Africa the new centre of Christianity?
I have heard some of these stats before and read something similar in Philip Jenkins book “The New Christendom”, but they never fail to amaze me.
Found this on the Going Global blog the other day…
- This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called “Christian Europe.” Yet in 1970 there were no legally functioning churches in all of China; only in 1971 did the communist regime allow for one Protestant and one Roman Catholic Church to hold public worship services, and this was mostly a concession to visiting Europeans and African students from Tanzania and Zambia.
- This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined–and the number of Anglicans in church in Nigeria was several times the umber in those other African countries.
- This past Sunday more Presbyterians were at church in Ghana than in Scotland, and more were in congregations of the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa than in the United States.
- This past Sunday the churches with the largest attendance in England and France had mostly black congregations. About half of the churchgoers in London were African or African-Caribbean. Today, the largest Christian congregation in Europe is in Kiev, and it is pastored by a Nigerian of Pentecostal background.
- This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia.
Quoted from Mark Noll’s book, ‘The New Shape of World Christianity’, [pp. 20-21]
What these stats do not reflect is the huge religiosity of so much of the continent.
Nor the fact that much African Christianity is full of the prosperity gospel, that is wrecking havoc on this beautiful continent.
Nor the fact that Christianity in Africa may be a mile wide but by and large it remains an inch deep…
We desperately need a robust, evangelical theology that engages the minds, the hearts and the reality of the people of Africa. The social problems are huge but so are the theological ones. We need men and women who will love Africa, commit to Africa (we need life-timers more than anything right now), walk alongside us, yes feel and work on the social needs (how can we not!), but we need a theology for Africa, that engages with the questions, the hopes, the dreams and the idols of Africa. A theology that loves Africa, prays for Africa, weeps for Africa, laughs with Africa, rejoices with Africa, walks with Africa, thinks with Africa.
Until we stop our unhealthy, co-dependent love affair with the west – we will never see the gospel take deep root in the soil of Africa.
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It is interesting to hear this from you since you live on the continent, albeit down south. A question I often have when people speak or new center, etc. is, how do you define center?
Good question, I think in this case it has to do with the numbers. Because I think most of the “power” and influence in Christian circles is still found in the west. And this is to the detriment to the gospel taking deep root in Africa… even the prosperity gospel is an imported thing…
So true. I think people get satisfaction in saying this but sometimes the very people who say it are not really interested in what is emerging in other parts of the world, except maybe, as a nice new wonder and good conversation piece.