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Examination of especially the last two of these five themes featured prominently at a remarkable conference held in early July of this year at the Hammanskraal retreat center of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. The organizers were part of Currents in World Christianity, a three-year project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts that built on an earlier Pew-sponsored program, the North Atlantic Missiology Project. For the South African meeting, leadership was supplied by Dr. Brian Stanley of the Centre for Advanced Religious and Theological Studies at the University of Cambridge and Professor J.W. Hofmeyr of the University of Pretoria's theology department.

In contrast to the 1910 Edinburgh conference, the perspectives of Europeans and North Americans did not dominate in Pretoria. About the same number of Africans as Europeans and North Americans addressed the conference (each about 40 percent of the 53 people on the program, with the rest from China, Korea, Brazil, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand). More important, what conference attenders heard were papers outlining the new realities of world Christianity that almost no one at Edinburgh would have predicted. Books and articles are forthcoming from the conference; meanwhile, it may be helpful to highlight a few of the meeting's well-documented reports.

Chinese scholars presented carefully researched papers on how in the 1920s and 1930s groups of Chinese Christians began to develop indigenous forms of the faith as they selected from the offerings of Western missionaries what they felt was most helpful for their own setting. One of these groups was the Jesus Family Movement of Jing Dianying, which combined Pentecostal, Confucian, Social Gospel, and even communist elements into an active movement that was eventually silenced by Mao Zedong's totalitarianism. Another was the "Local" or "Lord's Recovery" Church associated with Watchman Nee, which, despite brutal treatment under Mao, was by the 1990s surging forward in China with tens of thousands of adherents and also with thousands of "Local" churches around the world. (Members from the Pretoria "Local" Church, made up substantially of Afrikaners, attended part of the meeting at Hammanskraal.)

Knowledgeable scholars, many of them still quite young, presented especially intriguing reports on complex developments among African churches—some still connected to missionary beginnings, more independent of Western ties, and still more reflecting a diverse mixture of Western and African influences. From the careful scholarship now well established or on the horizon—for Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Benin, much of East Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and elsewhere—it is obvious that imported concepts like "Pentecostal" or "charismatic" have less and less relevance for situations defined increasingly by Christian engagement with local leaders, problems, achievements, and interpretations of Scripture. Several conference papers also documented in starkest terms how absolutely central poverty, disease, and conflict have become to Christian existence in Africa (but also in much of the rest of the newer Christian world as well). One of the most exciting papers outlined the emergence in Ghana of a theological understanding of Jesus as King and Chief who takes up and sanctifies in himself the interpersonal, intergenerational, and intercommunal mediations of the Ghanaians' traditional rulers.

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