1900–2000

The shift of Christianity to the “Global South” (twentieth century)

Shelley: in 1900 only 10 % of the world’s Christians lived on the continents of the South and East; a century later at least 70 % did. The historian Philip Jenkins spoke of the “Global South” as the new center of Christianity, where Pentecostal and charismatic faith predominates, and in Shelley’s view the world expansion of Christianity is essentially a Pentecostal expansion

Key points

• Figures: in 1900 only 10 per cent of Christians lived on the continents of the South and East; by 2000, at least 70 per cent.
• Jenkins: in the early 21st century Latin America had 480 million Christians, Africa 500 million, Asia 313 million and North America only 260 million. Weekly attendance in Nigerian Anglican churches exceeded that of all Anglican and Episcopal churches in Britain, Europe and the US together; Latin America has ten times as many Assemblies of God members as the US, and Congo has more Baptists than Britain. At the 1998 Lambeth Conference southern Christians used their numerical weight to push views unfashionable in the West: “Queen Victoria’s former empire, from South Africa to Singapore, struck back”.
• Africa: in 1900 about 10 million Christians out of 107 million (about 9 %), at the dawn of the 21st century 360 million out of 784 million (46 %)
• Scholars expect that in the first 25 years of the 21st century Christians will number 2.6 billion and Christianity will be the most widespread faith
• The Middle East and North Africa: Christians were 15 % in 1900, 5 % a hundred years later
• Shelley: Arab Christians are forced to renounce the faith, expelled, killed, yet reports of Muslim conversions continue and underground churches persist. Missionary translation of Scripture into local languages spurred cultural independence; Africans, learning that the patriarchs were polygamists, asked why missionaries were so firm on monogamy. In the “Global South”, as in the Eastern Church, redemption is widely understood as victory over evil, death and Satan (Christ the Victor). Liberation theologians read the Bible as a call against injustice and influence conservative evangelicals more in the South than in the North.
• Noll: Africans read Leviticus especially, Asians Proverbs; Southern Christians take the Bible directly as written for them, while the West keeps a historical distance
• Seoul: David Yonggi Cho, pastor of the world’s largest Pentecostal church, asked why women lead in a male-oriented culture, answered: “God told me so”
• Allan Anderson: in many cases the preacher’s ability to heal is the chief reason for the growth of the church
• “Back to Jerusalem”: in the late 20th century Chinese house churches hoped to send 100,000 missionaries to 51 countries along the Silk Road
• The target: about 5,200 groups and tribes, often Muslim, so that the Gospel would “return” to where it began
• Holmes: black majority churches have grown in Britain: Pentecostal, stressing spiritual warfare and exorcism; the ‘prosperity gospel’ is controversial.
• Padilla: in the early 1940s Latin America had about 2 million evangelicals among 128 million people; later Pentecostal growth worried Catholics. Citing Walls, European hegemony is broken: at the start of the 21st century Christianity’s centre of gravity is moving south.
• Kwiyani: in Africa all mainline denominations have had to ‘pentecostalise’ to some extent to avoid losing members to Pentecostal churches. Bonnke’s Christ for All Nations (campaigns 1974–2017) claims to have converted 61 million Nigerians between 1998 and 2017; Aladura, a Nigerian prayer movement begun in 1915 and tipping in 1918 in the influenza epidemic, held that God alone heals and shunned medicine. The prosperity gospel was popularised by Copeland, Cerullo, Jakes, in Brazil by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, in Asia by Cho and Prince; after 2000 a younger generation of prosperity preachers calling themselves prophets arose in Africa (Bushiri, Makandiwa, T. B. Joshua). Preachers’ wealth motivates African followers (‘If God can do this for the pastor, God can do this for me’), though critics note their lavish living. African Pentecostals demonise African religion, yet their growth cannot be explained without it – he argues for a ‘direct line’ between the two.

People

• Philip Jenkins
• Mark Noll
• David Yonggi Cho
• Allan Anderson
• Reinhard Bonnke

Place

Latin America, Africa, Asia