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In 2007 Books & Culture joins our sister magazines Christianity Today and Leadership Journal in the second year of the Christian Vision Project, focused on the church and global mission. Few scholars have made as decisive a contribution to the conversation about the changing nature of mission as Philip Jenkins, whose writing has awakened both the faithful and the secular to the dramatic shift southward in world Christianity. His books The Next Christendom and The New Faces of Christianity are exercises in both learning and unlearning: unlearning the widespread assumption that Christianity is a "Western" religion, perhaps in irreversible decline, and learning just how varied and vigorous global Christianity can be. Here is his provocative answer to our question, What must we learn, and unlearn, to be agents of God's mission in the world?
Be careful what you wish (or pray) for: you may get it. For some centuries, European and American Christians prayed fervently for the conversion of the wider world, especially in Africa and Asia, and many devoted their lives to achieving this end. And to an astonishing degree, they succeeded. During the 20th century alone, around 40 percent of the population of Africa converted from animism or primal religion to some variety of Christianity. Within a few decades, the African continent could be, in numerical terms, the center of world Christianity. Growth in Asia has also been impressive, while enthusiastic new forms of Christianity have blossomed in Latin America. Many denominations are discovering, to their surprise, that large numbers of their adherents, even majorities, no longer live in those areas that could once be claimed to represent the "Christian world."
At least by the 1970s, churches were acknowledging, at least in theory, that concepts of mission had to reflect these changing realities, that mission could no longer be seen as a blessing bestowed by Europeans and Americans upon those less fortunate dwellers beyond the pale. But for all the well-intentioned egalitarian talk of "mission in six continents," we still find people asking, semi-humorously, whether someday we might even find African or Asian missionaries coming to evangelize Europe and North America—as if such missionary efforts were not already widespread and thriving. As to the intellectual effects of the epochal southward movement of Christianity, no less a celebrity than Father Andrew Greeley opines that "We will depend on them for vitality, but they will continue to depend on us for the ideas." Uh-huh. I somehow doubt that the global South's contribution to theological inquiry will be confined to rhythmic dancing or hand-clapping.
In order to rethink mission, we Northerners must absorb a number of basic points. Primarily, we must appreciate the wider context in which we stand in relation to the wider Christian world. Already, we do not represent the norm within Christianity, whether in racial, social or economic terms, and we will over time be ever further marginalized. By 2050, white non-Hispanics could represent just 15 or 20 percent of the world's Christians. Following from that fact, the world's "average Christian" looks very different from the media stereotype. She or he is above all likely to be an extremely poor person by Western standards, with all that implies in terms of access to food, water, schooling, transportation, medical care, and a healthy environment. Nor, probably, does this ordinary believer live in a stable nation-state in which government is limited by the popular will, and where human rights receive more than lip service.
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