World Christianity

Sessions

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In the popular imagination, Christianity is often thought of as a “western” religion legitimized through its adoption by the Roman Empire, later metastasizing from its European heartland to impose itself on other cultures through missionary efforts that were thin veneers to justify European ambitions for empire. In the popular imagination, Christianity is now in decline, vividly illustrated by statistics from its European heartland: the Church of England claims 25 million members, but less than 1.2 million (5%) attend church services; only 5% of the French, and 15% of Italians go to Church regularly.

This picture of the popular imagination is more myth than truth. The epicenter of early Christianity was not in Rome, but in Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. Over its first few centuries, it spread through northern Africa (Nubia, Ethiopia, Roman Africa = roughly Tunisia), east to India, and west into the European continent. Today, as Christianity seems to decline in Europe, it is booming in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. If we wish to picture a typical practicing Anglican in 2003, we should think of a woman in Nigeria. By 2025, half of all Christians will live in Africa and Latin America; the largest concentration of Christians in the world will be in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this boom, we are seeing, according to Ghanian scholar Kwame Bediako, “the renewal of a non-Western religion.”

What should all this mean to American Episcopalians? What implications does it hold for the future of Christianity? From November 2 through December 14, 2003, we explored these and other questions in a series on World Christianity. Our primary reference was The Next Christendom. The Coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Also see our series in 2007, the New Faces of Christianity in the Global South