The Silent Revolution

Change We Can Believe In

We who live in the West can have a jaundiced view of things in the world. We live in a culture which is not just hostile towards our Lord Jesus Christ, it is scathingly derisive and dismissive. We can be excused somewhat if we fall into the trap of thinking all of the world to be equally hostile to the Lord Jesus Christ.

But a trap it is nonetheless. Mark A Noll, professor of history at Notre Dame, has had published recently a volume entitled The New Shape of World Christianity. At the beginning of the book, he gives us an overview of the "Rip Van Winkle" effect.

And the most important thing to realize about the current situation of Christianity throughout the world is that things are not as they were. A Christian Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep under a tree midway through the twentieth century and then woke up this past week to the sound of church bells (or a synthesizer with drums) on a Sunday morning, would not recognize the shifted shape of world Christianity.

It is as if the globe had been turned upside down and sideways. A few short decades ago, Christian believers were concentrated in the global north and west, but now a rapidly swelling majority lives in the global south and east. As Rip Van Winkle wiped a half-century of sleep from his eyes and tried to locate his fellow Christian believers, he would find them in surprising places, expressing their faith in surprising ways,under surprising conditions, with surprising relationships to culture.

The first thing that stands out is the growth in absolute numbers of professing Christians in the world.

The result of population changes—in general for the world, specifically for the churches—is a series of mind-blowing realities: More than half of all Christian adherents in the whole history of the church have been alive in the last one hundred years.

Consider the following snapshot to get an idea of how the Kingdom has changed demographic and geographic shape.

The magnitude of recent changes is the first thing, though not necessarily the most important thing, to grasp about the new world situation. A series of contrasts can underscore the great changes of the recent
past:

• This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called “Christian Europe.” Yet in 1970 there were no legally functioning churches in all of China; only in 1971 did the communist regime allow for one Protestant and one Roman Catholic Church to hold public worship services, and this was mostly a concession to visiting Europeans and African students from Tanzania and Zambia.
  

• This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya,South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined—and the number of Anglicans in church in Nigeria was several times the number in those other African countries.
  

• This past Sunday more Presbyterians were at church in Ghana than in Scotland, and more were in congregations of the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa than in the United States.
  

• This past Sunday there were more members of Brazil’s Pentecostal Assemblies of God at church than the combined total in the two largest U.S. Pentecostal denominations, the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ in the United States.
  

• This past Sunday more people attended the Yoido Full Gospel Church pastored by Yongi Cho in Seoul, Korea, than attended all the churches in significant American denominations like the Christian Reformed Church, the Evangelical Covenant Church or the Presbyterian Church in America. Six to eight times as many people attended this one church as the total that worshiped in Canada’s ten largest churches combined.
  
  
• This past Sunday Roman Catholics in the United States worshiped in more languages than at any previous time in American history.
  
  
• This past Sunday the churches with the largest attendance in England and France had mostly black congregations. About half of the churchgoers in London were African or African-Caribbean. Today, the largest Christian congregation in Europe is in Kiev, and it is
  pastored by a Nigerian of Pentecostal background.
  
  
• This past Sunday there were more Roman Catholics at worship in the Philippines than in any single country of Europe, including historically Catholic Italy, Spain or Poland.
  
  
• This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. Most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia.
  
  
• And for several years the world’s largest chapter of the Jesuit order has been found in India, not in the United States, as it had been for much of the late twentieth century.
  
  In a word, the Christian church has experienced a larger geographical redistribution in the last fifty years than in any comparable period in its history, with the exception of the very earliest years of church history.
  

The King is upon the Throne. All nations are to be made His disciples. All enemies are to be placed under His feet. His Kingdom is coming, and there is no force in heaven or upon earth that can stop it.