The Shift in Global Christianity

Last night, I attended a lecture on the The Shift in Global Christianity. I had originally wanted to go, decided against it and then one of my professors emailed me about the extra credit opportunity of attending and writing a summary of this very lecture. I will probably be posting all of my notes on here soon in a very non-cohesive way. In the mean time feel free to be enlightened/challenged by my summary of the lecture that just brushes what's bouncing around in my brain:

I usually hate being given factoids comprised of numbers. When Dr. Jenkins started spitting out at statistics, at first I was weary but this quickly changed. He started spitting out these astounding numbers of how the demographics of Christianity is shifting. In 1900, 1/3 of of the worlds' inhabitants subscribe to Christianity. 80-85% of the Christian population was in North America and Europe. In 2050 the projection of this will still be 1/3 of the world's inhabitants subscribing to Christianity, however, only 25% of the population will be in North America and Europe.

This is a huge demographic shift for Christianity away from ancient lands of Christianity. Where is it going? Africa, Latin America and Asia is where they will be residing, otherwise known as the global south. The big question that Dr. Jenkins seemed to be answering was why? In the future, there will be a larger proportion of people to be living in the world and the demographics will be distributed differently was the short vague answer.

However, there was another answer, a powerful gripping answer that those living in poverty (typically seen to be those located in the global south) have a different take on reading the bible in today's world as well as having a different conversion process. One of the African theologians who I was unable to jot down a name said that “If any African can't identify with their old testament, then they've lost their Africanness.”

Jenkins goes on to talk about the many hymns (upwards of thousands) that we don't know because they are in Swahili and other languages that we do not know. There are 16,000 hymns in the Dinka language alone. It was interesting to hear how the Psalms related the Bible to their actual lives as lions would leave the entrails behind in one of the hymns demonstrated during the presentation. He spoke of how whoever wrote Psalm 126 knew famine and that's what the African people can relate to. They can relate to a widow tearing up her whole house searching for a coin. Reading the bible with a global perspective changed what we otherwise would have thought what the bible was saying to us.

Two other major changes will be that the majority of the world's Christians will be chiefly a poor society. The other being that they will live in a very different spiritual universe than Europe or US, a more charismatic one which believes firmly in healing and exorcisms. Also, instead of the U.S. and Europe sending missionaries to places such as Nigeria, they instead will be sending missionaries to us.

This is going to be a very scary thing for the traditional churches in the U.S. and Europe. The closing remarks were Jenkins talking to a woman who feared the counter current movement of right now saying instead to “Look south. Don't want to? Don't worry, it'll come to you.”