The Future of Christianity

A recent study has shown Christianity is growing and changing. Arthur Patrick studies the evidence.

Saw the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew/ from the nations airy navies, grappling in the central blue.” That’s a bit of what Tennyson saw in 1831, when he “dip’t into the future/ far as human eye could see.” World War I biplanes locked in mortal combat, dropping primitive bombs? Perhaps even the lethal weapons of modern aerial warfare?

But the poet saw yet more: “The parliament of man, federation of the world.”
Since then we’ve seen much carnage and minimal federation. The United Nations hardly fits the bill. So to foretell can be risky. Unless the predictions are based on solid, sustainable evidence, that is.

Philip Jenkins dips into the future in his book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity,* an Oxford University Press imprint. We expect sober stuff from Oxford.

To read Jenkins is to be convinced he has it right. Increasingly the Christian church in Western society is “un-Black, un-poor, and un-young.” But in the past century “the centre of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa, Asia and Latin America.”

There were an estimated 10 million Christians on the African continent in 1900; there were 360 million of them in 2000. In Asia, 313 million people profess Christianity. In Latin America, there are 480 million believers. Careful projections indicate that by 2025 there will be more than two-and-a-half billion Christians on the planet, with half of them located in just two areas, Africa and Latin America. Taking present trends into account, by 2050 “only about one-fifth of the world’s three billion Christians will be non-Hispanic Whites.”

turning point
Already it is clear that we are living at another great turning point in human history. There have been decisive eras in the past. To read Acts in the New Testament is to see a just-born faith spread rapidly from Palestine through Syria, Turkey, Greece and reach as far as Rome, all in less than 40 years.

Explosive change came to Europe in the lifetime of Luther and the other Reformers in the 1500s. Wesley and other Evangelical revivalists released “a fresh outburst of religion which resembled that of the primitive church more than anything else.” North America experienced two “great awakenings.”

And, after the excesses of the French Revolution came the missionary movement that has shared the good news in distant lands. This process has now resulted in stunning success.
a spent force?

For decades an “encircling gloom” has been gathering about Christianity across vast regions of the earth, like Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Some churches with vigorous pasts appeared to be losing their zeal and focus. They have dwindling congregations and less financial support from committed adherents. They seem to be losing respect in the wider society and are failing to attract new converts. We have been told repeatedly that we live in a post-Christian age.

In 1976 Paul Johnson, a Catholic journalist, wrote a compelling history of Christianity. After following his narrative carefully for 515 pages, you’re ready for his punchline: “Christian history is a constant process of struggle and rebirth—a succession of crises, often accompanied by horror, bloodshed, bigotry and unreason, but evidence too of growth, vitality and increased understanding.”

rebirth
Well, it’s almost 50 years since my zeal for Christian history was galvanised at the University of Queensland. Since then, I’ve spent some exciting years of research in Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and Seventh-day Adventist libraries and archives. It’s been fun looking at the Christian story with insightful students in both the Northern Hemisphere and Australia.

There’s abundant evidence of human frailty in the history of the church, and convincing evidence that Christianity bears the message the world needs. Often, during 2000 years it seemed the faith was facing impossible odds, yet it has been reborn again and again.
So could this explosive growth of Christianity in the developing world be characterised as yet another rebirth?

tough realities
Probably so. But we would be naive to suggest the hard struggles are all in the past. Jenkins, with his background as “Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University” in the United States, helps us discern some of the challenges that Christianity faces—right now. And, from the human point of view, they will not diminish in the foreseeable future.

Often when a person is born into the kingdom of God or a new group of people become Christians, they will go back to the beginning of the faith. This is a healthy impulse. Two centuries ago during the Second Great Awakening in North America, strands of believers fostered what came to be called “Restorationism,” the determination to capture the spirit and thought of the early Christian church.

Such a back-to-basics impulse is apt to focus on the Bible—and rely much on the Holy Spirit. But it may, in its enthusiasm for present experience, neglect to heed severe lessons the church has learned at great cost during its long struggles in a hostile world.

meaning
When believers become numerous and powerful in a given society, they may well become less tolerant of those who do not think quite the same, as history suggests. So they may move to impose their convictions on dissenters. They may want to control the behaviour of the whole society with stricter laws.

The history of Christianity is rife with what Johnson calls “horror, bloodshed, bigotry and unreason.” When Christians were few, they were at times terribly persecuted by the Roman Empire. When they were many, they persecuted “pagans” and any they deemed heretics. They also mounted horrendous crusades against Middle Eastern “infidels,” for which we pay a price today.

Catholics persecuted Protestants where they were strong, and Protestants persecuted Catholics where they were the stronger. And both branches of Christianity persecuted minorities such as the Anabaptists, whose current descendants are often called Baptists and Adventists.

The New Testament expectation of Christians in respect to the state is threefold and simple: pray, pay and obey! Yes, we are to pray for our national leaders, pay our taxes and obey secular government so long as it doesn’t infringe upon a higher duty to God. The Bible doesn’t tell us to legislate the behaviour of others or force them to think or do according to our patterns.

Even as you read this article, there is serious conflict between Christians and Muslims in more than one part of the earth. When Christians of one tribe abridged the rights of Christians of another tribe, awesome atrocities occurred a few years ago in Rwanda.

One of my favourite authors is Ellen G White (1827-1915), who wrote: “We have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and His teaching in our past history.” Such thinking is valid for a denomination and for the entire multifaceted body we call the Christian church.

so . . .
So we must remember that the church and the state function in different spheres, and fulfil our duty to both “Caesar” and God. We are to respect the sanctity of the individual conscience; religious liberty with all its risks is a Christian privilege and duty. We both claim it for ourselves and we offer it gladly to others. There is no place for coercion in matters of faith. God calls for volunteers, not conscripts.

But there is more, if Jenkins sees aright. The “new converts are mostly teenagers and young adults, very few with white hair.” So they don’t want to learn from Western churches with their “empty pews and white-haired congregants.”
n The new global Christianity is many things. “One obvious fact is that at least for the foreseeable future, members of the South-dominated church are likely to be among the poorer people on the planet, in marked contrast to the older Western-dominated world.”

They are “far more conservative in terms of both beliefs and moral teaching.” They “preach deep personal faith and communal orthodoxy, mysticism and Puritanism, all founded on clear scriptural authority. They preach messages that, to a Westerner, appear simplistically charismatic, visionary, and apocalyptic. In this thought-world, prophecy is an everyday reality, while faith-healing, exorcism, and dream-visions are all basic components of religious sensibility.”

what to do
Today is a thrilling time to be alive. It calls us to open our Bibles with new diligence as we search for the essence of Christianity as for hidden treasure. Twenty centuries of Christian history indicate the resilience of the faith, its viability for people of different regions and cultures. They tell us the perils of human subjectivism and the horrors that may ensue from bigotry and unreason. They illustrate both the need we humans have for the Word of God and the essentiality of the Holy Spirit’s guidance.

Our rejoicing at the present moving of the Spirit should make us even more attentive to the message Jesus expresses in John 14, 15 and 16, about the multiphase ministry of the Spirit. He is to remind us of Jesus’ teachings, and testify about Jesus. He is to teach us and guide us into all truth. He will tell us “what is yet to come.” That’s far more than Tennyson’s federation. God has in mind for His people “a new earth, where righteousness will be at home” (2 Peter 3:13, TEV).

* Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002.

the future of christendom

A healthy distrust of worldly power and success is all the more necessary given the remarkable reversal of Christian fortunes over the ages, and the number of times that the faith seemed on the verge of destruction. In 500, Christianity was the religion of empire and domination; in 1000, it was the stubborn faith of exploited subject peoples, or of barbarians on the irrelevant fringes of the great civilisations; in 1900, Christian powers ruled the world. Knowing what the situation will be in 2100 or 2500 would take a truly inspired prophet.
But if there is one overarching lesson from this record of changing fortunes, it is that (to adapt the famous adage about Russia) Christianity is never as weak as it appears, nor as strong as it appears. And whether we look backward or forward in history, we can see that time and again, Christianity demonstrates a breathtaking ability to transform weakness into strength.
—The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

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