The global reality of Christianity

While I am waiting for my book on the Hutterites to arrive, I started reading a book I got for Christmas. Mark Noll’s The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith is a fascinating look at how dramatically the Christian landscape has changed and how rapidly it continues to change. It is a pretty easy read so it shouldn’t take long to finish it, although it gives a dizzying array of statistics and anecdotes. It is helpful to look at the church beyond the Western European-North American focus we have always had. It can be easy to assume that Christianity is primarily a Western thing with missionaries going to the pagan lands but the real growth of the faith is outside of the West. As Noll pointed out in the section I read last night, we have a weird mixture where the most vibrant growth in the church is in one global region while the bulk of Christian educational establishments are in another. There are lifetimes of theological material originating in the West but at the same time those same places in Europe where the great theological treatises were written are seeing (at least the visible expression) of the church dying out.

I am trying to be careful here not to overgeneralize but it certainly seems plausible that where Christianity is overly comfortable with the culture and society in general, it historically has devolved in empty religious expression and cold academia. It is true that many of the persecuted fringe groups did not have a ton of literature. The Anabaptists don’t boast of famous theologians credited with writing tomes of theology but that is because a) they were heavily persecuted so they didn’t have time to sit around in their studies and write huge books and b) they were far more concerned with what was happening right now. An elder in an illegal Chinese underground church is far more concerned with getting arrested than he is with worrying about who he can get to write endorsements on the dust jacket of his latest book or getting invited to speak at the latest conference.

We are often told we should pray for the persecuted church. Rightly so. Perhaps we should just as fervently pray for the unpersecuted church.