The Changing Face of Christianity
Picture the typical Christian. What do you see? Perhaps you think of the people in your small group Bible study or the people you pass as you walk into church. Or maybe you think of the groupies who attend every Christian conference and concert that hit town or the elderly woman who religiously reads her Bible and prays each morning. While clearly part of the body of Christ, none of them are even close to how the majority of Christians look.
The “typical” Christian in the world is better portrayed as a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian flavella. The vast majority of Christians are young, poor, theologically conservative, female, and people of color.[20] As we grow in our understanding of the changing face of Christianity, there’s great potential for improving how we do short-term missions. The North American church is no longer the trendsetter and center of Christianity, though we still have a significant role. Serving with eyes wide open includes changing our assumptions about the worldwide Christian church and our part therein.
By sheer majority alone, the Western church used to be the trendsetter for the rest of the Christian church. In 1800, only 1 percent of Christians lived outside North America and Western Europe. In 1900, 10 percent of all Christians lived outside North America and Western Europe. By 2000, more than two-thirds of the Christian church lived outside North America and Western Europe. The center of gravity in the body of Christ has shifted southward. The largest Christian communities today are not in the US Bible Belt but in Africa and Latin America.[21]
As a reflection of this reality, from here on we’ll use the term majority world church to refer to the church outside North America and Western Europe. This term was coined by church leaders gathered from these nations at the 2004 Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism in Pattaya, Thailand. They collaboratively rejected the terms previously used to describe them, most frequently third world church, a term they viewed as degrading.[22] Instead, majority world church is a descriptive term that refers to the church in those regions of the world where the greatest population of Christians live—outside North America and Western Europe.
Just as with the world at large, it’s impossible to accurately generalize about the majority world church. However, since many of us have limited experience with anything other than the churches we attend week after week, it’s helpful to pause and consider some of the common characteristics of the majority world church by looking at a few more snapshots.
Snapshot 1: Unprecedented Growth
Many contemporary sociologists are confounded by the pace at which Christianity is growing around the world. Endless predictions were made throughout the twentieth century that suggested Christianity would unravel alongside colonialism. However, “instead of Christianity fading away along with the empire, it unexpectedly grew and spread.”[23] New faith communities came into being without a colonial order to maintain them, and they grew with a flavor and look different from those brought to them by the imperialists.
The pace at which the majority church is growing is phenomenal. Consider a few of the statistics:
Some question these statistics, and that’s fair. Simply counting the number of people who say a prayer or espouse to follow Jesus is not enough. We’re called to make disciples who in turn have a transformational impact on their communities. Regardless, sociologists and missiologists agree that unprecedented growth is happening in the Christian church worldwide. Something is happening in God’s people around the world. Clearly the revolution of Jesus Christ continues to transcend the many atrocities and inequities described in chapter 1.
Christianity is the fastest-growing religion in the world, with a 6.9 percent growth rate, compared to 2.7 percent for Muslims, 2.2 percent for Hindus, and 1.7 percent for Buddhists.[25] The story of Christianity represents a fundamental and historical shift in worldwide religions. Christianity is not held captive by a particular culture. In fact, more languages and cultural expressions are used in Christian liturgy, devotion, worship, and prayer than in any other religion.[26]
Add the burgeoning growth of the church to your perspective on the twenty-first-century church. Open your eyes. Those of us who are members of God’s people are part of a worldwide revolution that is growing with racing speed.
Snapshot 2: Persecution? Of Course!
The phenomenal growth of the church has not come without a cost. More Christians have been martyred for their faith in this century than in the previous nineteen centuries combined. Christians in the majority world church suffer brutal persecution. For most of the majority world church, persecution is commonplace and expected. As a result, many portions of the Bible make much more immediate sense to them. The stories of Mordecai and Esther, Daniel and friends, and Paul and Silas read like their daily news.[27]
Persecution is especially prevalent for Christians living in many of the remnant communist countries, including China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and Laos. North Korea has been in “first place” for three years in a row as the least religiously free nation in the world. Religious persecution is also prevalent in parts of the Islamic world, such as Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and Uzbekistan. These states live by a fundamentalist conviction that there is one right way to see the world: through Islam.
You won’t often hear these stories from your news outlet, or even from the persecuted themselves, because for them persecution is just a fact of life when you’re a Christian. Almost daily, young Christian boys are stolen from their parents in Sudan and taken to “cultural cleansing camps” where they are forcibly converted to a fundamentalist sect. They’re then sold at open-air slave markets. This is happening today! Right now fellow members in the Christian church are experiencing this kind of Paul-like persecution.
Take a minute to visit Voice of the Martyr’s website, www.persecution.com, for a timely story about someone in the majority world church who is experiencing persecution today.
Snapshot 3: Communal Decision Making
Another reality in the majority world church is an emphasis on communal decision making rather than an individualist approach. I’ve often been involved in developing ministry partnerships between different organizations across cultures. When I do so with organizations led by North American ministry leaders, the process typically involves a few conversations with the key decision makers at the table, and the agreement is formed. Sometimes a variety of staff play a part in the decision-making process, but at the end of the day, the partnership is solidified between one or two key leaders.
The process is very different when developing partnerships with many ministries in the majority world. One reason is the commitment of majority world church leaders to a more communal decision-making process. The leaders deliberately wrestle with the implications of a decision for many groups and whether it will promote harmony. This doesn’t mean decision making and leadership are approached in an egalitarian manner in which everyone has equal voice. In fact, many majority world church leaders are far more hierarchical and paternalistic than egalitarian. However, the decision-making process occurs collectively with many people rather than with a couple of key leaders making decisions in isolation.
Historian Peter Brown sees the communal nature of the majority world church as strangely reminiscent of the Christian church in the third and fourth centuries. A radical sense of community is what made Christianity so appealing to people at that time. It allowed people to move from the wide, impersonal world into a miniature community. In the same way, many Christians in the majority world today find a far greater sense of identity with their local churches than they do with being citizens of Peru or Nigeria. Communities of faith fill the void of disintegrated families and tribes, which have been eroded by ethnic cleansing, disease, and famine. The intimacy experienced among Christian faith communities in the majority world is comparable to the intimacy of a large family gathering.[28]
An emphasis on community and interdependence is one way majority world pastors have adapted the tools and philosophies they received from Western missionaries. For example, the emphasis on helping a church become self-supporting has been a driving agenda of Western missions over the last several decades, as expressed in the “three-self” formula. According to the three-self formula, national churches should be self-propagating, self-supporting, and self-governing. Three-self is an appropriate reaction against “spoon-feeding,” where national churches remain dependent upon Western missionaries and Western funds.[29]
However, some majority world church leaders aren’t convinced that the three-self model is the right approach. They argue that the three-self movement comes from an individualist perspective rather than one developed for an interdependent church around the world. Isaac Mwase, a Christian scholar with roots in Jamaica and Zimbabwe, says, “Unless the economies of poverty in the global South change dramatically in the future, Christian solidarity would seem to demand external support. What is needed is not self-sufficiency among the poor, but a way of partnering across cultural and economic differences that affirms Christian solidarity, the interdependency of the Body of Christ.”[30]
When 40 percent of the people in the world earn less than two dollars a day and North Americans earn more than seventy dollars a day, can there ever be a point where majority world churches support themselves exclusively? These are the kinds of issues we need to explore with the majority world church.
The majority world church believes in interdependence and is trying to teach the Western church about it. We must figure out how to have healthy and mutually rewarding interdependent relationships. This plays directly into how we approach our short-term missions efforts. Those of us on short-term missions trips usually assume we have something to offer the churches and communities we visit, and sometimes we do. However, we must go beyond merely saying we need to learn from their churches as well. In truth, there is much for us to learn from the majority world church. These snapshots are simply an attempt to help us see a few of the inspiring characteristics of the majority world church. We’ll look more specifically at the implications of these snapshots for short-term missions, but initially let’s continue to open our eyes to see the big picture.
Snapshot 4: Beware the “Powers”
Another key thread in the majority world church is the core belief that we live in a dynamic, spiritual universe. While an awareness of demonic forces seldom goes beyond a thriller movie for many of us, principalities and powers are conscious realities to most of our fellow Christians around the world. Much like the first-century believers in Ephesus and Colossae, people in the majority world have an extraordinary fear of hostile, supernatural powers.
The African church is especially aware of the supernatural world. Africans, whether Christian or not, believe the universe is inhabited by the devil and a host of spiritual forces. Nearly all African religions believe strongly in the existence of all kinds of evil spirits and that these spirits influence human life in many ways. “Witchcraft beliefs remain pervasive and persistent, and no amount of denial can shift that reality, at least in Christian Africa.”[31]
The belief of the majority world church in supernatural and demonic powers doesn’t lead these Christians to hopeless fatalism. Instead, majority world Christians are much more aware of the importance of being vigilant against the active, dangerous spirit world lurking around them. One African pastor was asked if he thinks there’s a demon behind every bush, to which he replied, “There are lots more demons than there are bushes!”
The reality of the demonic world to people in the majority world church helps explain their particular interest in Paul’s letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians. First-century Ephesus and Colossae cultures were inundated with sorcery, magic, and divination. This reality is demonstrated by Paul’s frequent references to the “powers of darkness.” There are more references to principalities and powers in Ephesians and Colossians than in any other book of the Bible. Many Western commentators have explained away Paul’s multiple references to these dark forces as metaphors for the social and political structures that existed in first-century Ephesus and Colossae. Majority world church leaders, however, see these powers as literal, personal, and organized forces of evil with which they must contend on a day-to-day basis. They readily identify with Paul’s words.[32]
Most North American Christians espouse belief in the existence of demons and spiritual forces, but this belief rarely moves beyond theory for us. We’re intrigued by stories about demons when we hear about someone else’s experience or warn kids against using a Ouija board, but our day is rarely impacted by the fear of spiritual forces lurking about. This is a key difference between our lives and those of our brothers and sisters in the majority world. This sheds light on the next snapshot too.
Snapshot 5: God’s Provision Is Immediate and Direct
Believing in a dynamic universe with supernatural powers all around compels majority world Christians to pray with a greater sense of urgency and dependency. A member in a majority world church is much more likely to expect immediate and direct provision from God than a “typical” North American believer. You haven’t experienced prayer until you’ve prayed with a group of Christians in the majority world church whose very lives are dependent upon God. Of course, every minute of our lives is dependent upon God as well. However, we have been so influenced by the comforts of life in the West that the miracles of Jesus often seem like a first-century phenomenon rather than a reality for today.
In the majority world, huge and growing Christian populations are moving toward the kind of supernaturalism embodied by Jesus and his first-century followers. This is another reason why the Bible is more easily understood by non-Western believers. Christian communities in the majority world as diverse as Protestants, evangelicals, Orthodox, and Catholics proclaim a Christianity that includes Jesus’s power over the evil forces that inflict calamity and sickness upon the human race.[33]
Many of these snapshots are different angles on some of the same realities. Belief in the spirit world and day-to-day persecution are part of why the majority world church is much more aware of its daily dependence on God’s provision. For example, the belief in God’s immediate and direct provision is often the only coping mechanism available to majority church leaders such as Brother Yun. Yun, frequently referred to as the “heavenly man,” is one of China’s most persecuted house church leaders. Yun has suffered endless torture and imprisonment throughout his growing ministry in China while also reporting numerous episodes of God miraculously sustaining him.
One day after Yun was beaten and paraded through the streets for several hours, he was brought into an interrogation room where he was tightly bound, further beaten, and questioned. Despite Yun’s pain and anguish, he experienced an unusual measure of confidence in God’s protection over him. “Suddenly I remembered how the angels had opened the prison gates for Peter to escape. The rope that bound my arms behind my back suddenly snapped by itself! I didn’t tear the ropes off, but kept them loosely in place. I decided to try to escape.” As the officers attended to a phone call in the next room, Yun got up, walked through the middle of the courtyard, and leapt over an eight-foot wall. Yun says, “The God of Peter wonderfully helped me leap over the wall and escape.”[34]
Yun, like most of the majority world church leaders I meet, prefers not to focus on the sensational miracles and experiences of suffering that have inundated his life. Instead, he prefers to emphasize the character and beauty of Christ, who sustains him. May God stir us from our complacency through the examples of our brothers and sisters who believe in God’s direct and immediate provision.
Snapshot 6: Missionaries from Everywhere to Everywhere
One of the most exciting missions phenomena today is the Back to Jerusalem movement, a missions initiative among the Christian Chinese church. Specifically, the Back to Jerusalem movement is an initiative to proclaim the gospel and establish fellowships of believers in all the countries, cities, towns, and ethnic groups between China and Jerusalem. Along this route are the three other largest faith systems—Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.[35]
Back to Jerusalem is one of many missionary movements occurring in the majority world church. One morning I had breakfast with a Filipino missionary I’ll call Anna. Anna has been serving in China for five years. I asked, “Anna, how long did it take you to raise the funds to leave the Philippines and begin your work in China?”
She replied, “Oh, it was just a few weeks. I found out how much the airfare was, I told my church, and we began praying. And a few weeks later I was on the plane.”
A bit puzzled, I continued, “But what about the rest of your support? How about the other funds for your living expenses once you got there?”
Her face lit up as she said, “Oh, Brother Dave, I just live by faith. God meets my every need.”
Or travel to Nigeria. Several thousand Nigerians are serving as missionaries with one hundred agencies in more than fifty countries. Nigeria has long been viewed as a mission field, but now it’s becoming a major missionary-sending country. For every missionary who now enters Nigeria, five Nigerians go out as missionaries to other fields of service.
Together the United States and the United Kingdom still send out the largest missions force in the world, but close behind are India, South Korea, and Brazil.[36] We’re in a whole new era of missions. We are still an important player and need to continue to obediently send missionaries from the Western church. But we must realize we’re joining missionaries from around the world to go to the world.
Snapshot 7: Help Wanted—Leaders!
Much more can be said about what’s occurring in the majority world church, but let’s look at one last snapshot for now. With the unprecedented growth of Christianity, seven thousand new church leaders are needed daily to care for the growing church. The burgeoning growth of the Christian church is creating a leadership chasm.
We have to be cautious about how we respond to this reality. While leaders say their number one need is leadership training, many of them don’t want to use Western models to meet that need. Many residential training institutes sit empty around the world because they have been ineffective at providing the leadership training and ministry skills needed by pastors in the majority world church. In addition, majority world church leaders are intolerant of theological training that engages the head and not the heart.
We must also hold the need for leadership training in tension with the knowledge and skills many of these pastors have acquired through life experience. Brother Yun says that house pastors in China have been trained by “the foot chains that bind us and the leather whips that bruise us.”[38] Through the seminary of prison, these leaders have learned many valuable lessons about God that no book or course could ever teach. This “on the job training” coupled with formal training and resources will assist these leaders as they continue to shepherd their congregations.
Ministry training for pastors is an area where interdependent models need to be developed to help meet the need. A realistic perspective on the realities of the global church has to include the huge need for equipped ministry leaders.
Concluding Thoughts
The shifting of Christianity’s center to the south and the east in our world is reason to celebrate. Sometimes when North American Christians hear these snapshots, they ask, “Where have we gone wrong? Why are we suddenly becoming a minority?” Much in the Western church needs alignment. Yet despite our flawed missions efforts over the last century, God has used these very efforts to expand the church around the world. The primary reason that 70 percent of Christians live outside North America and Western Europe today is because of the unprecedented growth of Christianity from West to East.
Be inspired! God is doing amazing things through the church everywhere. Our brothers and sisters all over the world provide a glimpse into how God is working. They inspire us to remain faithful. The majority world church would want you to know it’s far from perfect and has many flaws of its own. That’s the beauty of God’s amazing ability to take our imperfect efforts and use them to reflect God’s glory.
I hope you’re starting to grow in your perspective of what it looks like to encounter the twenty-first-century world. The world with all its needs and disparities described in chapter 1 is a world in which God is continually calling people to salvation. The reality of Revelation 7:9—where people from every nation, tribe, and people group will gather to worship Jesus—has never seemed more plausible. The church exists in some form in every geopolitical nation of the world. Let us reflect on what it means to be joined together with disciples of Jesus all over the world. Open your eyes to your sister in Egypt and your brother in Chile. We need them in view as we do short-term missions.