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

by Philip Jenkins

Although I make no attempts to predict exact dates for the changes described in this book, one key date can be cited with confidence, namely December 12, 2031. This is the feast-day of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the year that marks the five-hundredth anniversary of the original apparition to Juan Diego. The event will unquestionably be commemorated with a vast celebration of Mexican and Chicano Catholic identity, both north and south of the Rio Grande.

A revived cult of Mary would have an appeal far beyond the Americas. Marian devotion is a powerful force in African Catholicism, and has been since the time of the earliest native converts.

A black or brown Mary would be a powerfully appropriate symbol for the emerging Southern Christendom.

A vigorous emerging church thus formulates its beliefs, and even its basic theology, according to immediate local needs and pressures, rather than waiting for the approval of venerable but distant mentors.

What the “mainstream” church thinks is not terribly important for them, and mainstream is a designation that changes over time.

At what point does inculturation end, to be replaced by the submergence of Christianity into some other religion?

Western observers complain

What is being practiced, it appears, is not inculturati...

Across southern Africa, some independent churches have retained a wide range of traditional practices, including polygamy, divination, animal sacrifices, initiation rites, circumcision, and the veneration of ancestors.

most African churches accept prophetic and visionary ideas that have long since fallen out of fashion in the West.

Many Southern churches are indeed syncretistic, they represent a thinly disguised paganism, and all in all they make for “a very superstitious kind of Christianity,” even post-Christianity.

If there is a single key area of faith and practice that divides Northern and Southern Christians, it is this matter of spiritual forces and their effects on the everyday human world.

Most churches eventually acknowledged that the older beliefs were too deeply embedded to be removed, and either made their peace with tradition or else made it an integral part of their own system.

the fact remains that in all Christian literature from the New Testament onwards, the Christian missionaries advanced principally by revealing the bankruptcy of men’s invisible enemies, the demons, through exorcisms and miracles of healing.”

The practice of healing is one of the strongest themes unifying the newer Southern churches, both mainstream and independent, and perhaps their strongest selling point for their congregations.

Today, rising African churches stand or fall by their success in healing, and elaborate rituals have formed around healing practices.

Healing is equally central in many of the new churches of Latin America.

For the world of the first century, though, a prophet was someone who spoke the inspired word of God,

which might or might not be relevant to current worldly concerns.

In the book of Acts, prophecy was a sign of the true church. And if that was true two thousand years ago, why should it not be true of a man or woman today, a Kimbangu or a Shembe?

When a modern church follows ancient Hebrew ways, we must ask whether it is subtly reviving paganism or just trying to observe the Old Testament in all its details.

Congolese church uses a profession rite in which a drop of the candidate’s blood is placed on the altar cloth. Such practices make great sense in African terms, and it would be easy to justify the practice by an arsenal of biblical texts.

they are not so much departing from the Christian mainstream as emphasizing some aspects that have become unfamiliar—

These latter preserve all the fundamental beliefs that would be recognizable from any stage of Christian development, including strict monotheism, a sense of Christ’s unique role, and a firm sense of the division between divine and human realms.

The catechumenate largely died out in the European Middle Ages when it was assumed that all church members were born and brought up in a Christian community,

Even some of the allegedly “primitive” attitudes to the spiritual world found in Africa or Asia would in the late twentieth century acquire steadily growing credence among white Western evangelicals and Pentecostals, with their belief in spiritual warfare. One aspect of this is spiritual mapping, identifying localities in which evil forces are believed to lurk, so that they can be confronted by prayer and exorcism.

In understanding the character of the new Christianity, it is helpful to use the division between “churches” and “sects” that is so basic to the academic study of religion.

Churches, in Weber’s view, are formal bodies that intellectualize religious teachings and restrain emotionalism in their services.

They offer believers a formal liturgy and set prayers, in ways that portray the divine as remote from daily life.

Sects, by contrast, are overtly emotional and spontaneous, and encourage individ...

they tend toward fundamentalism, while shunning the intellect as a poss...

Most sect members are voluntary converts, whose lives are largely controlled by the organization,

so that the sect becomes a small exclusive fellowship of people seeking spiritual perfection.

Churches, in contrast, are larger and better-est...

whose members are customarily born into th...

many societies of the global South live in an intellectual world far closer to the medieval world rather than to Western modernity. In recent decades, the politics of much of Africa, Latin America, and Asia have been profoundly affected by religious allegiances and activism,

funding uncomfortably crossed the boundary dividing the Church Militant from the Church Militarist.4 In the Roman Catholic Church, theologies of liberation spread widely following the second Vatican Council of 1963–65.

Both Catholics and mainstream Protestants shared similar ideas about the right and obligation to oppose oppressive regimes, and to combat the structural racial and economic justices found across the global South.

Liberationist hopes reached a new height in the late 1970s. When the Sandinista revolution triumphed in Nicaragua in 1979, several current and former priests served in the radical government.

State collapse will be a central theme in the future development of global religion, and the world’s religious geography.

Quite plausibly, a large share of the Christian world could by the middle of the present century be living under religious rule.

the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God gathered at Kanungu to await a mystical vision of the Virgin Mary; followers then immolated themselves by fire,

Subsequent reporting raised serious doubts about this interpretation, and the believers are more likely to have been murdered in what was in reality an act of organized crime or terrorism.

A linkage between tribalism and religious zealotry has been alleged in several recent conflicts in Africa. One of the most alarming involved the genocidal violence in Rwanda in 1994, one of the worst single acts of carnage in the world since the end of World War II.

The only religious group that emerged from the affair with credit was Rwanda’s small Muslim community, which courageously protected fugitives.

the critical political frontiers around the world are not decided by attitudes to class or dialectical materialism, but by rival concepts of God.

struggles become peculiarly intense when one religious tradition seeks to declare that nation X is or should be following its dictates, and attempts to enforce the appropriate legal and cultural values, with all the problems that implies for the minority faith.

In the year 1900, about one-third of the world’s people were Christians, and that proportion remains more or less unchanged today.

In 1900, the 200–220 million Muslims then living comprised some 12 or 13 percent of humanity, compared to 22.5 percent of the world today, and a projected figure of 27 percent by 2050.

there are four times as many Christians alive today as there were in 1900; but over the same period, Muslims have grown at least seven-fold.