Book Review:
The Next Christendom:
The Coming of Global Christianity 3rd Ed.
By
Philip Jenkins
Debi van Duin
For
TS6102N Christian Theology in the Third World
Presented to Dr. Robert Dean at Providence Theological Seminary
In partial fulfillment of the pre-requisites
for M.Div. Equivalence
July 21, 2019
In 2013, I spent five weeks in Lahore, Pakistan teaching TESOL Methodology to
some Korean Christian missionaries and Pakistani Christian English teachers. Some
of the questions I was asked by the Pakistanis was why the Christians in the west have
no idea of the persecution they regularly experience? Do Canadian Christians not care
what their brothers and sisters are going through here? I answered, “Yes, we care
deeply but we have no idea of your circumstances!” Just over a week after I returned
to my University in South Korea, several thousand Muslims attacked the Joseph
Colony in Lahore, a Christian neighborhood of about 200 homes, after an erroneous
report that a Christian sanitation worker had blasphemed the Prophet Muhammad.1 I
had eaten dinner with a student’s family in Joseph Colony and attended one of the
Churches that was attacked. They are poor and persecuted. That is their reality.
The premise of Jenkins book is to point out that we, in the West, are woefully
ignorant of that reality, and not just from the point of persecutions suffered! I
remember hearing the shock in the voices of the local Manitoba community in 1990
when the Mennonite World Conference delegates turned out to be predominantly
black Africans! Ironically, the theme for the conference was Witnessing to Christ in
Today's World. Jenkins, in 2002, pointed out that, “the era of Western Christianity has
passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning.”2 Yet,
although we in the West see the disinterest and increasing secularization around us
and assume that Christianity is dying, Jenkins states, “whatever Europeans or North
Americans may believe, Christianity is doing very well indeed in the global South -
not just surviving but expanding.”3 He asserts that by the year 2050 only one Christian
in five will be a non-Latino white person and that the center of gravity of the Christian
1
Retrieved 18/07/2019 from: https://thediplomat.com/2013/04/joseph-colony-christian-community-in-lahore-
attacked-and-unprotected/
2
Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity 3rd Ed, 2011. Oxford ; New York :
Oxford University Press. 3.
3
Ibid. 2
world will have shifted firmly to the Southern hemisphere (see appendix A for 2019
statistics).4
In the first four chapters, Jenkins examines earlier demographic shifts in the
geographic center of Christianity. He argues that Christianity began as a global
religion, spreading rapidly over Africa, Asia, and Europe during the first millennium
thanks to the expanse of the Roman Empire. Europe emerged as the dominant
geographic center of Christianity only more than five centuries later. For example,
Jenkins states that, “in 1516, a Portuguese priest wrote of Kongo’s King Afonso that
‘Better than we, he knows the prophets and the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
all the loves of the Saints, and all things regarding our Mother the Holy Church.’”5
Christians went on to impose their faith on indigenous people groups as the
Portuguese, Spanish French, and British began exploration and ultimately, settlement
of the Americas. When, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in part due to
religious persecution and political intolerance, increasing numbers of Protestant
British and French Huguenots settled in North America, the USA and Canada
ultimately joined Western Europe in being the core of Christianity.
In the nineteenth century, colonization was followed by a renewed vigor in
Christian missionary activity reviving the Christian presence in India, China and
many of the African nations. Still, as the twentieth century began, Catholic bishops
and cardinals were predominantly European and North American, very few native
priests had been ordained in Catholic mission territories. Christianity was and, Jenkins
believes, still is, according to North American and European mindsets; a Western,
white, and liberal religion, practiced in a way that fits a middle and upper-class
lifestyle.
4
Ibid. 5.
5
Ibid. 29. The Portuguese priest is quoted from: Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450-1930.1994, Oxford:
Clarendon, 83.
European and North American Christians had and have not fully realized how
successful Christian missions were in the Southern Hemisphere. Jenkins admits some
people only accepted the faith because they wanted white status or goods, while others
found Christianity an assuagement to their marginalized or dispossessed status.
Interestingly, although oppression abounded, Christianity gained converts, and these
converts spread their faith down through generations and across their lands. The
degree of religious belief among Christians in the Southern Hemisphere is validated
also in the stories of martyrdom from Asia, Africa, and Latin America in both the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.When the colonial powers moved out of their
conquered lands in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Christianity not only remained but has
proliferated.
Jenkins predicts, in Chapter 5, that by 2050 the world will see The Rise of the
New Christianity, but predicts, using a synthesis of geographic and demographic data
from a variety of sources, that this future Christianity will look very different from the
one Western Christians currently espouse. First of all, he states that:
“A christian is someone who describes himself or herself as Christian, who
believes that Jesus is not merely a prophet or an exalted moral teacher, but in
some unique sense the Son of God, and the messiah. Beyond that, we should not
inquire into detailed doctrine, whether for instance a person adheres to the Bible
alone, accepts the trinity, or has a literal belief in Jesus’ bodily resurrection. The
vast majority of self-described Christians worldwide do in fact meet most of these
criteria for membership in the faith, but for present purposes, we cannot label as
heretics those who do not.”6
This means that his statistics likely include marginalized groups and possibly
even sects or cults. But then again, western Christians are often divisive in outlook,
tending to dismiss any groups outside of the evangelical campas subchristian or even
unchristian. Jenkins readily admits that some statistics, especially those from official
6
Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 88
church sources, may well have exaggerated church membership, given the differences
in what might represent church membership
Jenkins, additionally, recognizes the difficulties in attempting to project future
shifts in religious adherence when past experience has produced some unpredictable
turns including natural disasters, plagues, disease and both political and religious
wars. Still, his claims that the growth of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere will
continue, based on population and economic statistics, has proven to be true. Data
from World Population Review in 2015, stated that there were “more than 2.3 billion
people that practice some form of Christianity. This means that about one-third of the
world’s total population follows this religion.”7 Christianity is clearly holding its own
as the largest religion in the world. But it is not the only growing religion.
Jenkins believes based on demographic predictions by 2050 that Africa and Latin
America will contain half of the Christian population of the world and this younger
form of Christendom will grow in concert with similar growth in predominantly
Muslim countries, creating the potential to bring about global religious and political
conflicts among Christians and between Christians and Muslims. It is interesting that
Jenkins completely omits mention of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands,
many of which have predominantly Christian populations, which, while the
accumulative numbers might not affect his predictions, are still significant in that
New Zealand was one of the top missionary sending nations until eclipsed by South
Korea. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell
Theological Seminary reports that "of the ten countries sending the most missionaries
in 2010, three were in the global South: Brazil, South Korea, and India." Other
notable missionary senders from the Southern hemisphere included South Africa, the
Philippines, Mexico, China, Colombia, and Nigeria.
7
Retrieved 20/07/2019: http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/most-christian-countries/
Global statistics on the current (2019)
