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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: WORLD CHRISTIANITY AND ITS STUDIES
World Christianity as a Phenomenon
If the world as a whole manifested itself chiefly in terms of conflicting patriotism and nationalities in the first half of the twentieth century, and if conflicting "superpowers" largely defined the second half, the closing decade of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century saw an intensified consciousness of global oneness. This global consciousness is accompanied by the rising awareness of the need for partnership among nations, and with other living beings as the world leapt to the age of unprecedented technological advancement in global communications. The phenomenon is named "globalization," which is defined appropriately by one scholar as "the compression of the world" characterized by a new and intensified "consciousness of the world as a whole." For better or for worse, both advocates and critics of globalization agree on the power of this global consciousness. To some, the new consciousness is about interdependency for the good of all. Others see global systems as created and driven by profit-seeking capitalists who exploit the phenomenon for selfish gains, and relate the phenomenon to injustice on the global scale. There are winners and losers with globalism; But all exist under its spell. The Christian missionary movement is one of the most important catalysts of the emerging global consciousness.
Christianity both enhanced and challenged the historical phenomenon of globalization. While the Christian practice of foreign mission reinforced globalization, its theology could not be identified with all aspects of globalization. As the socioeconomic and political globalization conspicuously triumphed by the first decade of the twenty-first century, Christianity had also reached global status in terms of reach and character. At the most basic level, world Christianity refers to the worldwide reach of Christian faith. Historians in the past have used terms like "expansion" or "spread" of the Christian faith. Yet, what world Christianity has marked in history is more than a spreading of the faith. World Christianity expresses the worldwide character of Christianity as it came to be owned at heart by people of diverse cultures and societies from every region and every continent, and portrayed in the multiplicity of church traditions, cultural expressions of faith-practices, and doctrinal voices. This worldwide, diverse, and multifaceted character of Christianity as a (single) religion is what we have come to call "world Christianity." While most scholars have treated it mainly, and rightly so, as a historical development in the late twentieth century, world Christianity has also lent itself as a particular perspective on contemporary Christianity. Therefore, it has important theological implications both as a perspective and a method of understanding Christianity as a whole. To emphasize the diverse nature and characters, some have used the plural "World Christianities," affirming multiplicity of Christian identities, confessions, and traditions. The term "global Christianity" has also been popularly used interchangeably with "world Christianity." Because the term "global" can be closely associated with a more controversial socioeconomic and political phenomenon of globalization, some are reluctant to use the term "global Christianity." While we generally see the more neutral term "world Christianity" in use today, we, however, do not differentiate between the two. We treat global Christianity and world Christianity as synonyms and use them interchangeably.
The terms "world Christianity" and "global Christianity" first came to missiological parlance as a result of the worldwide demographic changes of Christianity. The extent and means by which Christianity reached some parts of the world may be controversial. Most studies of world Christianity in recent years centered on dramatic demographic changes. World Christian Encyclopedia, is the most popular statistical source from which narratives of global demographic changes have been drawn. As some have rightly raised doubts on the possibility of obtaining accurate global statistics, it is reasonable to suspect the reliability of this data. Even so, most scholars accept the overall picture of the demographic shift this encyclopedia presents. Even if we doubt the details of the numbers, the trends are credible. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Christianity emerges as the largest religion in the world, and also has the largest presence on all continents except Asia. Michael Jaffarian, a researcher for the World Christian Encyclopedia said: "By continent, relative to population growth, in the twentieth century, Christianity saw amazing growth in Africa, strong growth in Asia, slight decline in North America, even slighter decline in Latin America, but more serious decline in Europe." At the beginning of the twentieth century, 80 percent of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America, but by 2010, more than half of those who identify as Christian — 60 percent — were from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Numerically, the majority of the world's Christians are now living on continents that were considered to be essentially non-Christian throughout most of the nineteenth century.
An important mark of world Christianity is the multiplicity of the religion's self-expressions in different contexts, traditions, and practices. Christianity's essential nature is to be able to incarnate itself in any context to transform such contexts for the knowledge and likeness of God in Christ. What antagonizes world Christianity is not the diverse local and indigenous expressions of Christianity, but the failure to recognize these as meaningful and to impose the older Western form on others as if it represented a universal form. The focus of those who study world Christianity today is on indigenous expressions. While Christians in the non-Western world are at ease to recognize and affirm their form of Christianity as a piece of a larger pie, the older forms of Christianity in the West found it harder to accept the concept of world Christianity. Do Western Christians understand the implications of world Christianity and their place in it? This is a lingering question as historic churches are still striving to recognize the global character of the Christian faith. Because the term "Christianity" by itself commonly refers to the dominant Western form of Christianity, the term "world" becomes necessary to express what Christianity should truly mean.
World Christianity has unity and diversity. Christianity is multifarious, and consists of traditions with different confessions and doctrines, some of which are quite distinct. Because Christianity by nature does not have a particular culture or civilization (though it emerges from one) and is essentially dynamic to adapt and transform, Christian diversity follows human social and cultural diversities. On the unity side, there are theological or doctrinal constants that unify the differing denominational bodies and confessional claims. As we will note throughout, the current discussion on world Christianity follows a historical tension between the West and the non-West. Because Western nations have dominated the rest of the world for the past few centuries, sociocultural and political tensions between the West and the rest continue even in the postcolonial period. Furthermore, since the diffusion of Christianity followed the path of Western domination, the development of world Christianity follows the same line of tension between the West and the rest. Not only is the West and the non-West tension unavoidable, it is a pertinent point of departure to discuss world Christianity today. Until the closing decades of the twentieth century, most studies of Christianity focused on Western Christianity. The rise of world Christianity challenged Western domination by bringing into focus the non-Western world. Scholarship on world Christianity, therefore, engages the emerging newer Christianity, that is, Christianity beyond the West. In recent years, a more positive term for "non-Western world" has been in vogue, that is, the "majority world." With the understanding that world Christianity has to necessarily engage the newer non-Western Christianity in order to balance (perhaps subvert?) Western dominance, the present study focuses on majority world Christianity.
The Discovery and the Study of World Christianity
Although the phenomenon we are treating here centers around historical occurrences in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the idea has been in vogue in some circles much longer. The ecumenical movement in the twentieth century dealt with what we may call world Christianity as a form of conciliar cooperation among churches in mission around the world. Beginning with the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910, Christian churches around the world have sought unity in diversity resulting in the formation of the World Council of Churches and its regional and national affiliate councils. As a description for the ecumenical endeavor surrounding the World Council of Churches, Henry P. Van Dusen had invoked "world Christianity" in the 1940s. Although there were others who had used the term "world Christianity, "Van Dusen's treatment was perhaps the earliest academic work to give specific meaning of the term. Van Dusen described "world Christianity" in reference to the ongoing movement of world mission and churches' unity that has already impacted the world and has the potential to influence much more. With Christians averaging "less than 3 per cent" of the population "in all 'mission lands'" at the time, he affirmed "the enormous numbers of mankind as yet untouched by Christianity." Yet, the worldwide character and impact of Christianity through the missionary movement is incomparable with any movement or entity, he argued. Van Dusen's comparative words may sound triumphalist to some ears, and perhaps insensitive for some readers today, but he clearly expressed the global characteristics of Christianity:
There is no other force spread widely through our contemporary world and disseminating through the whole body of humanity influences of the righting of its wrongs, the healing of its deepest maladies, the bridging of its division, possibly even the halting of its fatalistic descent toward conflict and chaos. There is no other agency reaching out toward every corner of the earth, toward every people and every aspect of human life — for health and enlightenment, for reconciliation and redemption. There is no other institution or movement that still holds together the shattered fragments of humanity, as an earnest example to all men of what God intended the life of mankind to be and what someday the family of nations may become.
Although the ecumenical movement as represented by the World Council of Churches may have failed to become a home to world Christianity, van Dusen's ecumenical vision anticipated what we are now calling world Christianity. By the closing years of the twentieth century, it became clear that the ecumenical movement, as organizationally represented by the World Council of Churches, had turned itself into a particular confessional body representing one theological tradition among others. The loss of an ecumenical vision for the church from within the council itself and the domestication of this vision by its own membersled to the eclipse of ecumenicity in the World Council. By narrowing itself to a confessional tradition, the World Council of Churches fails to characterize "world Christianity." The Council's positioning has become rather passive on missionary expansion and practically discarded the importance of numerical growth of the church, especially since the 1960s. This apparent lack of missionary zeal dissociated the council from the major growth of Christianity in the Southern hemispheres. Yet, the ecumenical movement played a significant role in other aspects of world Christianity. Although it failed to hold together confessional diversity to the extent that a large number of growing churches in the twentieth century existed outside the movement, the ecumenical movement itself surrounding the World Council of Churches has done more than any other to promote relationships among churches, denominations, and confessional bodies around the world in the twentieth century.
In the 1970s and the 1980s, a few watchful scholars began to depict a worldwide changing demography of Christianity as they saw what Andrew Walls calls "the massive movement towards the Christian faith in all the southern continents." Two scholars in particular, Walbert Bühlmann(Catholic) and Andrew F. Walls (Protestant), brought the phenomenon to attention as they uncovered and analyzed the development and forecasted the implications. Bühlmann dubbed this rising church in the southern continents the "Third Church," and he announced its arrival as an "epoch-making event" in his 1974 book The Coming of the Third Church. The Third Church or "the Southern Church," he said, is the "church of the Third World" as well as "church of the third millennium" from which "the most important drives and inspirations for the whole church in the future will come." The first millennium belonged to "the First Church, the Eastern Church" when all the first eight councils were held under its tutelage. The Second Church, the Western Church, dominated the second millennium, "shaped the Middle Ages and, from the time of the 'discovery' of the New World, undertook all missionary initiatives." The turning of the tide from a Western church to the world church and to the Third Church, he said, had happened among Catholics in 1970 when "51 percent of all Catholics were living in the southern continents: Latin America, Africa, Asia-Oceania." With this, he wrote, "the centre of gravity of Christianity in the West has shifted more and more ... [toward] southern continents." Bühlmann equates the rise of "third Church" with the advent of the "world church" but sees the latter as a part of a changing phase of the Western church. He said, "We are therefore, almost without noticing it, witnesses of a dramatic change in the Christian church; the predominance of the Western church has been radically altered. From being the church of the West it has become a world church with an evident presence in all six continents." This point is reaffirmed in his other book published almost ten years later where he writes, "A Western church, with its world hegemony, has become a world church, comprised of six continental churches ... , all endowed with equal rights." Bühlmann's point may be understandable when placed within the Catholic Church's concept of the church's organic oneness. This does not deter him from forecasting a world church that is decentralized, intercontinental, intercultural, and consequently "pluriform" in nature.
Others have written more than Andrew Walls on the subject of "world Christianity," but we can hardly identify anyone who has done more toelevate the topic of world Christianity. Walls has been contributing to an expanding notion of world Christianity in at least three major ways: First, together with Bühlmann, he pioneered the study by identifying the movement and its major characteristics, sketching its fundamental features. Second, through his collegial and solicitous mentoring of thinkers and institutions, Walls has significantly heightened the knowledge of, and helped to establish, world Christianity as a major subject of inquiry. His leadership and founding of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World (later renamed Centre for the Study of World Christianity), first at the University of Aberdeen and later when it moved to the University of Edinburgh, became foundational to the study and development of discourse on world Christianity around the world. Third, Walls models and promotes intercultural learning through his tireless studies and travels as he enriches and disseminates knowledge of various aspects of world Christianity to the ministerial and academic guilds around the world.
Walls first studied southern Christianity in Africa, and over the past four decades expanded his study to Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. Through his method of comparative historical research, he demonstrates the authenticity and validity of southern Christianity and places it on par with Northern forms of Christianity. His thoughts revolve around the transmission of Christian faith across times, cultures, and social locations. Through his historical analyses of the transmission of faith, he formulates important historical wellsprings and viewpoints, and expresses theological principles rooted in important missiological themes.
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