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Speaking to a Pentecostal congregation recently, I made a faux pas by trying to imagine the fate of Christianity in the coming decades. As the pastor politely corrected me, such developments need concern us little, given the imminence of the return of Christ—though my speculations might be worth considering "should the Lord tarry." For many secular observers likewise, the future of Christianity scarcely seems a worthwhile topic for discussion, since the religion is self-evidently in such precipitous decline. In both cases, the perception seems to be that a book with the title The Future of Christianity should be a joke item with entirely blank pages. To the argument about Christ's return, I can say nothing worthwhile; but the view of Christian decline is easily rebutted. Two recent books by Anglican authors—theologian Alister McGrath; priest and future-watcher Richard Kew—show beyond question that the faith is booming worldwide, not just in raw numbers (though these are impressive enough) but also in terms of its spiritual and intellectual ferment.
These two idea-rich books have a great deal in common, and not just the fact that both are written by Anglicans of British origin. Each is, in its way, a masterpiece of compression, covering in a very short space a range of topics that a less skilled or disciplined writer might have blown up to a thousand pages. Both also offer an impressive historical vision of the recent past.
McGrath's book begins with the disasters that Christianity suffered across the West in the twentieth century, events like the Armenian genocide, the Communist persecutions, and the churches' failure to confront Nazism. Significantly, it is in this horrendous company that he places the general moral and spiritual crisis that the West experienced during the 1960s, and history may yet justify this grim classification. As he remarks of attempts to "modernize" Christianity in this era, "it was almost as if these people deliberately set out to create a Christianity which would be lukewarmly welcomed in 1960 yet regarded as laughable in 2000." He draws an apt comparison between the repackaging of liberal Christianity and the Coca-Cola company's disastrous marketing experiment for "New Coke" in the 1980s. Just as popular demand forced the reinstitution of the old model under the title of "Classic Coke," so religious consumers transferred their loyalty from failed innovation to revived tradition, in the form of fundamentalist and evangelical churches.
McGrath moves immediately from reporting cultural death (or near-death) to triumphant life, as he traces the astonishing growth of Christianity across the global South over the last 50 years, the passionate upsurge of Christian commitment in much of Africa and in nations like Korea. He also tracks growth trends in North American Christianity, showing in the process that, yes, there do still remain useful and novel things to say about megachurches like Willow Creek, as well as smaller nondenominational community churches.
Indeed, one of McGrath's central concerns is to trace the likely fate of denominationalism in the new Christian configuration, the "new ways of being church" that we see evolving before our eyes. Reasonably, he sees the major Christian trends of the next century as Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism, though in both cases with an emphasis on innovative types of organization, such as the cell church. I am surprised that he is also quite optimistic about the Eastern Orthodox tradition, which seems to me to suffer a dreadful handicap from its concentration in regions of steep population decline. McGrath, like Kew, points to the urgent need for all churches to grow through mission rather than merely hoping to survive. In this respect both books offer the same message: evangelize or die.
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