’s population, France 15 percent, Germany 9 percent, and Belgium 7 percent.
As the European powers carved up Africa among themselves, they inevitably had an impact on missionary endeavors there. Missionaries tended to be closely related to their sponsoring European nation and, whether they wanted it or not, became subject to and identified with the colonizing European powers. Missionaries all too often became a means by which the colonial rulers subdued and controlled their African colonies.
A second great watershed in the history of the modern African church came around 1960, when the churches, along with the nations that housed them, moved from colonialism to independence. Decolonization began soon after World War II and extended for half a century.
The era of imperial collapse began when the British withdrew from India and Pakistan in 1947.
In Africa, decolonization began with the independence of Ghana in 1957, which was followed in rapid succession over the next decade by Zaire and Nigeria in 1960, Algeria in 1962, and Zimbabwe in 1979.
White rule survived in South Africa until 1994, with the overthrow of apartheid.
With the wholesale rejection of European colonialism and the rise of nationalism among colonized peoples, anti-Western sentiment often translated into anti-missionary rhetoric: missionaries were branded as a tool of imperialism.
Just as African nations declared their independence from European colonialism, so also Africans began to chart their own course ecclesiologically. One of the most significant consequences of European decolonization was the emergence of African Indigenous Churches (AIC). Amid all the variety of Protestants (Anglicans to Pentecostals) and the different Catholic orders (Jesuits to Capuchins), the AIC typically developed from a Protestant mission context.
Born largely out of frustration with Western colonial exploitation, these indigenous churches have gone their own way and function without reference to overseas churches. They range from independent versions of Western Protestant churches to highly syncretistic Christian versions of traditional African religions.
The largest of the AICs are the Aladura “Prayer People” churches, which grew out of the Anglican Church. In response to an epidemic in 1918, Joseph Sadare had a vivid dream about the need for constant prayer. Sparked by an affiliation with a Pentecostal group, the Aladura church was born in 1928, and it rapidly spread from Nigeria to Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ghana. Today it is composed of a million adherents.
Various Christian movements sprang up in the first half of the twentieth century that had a decidedly anticolonial cast. One of the most significant was centered around Simon Kimbangu.
Born near Kinshasa, in what was then the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), he was converted and educated by British Baptist missionaries. In 1918 he reportedly had a religious vision in which the voice of Christ called him to a healing ministry and an Africanized Christianity.
Kimbangu initially ignored the vision, but eventually he heeded the call, returning to his home village. Almost immediately, he was reported to have healed a sick woman by the laying on of hands. Dozens of apparent miracles were attributed to Kimbangu, and he gained thousands of followers from surrounding villages and towns. Both Catholics and Protestants repudiated him.
By June 1921 the Belgian authorities arrested him for inciting revolution. Four months later he was sentenced to death. Albert I of Belgium commuted his sentence to life in prison, where he remained until his death thirty years later, in 1951.
Colonial authorities assumed Kimbangu’s movement would wither after his imprisonment and death, but the church flourished under the leadership of his son, Kuntima Diangienda, as it took up the cause against colonialism. Kimbanguism, characterized by faith healing and charismatic phenomena, spread rapidly throughout central Africa, making it the most popular indigenous form of Christianity in Africa. It is estimated to have nearly 5 million adherents.
African Indigenous Churches have continued to grow and proliferate, but tend to be less concerned with integrating Christianity into traditional African culture.
In part this is because the African-led churches are more sensitive to the strengths of traditional African culture
In part it is because African people are becoming less traditional, more urbanized, and more Western.
AICs are increasingly coming to resemble Western Christian churches, particularly those of the more fervent Pentecostal variety.
With the dawn of the twenty-first century, Christianity is probably the main religion in most of sub-Saharan Africa, while in the northern part of the continent it is a minority religion existing alongside the Muslim majority.
There has been tremendous growth of Christians in Africa. As evidence, only 9 million Christians were in Africa in 1900, but by the year 2000, there were an estimated 380 million Christians. According to a 2006 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study, 147 million African Christians were “renewalists” (a term that includes both Pentecostals and Charismatics).
Much of the Christian growth in Africa is now due to African evangelism rather than Western missionaries. Christianity in Africa shows tremendous variety, from the ancient forms of Oriental Orthodox Christianity in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Eritrea to the newest African-Christian denominations of Nigeria, a country that has experienced massive conversions to Christianity in recent decades.
B. China#
According to tradition, the apostle Thomas brought the Christian gospel to China in the first century. While there is evidence that Christianity was firmly established in Persia by the early fourth century, there is no documentation that it had reached China. However, by the seventh century Christianity did make its way there. The Nestorian missionary Alopen followed the Silk Road to China, where he was warmly received by Emperor Taizong of the Tang dynasty in 635. The emperor permitted the first Christian church to be erected at Xi’an three years later and also permitted the first Chinese translation of a Christian book: The Sutra of Jesus the Messiah.
The discovery of the so-called “Nestorian Stele” in 1625 provides compelling evidence that Nestorian Christianity had indeed made its way to China in the seventh century. When the Tang dynasty was overthrown in 845, Christianity seems to have disappeared until the thirteenth century.
Over the centuries, Christianity had a mixed reception in China.
It is estimated that some 200,000 Christians were in China in 1900 and more than 2,000 missionaries.
Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, however, Christianity became increasingly associated with Western colonialism.
Growing xenophobia led to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the deaths of thousands of Christians.
Christianity received a much-needed reprieve with the rise of Chiang Kai-shek in the 1930s. After his marriage to the American-educated Methodist Song Meiling, Christianity gained ground in China.
After World War II, the Christian church grew significantly in Asian nations such as Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. However, with the rise of communism in 1949, Chinese Christianity went underground, and foreign missionaries were expelled. The communist government allowed only state-sanctioned churches:
for Catholics (the Three-Self Movement in 1951)
for Protestants (the Three-Self Patriotic Movement in 1954)
Both organizations were used by the state to eliminate foreign influence.
Christians underwent great suffering in the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the catastrophic Cultural Revolution (1966–69). Many feared that Christianity was doomed in China. However, with the demise of first-generation Communist Party leaders such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the government began implementing a series of political and economic reforms advocated by Deng Xiaoping that eventually led to some relaxation of control over many areas of society. By the late 1970s, underground churches, largely Protestant in orientation, began to proliferate.
As China modernized under Deng Xiaoping and embraced a market economy toward the end of the twentieth century, the restrictions on Christianity began to diminish. Then in 1989 the student-led pro-democracy movement reached a decisive moment in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The repressive nature of the Communist Party resurfaced, and the student protests at Tiananmen Square were violently crushed by the Chinese military. This suppression had unintended consequences for the burgeoning “house church movement.”
The harsh response of the Communist government and the killing of many hundreds of Chinese students had a dramatic impact on the collective psyche of the Chinese people. The people of China lost confidence in the Communist Party, and this in turn created a new openness to Christianity.
Especially since 1989, evangelical Christianity has exploded throughout China. The so-called “house church movement,” led largely by laypeople — many of whom are women — spread like wildfire. Even the government-sponsored Three-Self Church has been impacted so that some have become evangelical. The best estimates for the first decades of the twenty-first century are that more than 100 million Christians are now active in China. There is little doubt that China has emerged as a global economic power but, with other Asian nations, is also poised to become a major force in world Christianity.
Still, Chinese Christian churches are bereft of theological leadership. With so many churches emerging, leadership is more happenstance. Many of the leaders are uneducated and subject to folk religion and superstition.
C. India#
If tradition is to be given credence, then Christianity in India is as ancient as Christianity itself. According to tradition, the apostle Thomas in AD 52, following the ancient trade route between the Middle East and South India, is believed to have reached Kudungalur (modern Cranganore) on the southwest coast of the Indian state of Kerala. Local legend has it that Thomas converted the daughter of the Indo-Parthian King Gondophares. After establishing several churches in the region, he traveled to Mylapore (near modern-day Madras), where his preaching led to his martyrdom in AD 72.
From the fourth century, Christians in India (also called Thomas Christians) came under the influence of the Syrian (Nestorian) Church. Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, reached Calcutta in 1498 and established trade relations. This was the beginning of a long European presence in India. Franciscan, Dominican, Jesuit, and Augustinian missionaries soon arrived only to find that the Indian Christians were Nestorian in theology and Syrian in liturgy.
Backed by the padroado (papal treaties giving Spain and Portugal some ecclesiastical rights over colonies), European missionaries incessantly tried to impose their own liturgy and authority on the Thomas Christians. Eventually the Christian community in India split into:
The New Party, which retained Nestorianism and the Syrian liturgy
The Old Party, which held to Latin theology and rites
In the 1600s the German Pietists Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau were among the first Protestant missionaries to work in India, but with sparse impact.
It was not until the nineteenth century that Protestant missions were able to make significant progress in India. The most important early Protestant missionary was the English Baptist William Carey.
In June 1793 Carey, his family, and John Thomas, a medical doctor, set sail for India, arriving in Bengal in November. Having decided to be self-supporting, Carey took a job as the manager of an indigo plantation in Malda. He quickly learned the language and planted a church in 1795, set up a school, and successfully lobbied against the Indian custom of sati—the required death of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre — which was finally banned in 1829.
In 1799 Carey resettled in the Danish enclave of Serampore, where he was joined by the printer William Ward and the educator Joshua Marshman. The “Serampore Trio”, as they became known, were energetically engaged in education, publishing, and translation work. Among their achievements were:
The publishing of the Bible in Bengali and other languages
Creating grammars in Bengali, Sanskrit, and Marathi
Establishing the first newspaper in India
Founding Serampore College (1818)
Engaging in dialogue with Hindu intellectuals
Opening new mission stations in Bengal, Orissa, North India, and Ceylon.
Carey also served as professor of Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi at the recently founded Fort William College in Calcutta, a post he held from 1801 to 1831.
Christians in North America followed Carey’s work with great interest. American Congregationalists were the first to establish a missionary society in 1810: the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
Among the first missionaries sent by the American Board were Adoniram and Ann Judson. They set sail for India in 1812, and during their journey they became convinced Baptists. After arriving in Calcutta, they resigned from the American Board and headed for Rangoon, Burma. Under the auspices of the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the USA for Foreign Missions, which was established in 1814, Judson engaged in a flurry of activity: establishing a church, preaching, and Bible translation. Judson spent twenty-four years translating the Bible into Burmese, completing it in 1834. He spent the remaining years of his life compiling a Burmese-English dictionary.
Judson made great personal sacrifices in losing two wives on the mission field: Ann in 1826, and Sarah in 1845.
Britain had become the largest colonial empire of the nineteenth century, and India was Britain’s oldest, largest, and most lucrative colonial possession—the jewel in the crown. Native opposition to British rule coalesced after World War I under the leadership of the British-educated lawyer Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), who preached “nonviolent noncooperation.” In response, British rulers gradually introduced political reforms and limited self-government.
In the aftermath of World War II, the call for Indian independence grew louder. The obstacle posed by the age-old conflict between Hindus and Muslims was resolved in 1947 when Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India were both granted independence.
Throughout the twentieth century, Christianity in India has been fraught with conflict and tensions between Catholics, Protestants, and Thomas Christians. But the overriding issue for all Christians in India centers on the caste system. Indeed, it is difficult to find any time in the history of Indian Christianity when this was not a burning issue. This has been and remains the enduring problem for all Christians in India. There are roughly 3,000 separate castes (jatis) in India, each ethnically distinct and forbidden from intermingling.
Thousands of years ago, Brahman elites devised a hierarchical social structure of four general categories (varna), each of which has hundreds of castes: Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishiya, and Shudra. The top three varna make up about 15 percent of the population; the lowest varna (Shudra) represents about 50 percent.
There are two other groups of castes that are outside the established social structure.
The first are the so-called “untouchables,” or Dalits — which means “broken,” “crushed,” or “oppressed.” The Dalits are considered subhuman and little better than animals. They have no opportunities for economic or social advancement and are confined to the most demeaning jobs in Indian culture, such as removing dung or cutting carcasses. They are permitted to dwell only outside the villages and are often subject to abuse.
Also beyond the pale are the Adivasis, aboriginal or tribal peoples of the northeast. The Adivasis are a fierce warrior people who refuse to submit to the Brahman social structure and thus remain out of mainstream society.
These social structures and taboos are so culturally ingrained that even Indian Christians tend to accept the caste system. Brahmans who become Christians are seen as Brahman-Christians, and Shudras who embrace Christianity usually are seen as Shudra-Christians. Churches all too often accept the same cultural boundaries and tend to be composed of members of the same caste. This culturally conditioned Christianity poses a serious challenge to the Indian church.
Christianity has begun to make inroads in all social communities of India, but especially among the disenfranchised Dalits and Adivasis. One of the principle vehicles of evangelization is the Pentecostal movement. Catholics remain the largest Christian community, although Protestant communities are on the rise. Scholars estimate that there are approximately 50 million Christians in India, making it the third-largest religion behind Hinduism and Islam.
Since the partition in 1947 and the emergence of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan (as well as other autonomous neighboring nations — Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, and Sri Lanka), the number of missionaries from abroad has declined. Hindu nationalists continue to view Indian Christians as a foreign intrusion, and hostility toward Christianity and its proselytizing activities has grown each decade. Much of this hostility has become institutionalized in various Indian political parties. This has resulted in the destruction of Christian churches and, in some cases, death.
Many mainline denominations such as the Anglicans, Methodists, and Congregationalists have merged to form the Church of South India. Other denominations such as the Thomas Christians have retained their separate identities. The Roman Catholic Church in India has undergone what some have called “Indianization” — that is, Christian in doctrine but culturally Indian. Vatican II encouraged such adaptation. The Jesuits in particular have provided significant academic leadership.
One of the ironies of the religious scene in India is that the Hindu elites of Indian aristocracy often send their children to Christian schools, which are generally considered the finest educational institutions in the country. The main regional concentrations of Christian population are the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in southern India, Goa in the southwest, and Manipur and Mizonran in the northeast. Northeast India accounts for 60 percent of the country’s total Christian population, and in the southern states Christians make up a significant segment of the population.
D. Latin America#
Although Latin America eventually achieved political independence from Spain, Iberian Catholicism had become imbedded in the warp and woof of its culture. The lands remained profoundly Catholic well into the twentieth century and were identified as such at the 1910 Edinburgh Missions Conference. Thus, this region of the world was regarded as off-limits to evangelization.
The first Protestant church in Latin America was established in Brazil in 1855, but it remained quite small and never had any significant impact until the arrival of Pentecostals. The earliest Pentecostals in Latin America were Methodist missionaries in Chile who were in contact with the Azusa Street Revival in 1907 and were subsequently energized by speaking in tongues.
Although Pentecostal Protestantism gained a foothold in Latin America soon after the turn of the century, still it was the Catholic Church that dominated religious and cultural experience until midcentury.
In 1940 scholars estimate no more than a million Protestants were in all of Latin America.
By the 1960s the evangélicos (Pentecostals/Protestants) were rapidly gaining ground.
From Chile, Pentecostalism spread to Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico and then to the whole of Latin America.
By 2000 it is estimated there were more than 50 million evangélicos in Latin America.
In the eyes of many, the Catholic Church was an unspoken ally of the social status quo and this at a time when the gap between the rich and poor was at its greatest. But Vatican II (1962–65) marked an ecclesiastical sea change that had a special resonance in Latin America. With its emphasis on social justice, lay leadership, vernacular liturgy, and a special concern for the poor, Vatican II inspired new and sometimes radical thinking.
At the 1968 Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellín, Columbia, the bishops began to reconceive the doctrine of sin in sociopolitical terms — that is, sin was identified especially with unjust and repressive social and political structures. This new thinking soon laid the groundwork for a theology of liberation.
Closely linked with the emergence of “liberation theology” was the pastoral strategy of the comunidades eclesiales de base (base communities). Because of the critical shortage of priests, the Catholic Church established parish-type communities with lay leadership. This had the effect of shifting the religious focus from the mass to Bible study and social action.
As liberation theology and the lay-led base communities gained momentum in the 1970s and 1980s, steady resistance arose within the more conservative tiers of the church and the state. It made matters more complex when the United States, embroiled in the Cold War, intervened on the side of anticommunist Latin American dictators.
Some Catholic priests joined the Sandinista socialist revolution in Nicaragua
Others opposed the U.S.-backed military dictatorships in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina
As the confrontation between leftists and militarists spread across the continent, a significant number of priests were killed. The most notable was Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, who was murdered while celebrating mass in March 1980.
The collapse of communism in Russia and the conclusion of the Cold War undermined the anticommunist rationale for political involvement in Latin America, and so the United States began to reduce its presence south of its border.
The social and political upheavals plaguing Latin America provided an unprecedented opportunity for North American Protestantism to make inroads. By the 1960s North American evangelicals began to focus more attention on South and Central America.
Population growth rates in the global South are astonishing. Africa and Latin America combined represented 13 percent of the world population in 1900. By 2050, Africa and Latin America will be home to 29 percent. Population projections suggest that between 2000 and 2050, the eight largest Latin American nations will increase from a total of 429 million to 600 million.
III. THE RISE OF PENTECOSTALISM#
One of the most important religious developments to give shape and substance to twentieth-century global Christianity is the Pentecostal movement and its more contemporary and refined offspring, the “charismatic movement.” Reputable scholars assert that in 2000, Pentecostal numbers worldwide were increasing at the rate of nearly 19 million a year.
Pentecostals “account for one of every three Christians in the world.”
Origins#
Pentecostalism has its roots in the American Wesleyan-Holiness movement of the late nineteenth century and takes its name from the Christian feast of Pentecost, which celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples (Acts 2). Pentecostals believe in the continuing efficacy of the charismatic gifts and emphasize a post-conversion experience that is signaled by ecstatic utterances in a language unknown to the speaker, called glossolalia or “speaking in tongues.”
As a distinctive movement, Pentecostalism often traces its origins to Topeka, Kansas, and the teachings of a former Methodist preacher, Charles Fox Parham. At his Bethel Bible School, of which he was founder and the only teacher, Parham formulated the basic Pentecostal doctrine.
After conversion and after sanctification (according to Holiness teaching), there is to be a third spiritual movement he called the “baptism of the Holy Ghost,” and it is accompanied by “speaking in other tongues” — a replication of the day of Pentecost in Acts 2.
Parham’s teaching first bore fruit in January 1901, when Agnes Ozman, a young student at the Bethel Bible School, spoke in tongues. Shortly thereafter Parham and other students had the same post-conversion experience, and the first seeds of the Pentecostal movement were planted.
The Azusa Street Outbreak#
Although Parham was the first to articulate the distinctive doctrines of Pentecostalism (in particular, the experience of glossolalia as a sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit), the emergence of Pentecostalism as a national and then worldwide movement came by way of his disciple, William J. Seymour, the son of a slave.
Believing he was living in the last days and that God was going to pour out his Spirit, Seymour made his way from Houston, Texas, to Los Angeles, California, in 1906, where he began holding revival meetings in an abandoned Methodist Church on Azusa Street, renamed the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission.
The spark that burst into flame occurred on April 15, 1906, when Jenny Evans Moore spoke in tongues at the Azusa Street Mission. Within days, Los Angeles newspapers captivated readers with stories of “weird howlings” and the “gurgle of wordless talk.”
Shortly after the revival began, Seymour published his own broadsheet, the “Apostolic Faith”, recounting conversions, miracle healings, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit as evidenced by speaking in unknown tongues. Word spread quickly about the strange revival on Azusa Street.
Over the next three years the revival attracted thousands of people from all over the world—some merely curious, others seeking a genuine spiritual experience. The revival triggered new waves of evangelistic and missionary fervor around the world.
By the end of the twentieth century, what began as a few scattered local revivals had become a worldwide phenomenon of nearly a billion adherents. It also became very diverse and multilayered.
Characteristics and Worship#
With more than a billion adherents on every continent and populating literally thousands of denominations, the doctrinal perimeters of Pentecostalism has become broader. Certainly the most notable doctrinal characteristic is the affirmation of the continuing efficacy of the charismatic gifts, especially speaking in tongues.
Essentially, Pentecostalism is old-time revivalism that combines miraculous healings, tongues speaking, and a dispensational premillennialism with an expectation of the imminent rapture of the believers from a world rapidly spinning toward tribulation and final judgment.
Pentecostal worship is characterized by lifting hands, dancing, shouting, clapping, exorcisms, and other forms of emotional expression.
The areas of doctrinal agreement place Pentecostals squarely within the boundaries of historic orthodoxy. In full accord with the Christian tradition, Pentecostals affirm the authority of the Scriptures, the centrality of the cross, and the resurrection of Christ, as well as an emphasis on repentance, conversion, and a godly life. Because Pentecostals believe we are living in the last days, they are emphatic about the need for world evangelism.
Schisms and Early denominations#
The prime doctrinal deviation resulted in the emergence of the so-called “Oneness” or “Jesus Only” Pentecostals, who embrace a modern modalistic understanding of the Godhead, thus denying the traditional doctrine of the Trinity.
In 1911 two Los Angeles Pentecostals, Glen Cook and Frank Ewart, began to teach that Jesus Christ was the one God who variously revealed himself under the name (or mode) of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Controversy erupted and resulted in a schism in 1916, which ultimately produced a new denominational branch of Oneness Pentecostals, the largest of which is the United Pentecostal Church. Through the years other controversies erupted over lesser doctrinal disputes and personality clashes. However, most Pentecostal denominations retained the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.
Despite its origins in the Wesleyan Holiness movement, the majority of denominational leaders rejected Pentecostalism amid charges of demon possession and mental instability. These included the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Methodist Church, the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), and the Salvation Army. However, other Holiness leaders investigated the revival on Azusa Street and quickly embraced the tenets of the new revival. Within a year after the revival, the Pentecostal message had spread around the nation.
Sharp denominational controversies led to the first Pentecostal denominations in America. This first wave of new Pentecostal churches to emerge included the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Church of God in Christ, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Apostolic Faith (Portland, Oregon), and the United Holy Church. Most of these churches were located in the southern states and experienced rapid growth.
Global Spread#
The Pentecostal movement also spread rapidly around the world after 1906.
The leading pioneer was Thomas Ball Barratt, a Norwegian Methodist pastor who founded flourishing Pentecostal movements in Scandinavian nations and England.
The revival reached Chile in 1909 under the leadership of an American Methodist missionary, Willis C. Hoover.
In 1910 two American Swedish immigrants, Daniel Berg and Gunnar Vingren, established Pentecostal churches in Brazil.
Successful Pentecostal missions were also inaugurated by 1910 in China and Africa.
Pentecostalism has become the fastest-growing religious movement in Latin America and has been wielding increasing influence. It had a dramatic impact on Brazil, where Protestants/Pentecostals made up 15 percent of the population by 1990. Due largely to the efforts of Pentecostals, Protestantism at the turn to the twenty-first century represented as much as 20 percent of the population in such nations as Argentina, Mexico, Columbia, Chile, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Panama, and Venezuela. The country with the highest percentage of Protestants is Guatemala, accounting for nearly 35 percent.
Meanwhile, Pentecostalism was introduced to Russia and other Slavic nations through the efforts of Ivan Voronaev, a Russian-born immigrant. In 1919 Voronaev established the first Russian-speaking Pentecostal church in New York City, and the following year he began a ministry in Odessa, Russia, which in turn sponsored more than 350 congregations in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Bulgaria. His success caught the attention of the Soviet police, who arrested him in 1929 and sent him to a Siberian gulag, where he died in captivity.
Pentecostal churches enjoyed significant growth in North America after World War II. The emergence of faith-healing TV evangelists such as Oral Roberts in the 1950s exposed Pentecostalism to a broader range of American Christians. Pentecostals began to make inroads into the middle class, although it still could not shake off entirely the earlier perception of a movement largely born of rural communities and the economic margins of society.
The “Second Wave”#
Pentecostalism entered a significant new phase (often called the “second wave”) of cultural respectability when glossolalia first made its appearance in a mainline denomination.
One of the early indications of this development occurred in 1943, when some of the largest Pentecostal denominations (Assemblies of God, the Church of God — Cleveland, Tennessee, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and the Pentecostal Holiness Church) became charter members of the National Association of Evangelicals. The founding of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship by Demos Shakarian in 1951 challenged the working-class stereotype, showing that the Pentecostal message was being received among middle-class professionals and businessmen.
Father Dennis Bennett fired the verbal shot that was heard around the world on April 3, 1960, when he announced from his pulpit at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church — a 2,600-member congregation in Van Nuys, California —that he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Bennett’s announcement created something of a media sensation with featured articles in both Newsweek and Time magazines. Members of his vestry soon asked for his resignation, and, rather than subjecting his church to further turmoil, Bennett resigned his pastorate. He remained in the Episcopal denomination and was warmly welcomed to a new ministry at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Seattle, Washington, where he remained until 1981. Under Bennett’s leadership, St. Luke’s experienced rapid growth with the introduction of Pentecostal-style worship, becoming a center of the charismatic movement.
Shaping the Charismatic Movement#
The term “charismatic” entered the theological vocabulary in the early 1970s to designate this movement in the mainline churches and to distinguish it from the original or classical Pentecostals.
The charismatic movement is similar to classical Pentecostalism in its emphasis on the exercise of certain gifts (particularly tongues and prophecy)
It differs from classical Pentecostalism in that it is trans-denominational in nature, it has no set theology of two-stage blessing, it incorporates a diversity of theological opinion, and it also provides a wealth of contemporary worship songs expressing personal and corporate devotion
Unlike the rejection of the classical Pentecostals, the new wave of charismatic renewal was generally allowed to remain within the mainline churches. Favorable study reports by the Episcopalians (1963) and the Presbyterians (1970), while pointing out possible excesses, generally were tolerant and open to the existence of this kind of Pentecostal spirituality as a renewal movement within the traditional churches.
Infiltrated the Roman Catholic#
In 1967 the charismatic movement infiltrated the Roman Catholic Church during a weekend retreat at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, led by theology professors Ralph Keiffer and Bill Story.
Catholic charismatic prayer groups soon sprang up at Notre Dame University and the University of Michigan. By 1973 the movement had spread so rapidly that 30,000 Catholic Charismatics gathered at Notre Dame for a national conference. Official reports by Catholic theologians in 1969 and 1974 approved the renewal movement, but cautioned charismatic Catholics not to undermine the church’s authority by the exercise of these spiritual gifts.
Within a decade of the first penetration, the movement spread to Catholic churches in over a hundred nations. The most prominent charismatic leader among Catholics was Joseph Leon Cardinal Suenens, who was named by Popes Paul VI and John Paul II as a special adviser to the renewal.
The Third Wave#
The central figure of this later manifestation was John Wimber, who—in the words of a 1998 editorial in Christianity Today magazine — was a “beer-guzzling, drug-abusing pop musician, who was converted at the age of 29 while chain-smoking his way through a Quaker-led Bible study.”
Wimber had enjoyed some success as a backing musician with the popular singing duo The Righteous Brothers before his dramatic conversion in 1963. He soon began attending a Quaker church in Yorba Linda, California, where his evangelistic enthusiasm led to hundreds of converts. His ministry success came to the attention of Fuller Theological Seminary, and in 1974 he became the founding director of the Department of Church Growth at the Fuller Institute of Evangelism and Church Growth. By 1977 he had embraced some of the beliefs of the charismatic movement (although he did not like the “charismatic” label).
In 1982 Wimber joined the fledgling Vineyard movement, becoming its chief theologian and spokesperson. Both during his lifetime and since his death in 1997, the Vineyard movement has established more than 1,500 churches across America and internationally with its particular version of the charismatic movement.
Wimber’s approach to the charismatic gifts differed from classic Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement, particularly in their approach to speaking in tongues.
The previous groups had emphasized the gift of tongues as the only evidence for the baptism of the Holy Spirit
Wimber emphasized that this was just one of the many spiritual gifts
This “third wave of the Holy Spirit,” as Wagner termed it, does not disregard glossolalia or by any means rule it out, but neither does it make this the center of attention.
Drawing especially on chapters 12–14 of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Wimber viewed speaking in tongues as only one of several manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Wimber and the Vineyard churches focused more on the full range of spiritual gifts listed in First Corinthians than on the glossolalia in Acts. Fuller Professor George Eldon Ladd’s theological writings on the kingdom of God convinced Wimber that all the gifts of the Holy Spirit are “signs and wonders” that the kingdom of God had come.
Wimber’s association with a major evangelical seminary gave the Vineyard movement a kind of theological credibility, and his more moderate understanding of the charismatic gifts further removed theological stumbling blocks for some mainstream evangelicals.
Acceptance and Impact#
Today the charismatic movement, in its many permutations, is so widely accepted that theological criticism rarely rises to the level of open debate. There are those who formally reject such emotional experiences as speaking in tongues, but there is a growing acceptance of the charismatic experience in mainline and evangelical Protestantism as well as Roman Catholicism.
The third-wave charismatic theologian Wayne Grudem defied traditional theological categories by espousing a Reformed soteriology while at the same time embracing the charismatic gifts. His best-selling textbook Systematic Theology, with its advocacy of continuing charismatic gifts, is widely used in conservative evangelical and Reformed seminaries.
Following in the wake of Grudem, the Reverend C. J. Mahaney established an energetic network of conservative Reformed and charismatic churches called Sovereign Grace Ministries. Furthermore, traditional non-charismatic Reformed theologians have joined in formal alliance with these new theological hybrids in conservative parachurch organizations such as the Gospel Coalition and the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. What was once theologically inconceivable has now become theologically acceptable.
The growth of Pentecostalism is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the movement as such has only been in existence since the beginning of the twentieth century and within that time frame has come to represent perhaps the most energetic missionary force in the history of the Christian church. Although one would never have thought it at the outset of the twentieth century, it may be legitimately argued that it is one of the most impactful religious movements of that century.
As the third millennium develops, the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement shows no sign of decline. In all three waves it still represents the most vibrant expression of Christianity in the world. The best estimates are that there are nearly a billion charismatic or charismatically influenced Christians spread throughout every nation of the world.
A Particular Branch#
One concept that has emerged with particular force in the Pentecostal-charismatic world is known as the “Health and Wealth Gospel.” (Other designations include “Faith Formula,” “Prosperity,” or “Word” movement.) This group combines traditional Pentecostalism with “positive thinking.”
Adherents not only embrace the charismatic gifts, but also portray God as both endlessly beneficent and perfectly predictable. One should distinguish this health-and-wealth movement from fundamentalism, evangelicalism, and even the Pentecostal-charismatic movement.
The exact place of this health-and-wealth movement in the broader spectrum of conservative Protestantism is disputed, since there are ambiguous and sometimes acrimonious relations among fellow Charismatics. Important leaders of the movement include Americans Kenneth Hagin, Oral Roberts, and Kenneth Copeland as well as internationals Reinhard Bonnke (Africa), UIf Ekman (Sweden), and Paul Yonggi Cho (Korea).
IV. MISSIONS TO AMERICA#
One of the notable developments at the dawn of the third millennium is that Christians from the global South are now sending missionaries to America and endeavoring to reclaim evangelical Christianity from what they perceive as the ruinous effects of post-Christian cultural decline. This reversal of roles has become especially evident in the Anglican Church — the third-largest Christian communion in the world, after the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches.
The global Anglican Church is composed of thirty-eight provinces around the world, with the Church of England as the historic mother church. Although the archbishop of Canterbury is recognized as the symbolic head of the worldwide communion, he has no formal authority over the other provinces, which are free to act in accord with their own convictions. Increasingly, the Anglican provinces of the global South have exercised their independent authority in an effort to reassert historic Christian doctrine and traditional values.
In recent decades the American province of the Anglican Communion (also called the Episcopal Church in the United States of America — ECUSA) has been plagued with deep divisions. Amid growing concern that ECUSA had departed from the historic Christian gospel, evangelical Episcopalians began to explore ways to disassociate from the American province yet remain within the worldwide Anglican Communion.
In 1998 the evangelical St. Andrews Church of Little Rock, Arkansas, made the controversial decision to reject the authority of ECUSA and come under the oversight of the more conservative primate, Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda.
The realignment continued in 2000 when archbishops Kolini and Moses Tay of Southeast Asia consecrated Chuck Murphy and John Rodgers as missionary bishops to America.
Later that same year, an Anglican mission was officially established under the authority of the Rwandan archbishop, thus creating the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA) — formerly the Anglican Mission in America.
AMiA is under the authority of the archbishop of Rwanda, and its bishops are full members of the Rwandan House of Bishops, which is responsible for overseeing Rwanda’s missionary outreach to North America. The creation of AMiA provides a way for evangelical congregations and clergy to remain connected to the worldwide Anglican Communion through the leadership in Rwanda while being free of the American Episcopal Church.
Tensions escalated significantly in 2003, when ECUSA approved the consecration of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as the bishop of New Hampshire. Robinson was the first noncelibate homosexual to be ordained a bishop in a major Christian denomination. Robinson’s consecration accelerated the crisis in the global Anglican Communion. While ECUSA supported Bishop Robinson, many of the Anglican provinces of the global South did not.
Growing disaffection with ECUSA led to yet another Anglican mission to North America. Largely because of the ordination of Robinson, Archbishop Peter Akinola, primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, in 2007 joined with conservative members of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia to form the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA). This is particularly notable because Archbishop Akinola represented the largest Anglican province in the world, with nearly 20 million people.
Resistance to the hierarchy of the Anglican Church found forceful expression in the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) held in Jerusalem only weeks before the opening of the 2008 Lambeth Conference called by the archbishop of Canterbury.
The assembly of nearly 300 bishops and archbishops (as well as 1,100 lay leaders) issued the “Jerusalem Declaration,” opposing the “false” gospel that had infiltrated the Anglican Communion, and declared they would no longer allow the archbishop of Canterbury to determine Anglican identity.
That identity, they said, was to be demonstrated through adherence to fourteen tenets of historic orthodoxy, including “the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family.”
What gave considerable weight to GAFCON was the fact that the leading participants included some of the most influential primates in the global Anglican Communion, such as Archbishops Peter Akinola of Nigeria, Benjamin Nzimbi of Kenya, Donald Mtetemela of Tanzania, Justice Akrofi of West Africa, Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, Henry Orombi of Uganda, Peter Jensen of Sydney, Australia, and Greg Venables of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay), as well as prominent bishops from Canada and the United States. Together these leaders represented 30 million of the 55 million “active” Anglicans in the worldwide communion.
Finally, in 2008 conservative leaders of American Anglican organizations, in collaboration with leaders of the Anglican churches in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Australia, made the groundbreaking decision to establish a new competing Anglican province: the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).
With active support from Anglican churches from the global South, ACNA was established on December 4, 2008, in Wheaton, Illinois. At the first provincial assembly in June 2009, Robert Duncan was elected archbishop and primate. ACNA now comprises some 100,000 Anglicans in 700 parishes in 28 dioceses.
V. POST-CHRISTIAN EUROPE#
After World War II, European Christianity underwent a precipitous decline. According to recent demographic studies, there are 560 million Christians in Europe, but that number is quite misleading. The decline of Christianity is especially acute among young people (ages 18–24), where two-thirds describe themselves as “nonreligious.” In the same age group, nearly half do not believe Jesus really existed. Britain, like much of Europe, has become a secular society, or as some have labeled it, “post-Christian.”
Post-Christian Europe reflects the rise of postmodernism. One of the characteristic features of postmodernism is rejection of ultimate religious truth. This relativist notion is not so much hostile to traditional Christianity, as it simply ignores the church as irrelevant. This picture is the same over much of Europe. In Germany, the official membership in Protestant churches is 28 million, but only about a million regularly attend church; and a quarter of the population claims no religious affiliation at all. The picture is much the same in France.
Even in Italy, a nation historically identified as the home of European Catholicism, there is widespread church absenteeism and dismissal of the teachings of the papacy. While most Italians are baptized as Catholics, with a resulting official membership of 55 million, the number of those who actively participate in church is significantly lower, perhaps as low as one-tenth of those baptized.
VI. CONCLUSION#
If the contemporary portrait of a Christian in the twenty-first century is a “poor, black, African, Pentecostal woman about twenty-five years old,” then there are necessary accompanying issues that will have to be addressed by Christians—especially evangelicals. The myriad of ancillary issues of youth, education, poverty, race, gender, non-Western cultural contextualization, and theological diversity must be carefully addressed, not just with orthodoxy but with orthopraxy.
The shift to the global South will bring some challenges to the enlightened Western world. Many African Christians, especially in African Indigenous Churches, have a dual religious allegiance. Many under the influence of the “Health and Wealth Gospel” believe that Christ will bring prosperity, but just in case he does not, they also invoke occult practices. As Christianity expands in the global South, new challenges await.