The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Future of Christianity Trilogy)

by Philip Jenkins

Pentecostal expansion across the Southern continents has been so astonishing as to justify claims of a new Reformation.

Although poorly studied, South-South evangelism represents one of the most impressive phenomena in contemporary Christianity:

Christianity has thus been in China for a long time—about as long, in fact, as Buddhism has been in Japan.

Amazing as it may appear to a blasé West, Christianity exercises an overwhelming global appeal, which shows not the slightest sign of waning.

One way or another, inside the Catholic Church or outside it, Christianity worldwide is becoming steadily more charismatic.

China has about as many Christians as it does members of the Communist Party.

Understanding the emerging new world order may require a good knowledge of the three great non-Western religions: Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity.

The Armenian genocide of 1915 is well known, but quite as devastating were the massacres of tens of thousands of Lebanese and Syrian Christians in 1860, by both Muslims and Druzes. In 1915 the Turks slaughtered and expelled hundreds of thousands of Christians of all sects. A famine deliberately induced by the Turkish military claimed the lives of 100,000 Lebanese Maronite Christians. Across the Middle East, it was above all the bloodshed of 1915 that destroyed ancient Christian cultures that had lasted successfully since Roman times, groups such as the Jacobites, Nestorians, and Chaldaeans. And the carnage continued after the war ended. Between 1919 and 1925, Greek Christians were expelled en masse from the new Kemalist state of Turkey. In 1923 Istanbul’s Greek Christian population was around 400,000: today, it may at most be 4,000.10

In the world as a whole, there is no question that the threat of intolerance and persecution chiefly comes from the Islamic side of the equation.

The twentieth century was the last in which whites dominated the Catholic church: Europe simply is not The Church. Latin America may be.

For whatever reason, Western investment in missions has been cut back dramatically at just the point it is most desperately needed, at the peak of the current surge in Christian numbers.

To a Christian living in a Third World dictatorship, the image of the government as Antichrist is not a bizarre religious fantasy but a convincing piece of political analysis.