What does this author mean by global Christianity? How does theo
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Chapter 9
1) What does this author mean by global Christianity?
Chapter 10
1) How does theology relegate the study of evangelism?
2) Name and define four dynamics of full and free speech in the church?
CHAPTER 9
Shifting Southward: Global Christianity since 1945
Dana L. Robert
From December 12 to 29, 1938, the most representative meeting of world Protestantism to date took place in Tambaram, India. Under the gathering storm clouds of World War II, with parts of China already under Japanese occupation, Hitler triumphant in Sudetenland, and Stalinism in full swing, 471 persons from 69 different countries met at Madras Christian College for the second decennial meeting of the International Missionary Council.
For the first time, African Christians from different parts of the continent met each other. The African delegation traveled together for weeks on a steamer that proceeded from West Africa to Cape Town and around the Cape of Good Hope to India. China, besieged by Japan and torn asunder by competing warlords, nationalists, and Communists, sent forty-nine official delegates, of whom nearly two-thirds were nationals and only one-third were missionaries. The women’s missionary movement, then at the height of its influence, pushed for full representation by women at Madras. Their persistence was rewarded with sixty women delegates sent by their national Christian councils, and another ten women in attendance by invitation. Europeans whose countries would soon be at war worked together in committee, as common Christian commitment overrode the tensions among Belgians, Danes, French, Germans, British, Dutch, Norwegians, and others.
The central theme that drew so many to India at a time of multiple global crises was “the upbuilding of the younger churches as a part of the historic universal Christian community.”1 With Protestant missions bearing fruit in many parts of the world, the time was ripe for younger non-Western churches to take their places alongside older Western denominations in joint consideration of the universal church’s faith, witness, social realities, and responsibilities. The roster of attendees reads like a who’s who of mid-twentieth-century world Christianity.2
Yet the 1938 IMC conference was a gathering of visionaries, for the global Christianity it embraced was a skeleton without flesh or bulk, a mission-educated minority who were leading nascent Christian institutions. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Europeans dominated the world church, with approximately 70.6 percent of the world’s Christian population. By 1938, on the eve of World War II, the apparent European domination of Protestantism and Catholicism remained strong. Yet by the end of the twentieth century, the European percentage of world Christianity had shrunk to 28 percent of the total; Latin America and Africa combined provided 43 percent of the world’s Christians. Although North Americans became the backbone of the cross-cultural mission force after World War II, their numerical dominance was being overtaken by missionaries from the very countries that were
Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:23:49.
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considered mission fields only fifty years before. The typical late twentieth-century Christian was no longer a European man, but a Latin American or African woman.3 The skeleton of 1938 had grown organs and sinew.
This essay paints in broad strokes the transformation of world Christianity since the Second World War — a massive cultural and geographic shift away from Europeans and their descendants toward peoples of the Southern Hemisphere.4 The shift southward began early in the century, and the 1938 missionary conference was vivid proof of powerful indigenous Christian leadership in both church and state, despite a missionary movement trapped within colonialist structures and attitudes. But after World War II, rising movements of political and ecclesiastical self-determination materially changed the context in which non- Western churches operated, thereby allowing Christianity to blossom in multiple cultures. After examining the changing political context in which the growth of global Christianity took place, this essay will give examples of the emerging Christian movement and then comment on the challenge for historians posed by the seismic shift in Christian identity.
Christianity and Nationalism
Besides laying waste to Europe, North Africa, and western Asia, the Second World War revealed the rotten underbelly of European imperialism. In the new postwar political climate, long-simmering nationalist movements finally succeeded in throwing off direct European rule. With the newly formed United Nations supporting the rights of peoples to self- determination, one country after another reverted to local control. In 1947 India obtained its freedom from Britain, beginning a process of decolonization that continued with Burma in 1948, Ghana in 1957, Nigeria in 1960, Kenya in 1963, and on around the globe. British policies of indirect rule promoted orderly transitions in some places, but left open sores in others, for example, in Sudan, where the Islamic north was left to govern the traditionalists and Christian south in 1956. Having introduced Western democratic institutions, the United States released the Philippines in 1946. Colonial powers such as Holland, France, and Portugal resisted the nationalist tide, ultimately to no avail. The Belgians were so angry at losing their colonies that they literally tore the phones off the walls in the Congo, leaving the colonial infrastructure in ruins. The French departed Algeria after six years of fighting the independence movement. Only a coup d’état in Portugal finally persuaded the Portuguese to free Angola and Mozambique in 1975, which, like many countries, erupted into civil war once the Europeans had departed. Different ethnic and political groups that had previously cooperated in opposition to European imperialism now found themselves fighting over control of nations whose boundaries, size, and even political systems had been created by foreigners. The success of anti-imperialist independence movements, with subsequent internal struggles for control in dozens of fledgling nation-states, was the most significant political factor affecting the growth of non-Western Christianity in the decades following World War II.
Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:23:49.
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To understand why decolonization profoundly affected the state of Christianity in the non-Western world, one must explore the prior ambiguous relationship between Western missions and European imperialism. On the one hand, although missionary work often predated the coming of Western control, imperialism’s arrival inevitably placed missions within an oppressive political context that they sometimes exploited for their own benefit. In China, for example, the unequal treaties of 1842 and 1858 permitted missions to operate in selected port cities and to buy land. Foreign missions in China benefited from extraterritoriality, whereby they were not subject to Chinese laws and regulations. In colonial Africa, missions received land grants. For example, in 1898 Cecil Rhodes awarded 13,000 acres to American Methodists for their Rhodesian Mission. Sometimes, however, the missionaries themselves stood between the indigenous peoples and their exploitation by Europeans. French Protestant missionary Maurice Leenhardt defended the land rights of the Kanaks in face of overwhelming pressure from French colonialists in New Caledonia. Presbyterian missionaries William Sheppard and William Morrison faced trial in 1909 for exposing the atrocities perpetrated on rubber gatherers in the Belgian Congo. While courageous individual missionaries mitigated the effects of imperialism on indigenous peoples, by and large the missions benefited materially from European control. Most missionaries saw themselves as apolitical and preferred the status quo of colonialism to the uncertainties of national revolution.
Another important factor in understanding the ambiguous relationship between missions and imperialism before decolonization was the importance of missionary schools. Christian missions pioneered Western learning in the non-Western world. In 1935 missions were running nearly 57,000 schools throughout the world, including more than one hundred colleges. Mission schools promoted literacy in both European languages and vernaculars, and they spread Western ideals of democratic governance, individual rights, and the educability of women and girls. Despite their limitations, missions through education provided local leadership with the tools it needed to challenge foreign oppression. The Christian contribution to Asian nationalism was extremely significant, especially through the impact of mission schools. Korea, for example, was colonized by the Japanese in 1910. At that time, mission schools were the only form of modern education in the country. In 1911 the Japanese military police accused students at a Presbyterian school of plotting to assassinate the Japanese governor-general. The police arrested 123 Koreans for conspiracy, 105 of whom were Christian nationalists. In 1919, thirty-three Koreans signed the Korean Declaration of Independence. Fifteen signatories were Christians, even though Christians represented only 1 percent of the total population.5 Mission education, which combined vernacular literacy with Western learning, clearly played a key role in equipping nationalist leadership.
The role of mission schools in creating nationalist leadership was important not only in Asia, but also in Africa. Missions founded schools before those of colonial governments, including the first higher education for Africans in 1827 at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, and higher education for South Africans at Fort Hare in 1916. By the Second World War, mission churches in Africa had produced a Christian elite poised to found independent
Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:23:49.
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governments. When independence came, even though Christianity was a minority religion, its adherents played a much larger role than their numbers warranted. Most black African leaders were churchmen. Kenneth Kaunda, first president of Zambia, was the son of a Presbyterian minister. Hastings Banda, first president of Malawi, received his early education in a mission school and attended college in the United States. Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana, attended Catholic mission schools and began his career teaching in them. Leopold Senghor studied for the priesthood before entering politics and becoming first president of Senegal. Similarly, Julius Nyerere, first prime minister of Tanzania, both studied and taught in Catholic mission schools. Not only did mission schools train many nationalist leaders, but church-related institutions provided opportunities for developing indigenous leadership.
After World War II, with the process from decolonization to independence in full swing, Christianity in the non-Western world faced an entirely new context. In 1954, leading East Asian Christians wrote a volume entitled Christianity and the Asian Revolution. Reflecting on the social convulsions of the twentieth century, the Christian leaders defined the “Asian Revolution” not only as a reaction against European colonialism, but also as a search for human rights and economic and social justice, ideas obtained from the West itself. The authors noted, “As the American colonists revolted in the name of English justice against British rule, so Asians, in the name of political and social doctrines which originated in large part in Europe and America, revolted against European colonialism.”6 The rejection of colonialism by Asian and African Christians included rejecting Western missionary paternalism, with its Eurocentrism and moral superiority. From the 1950s through the 1970s, as nations shook off the legacy of European domination, churches around the world accused Western missionaries of paternalism, racism, and cultural imperialism. The refrain “Missionary, Go Home”7 reached its peak in the early 1970s. In 1971 Christian leaders in the Philippines, Kenya, and Argentina called for a moratorium on missionaries to end the dependence of the younger churches on the older ones. In 1974 the All Africa Conference of Churches, meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, called for a moratorium on Western missionaries and money sent to Africa, because of the belief that foreign assistance created dependency and stifled African leadership.
The cries for moratorium from Latin American, Asian, and African Christians shocked the Western missionary movement. But indigenous Christian protests against Western mission were insignificant compared with the wholesale rejection of Christianity that occurred within revolutionary movements led by non-Christians. At the International Missionary Council meeting of 1938, the largest delegations of Asian Christians came from the countries with the largest Western-style Christian infrastructures: India and China. Both Indian and Chinese Christianity boasted national Christian councils under indigenous leadership; both enjoyed thriving ecumenical movements that supported organic church unions; both hosted a range of Christian colleges and hospitals. Ironically, anti-Christian backlashes raged in both countries. Because Christianity was a minority religion in both China and India, its association with European domination widely discredited it as dangerous
Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:23:49.
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and foreign in the eyes of the majority non-Christians. Despite a community that traced its founding to the apostle Thomas, most Indian Christians were outcastes, members of ethnic groups despised in Hindu society. Practicing a double discrimination against both Christianity and low-caste status, the postcolonial Indian government excluded Christian Dalits (outcastes) from the affirmative-action programs guaranteed to other ethnic minorities. The government of India began denying visas to missionaries in 1964, and Christians faced ongoing discrimination and intermittent persecution in both India and Pakistan.8
In China, the place of the largest Western missionary investment in the early twentieth century, accession to power by the Communists in 1949 condemned Christianity as the religion of the colonialist oppressor. Chinese churches became sites for Marxist struggle against the “opium of the people.” In 1950 the Communist government organized Chinese Protestants into the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and Catholics into the Catholic Patriotic Association. Under theologian Y. T. Wu, who had attended the Madras IMC meeting in 1938, the Three-Self Movement published the Christian Manifesto, which stated that missionary Christianity was connected with Western imperialism and that the United States used religion to support reactionary political forces. The document called for Chinese Christians immediately to become self-reliant and separate from all Western institutions.9 The Three-Self Movement began holding meetings at which Christian leaders were accused of betraying the Chinese people and were sent to labor camps for “reeducation.” With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the remaining foreign missionaries left China, for their presence was endangering the Chinese Christian community. The few missionaries who did not leave were imprisoned along with many leading Chinese Christians. The worst suffering of Chinese Christians occurred from 1966 to 1976 during the Cultural Revolution, a period in which no public worship was permitted in China. The very schools and hospitals that had seemed like the best contribution of foreign missions to China were held up as the proof of missionary imperialism and foreign domination of Christianity. Millions of Chinese died as the government encouraged the destruction of all things religious or traditional. Except for a catacombs church of unknown strength, it seemed to China watchers in the 1970s that the Communist dictatorship had destroyed Chinese Christianity.
In parts of Africa, anticolonial movements sometimes took an anti-Christian stance. Nationalist leaders accused missions of telling Africans to pray and then stealing their land while their heads were bowed. Despite having been a resident mission pupil in childhood, Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the anti-Christian, pro-independence Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya during the 1950s and later the country’s first president, accused missionaries of trying to destroy African culture. During the Mau-Mau liberation struggle, which mobilized African traditional religion against Christianity, rebels killed African Christians who refused to drink the goats’ blood and other sacrifices of the pro-independence cult. During the Cold War, Marxist ideology as well as funding from the Soviet Union and China began playing a role in African conflicts. Following the Cuban example, Communists funded movements in Mozambique and Angola, dismantled mission schools, and attacked churches as supposed
Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:23:49.
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organs of capitalism and European religion. By the 1970s, on a political and ideological level, world Christianity seemed in disarray.
Although mission education, literacy training, and ideals of individual human worth had provided tools that initiated intellectual leadership of independence movements in Asia and Africa, the perceived alliance of foreign missions with European domination branded Christianity a henchman of colonialism. In the West, reacting against the colonial legacy, scholars and historians similarly indicted Christian missions as a tool of Western domination. As far as Western intellectuals were concerned, the non-Western Christian was a mercenary “rice Christian,” and the missionary as outdated as a dinosaur. The teaching of missions and world Christianity began disappearing from colleges and seminaries, a casualty of the Vietnam-era rejection of “culture Christianity” and Western domination in world affairs. With indigenous church leaders calling for moratoriums on missionaries, Western mainline churches became highly self-critical and guilt-ridden. Attempting to shift from paternalistic to partnership models of mission, they began cutting back on Western missionary personnel. During the long process from decolonization to independence, scholars, politicians, and leading ecclesiastics branded both Western missions and world Christianity failures because of their perceived social, theological, and political captivity to the despised colonial interests.
Revival and Renewal in World Christianity
The irony of world Christianity from the Second World War through the 1970s was that even as scholars were writing books implicating Christianity in European imperialism, the number of believers began growing rapidly throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Perhaps if historians in the sixties and seventies had been studying Christianity as a people’s movement rather than a political one, they might have noticed that growth among the grassroots did not mirror the criticisms of intellectual elites. The process of decolonization and independence began severing the connection between Christianity and European colonialism. The repudiation of missionary paternalism, combined with expanding indigenous initiatives, freed Christianity to become more at home in local situations.
Another fallacy of treating Christianity as a politicized Western movement is that scholarship ignored the way in which ordinary people were receiving the gospel message and retranslating it into cultural modes that fitted their worldviews and met their needs.10 In retrospect it is evident that even during the colonial period, indigenous Christians — Bible women, evangelists, catechists, and prophets — were all along the most effective interpreters of Christianity to their own people. The explosion of non-Western Christianity was possible because Christianity was already being indigenized before the colonizers departed.
In the uncertainty of postcolonial situations, in the midst of civil strife and ethnic tensions in emerging nations, indigenous forms of Christianity spread quietly and quickly. Even in the so-called mission denominations, native leaders took over and indigenized positions held
Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:23:49.
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formerly by Western missionaries. In Kenya, for example, Mau-Mau rebels targeted Anglicanism as the religion of colonizers during the 1950s. But after Mau-Mau, independence, and the subsequent instability of a struggling government, Anglicanism in Kenya emerged even stronger, with exponential growth among the Kikuyu from the 1970s onward. Not only was Anglicanism now led by Kenyan bishops and priests, but the new context transformed the liability of being an English religion under a colonial government into the advantage of being a global faith under an independent government. In the 1980s and 1990s, as political and economic institutions began collapsing under corrupt one-party dictatorships, the church became one of the few institutions with the moral authority and international connections to oppose the government, which it did on occasion. In some parts of Africa, the church’s infrastructures and international connections provided more stability for supporting daily life than did the government.11 The postindependence growth of Anglicanism occurred so steadily throughout former British colonies that Africa is now the continent with most Anglicans. At the 1998 Lambeth Conference, the highest consultative body of the Anglican Communion, 224 of the 735 bishops were from Africa, compared with only 139 from the United Kingdom and Europe.12 Anglicans in Nigeria report 17 million baptized members, compared with 2.8 million in the United States.13
Given its brutal suppression under Communism after 1949, the Chinese church provides the most stirring illustration of the resilience of Asian Christianity. In 1979 five thousand Chinese Christians attended the first public worship service allowed since 1966. By suffering under Communism along with other citizens, Chinese Christians proved they were not the “running dogs” of imperialists but were truly Chinese citizens. With the end of the Cultural Revolution, Christians began reclaiming buildings that had previously been seized. The Chinese Christian Council opened thirteen theological seminaries and began printing Bibles, creating a hymnal, and training pastors for churches that had gone without resources for fifteen years. Recent scholarship estimates that on the eve of the Communist takeover, one- fourth of all Chinese Christians were already members of indigenous, independent Chinese churches.14 It was these indigenized forms of Christianity that provided the most resistance to Communist domination of the churches. Biblically literalist, directly dependent on the power of the Holy Spirit, and emerging from the religious sensibilities of popular Chinese religion, indigenized forms of Chinese Christianity grew the most under Communist persecution. What had been 700,000 Protestants in 1949 grew to between 12 and 36 million Protestants by the end of the century.15 In addition to government-approved churches, millions of Chinese Christians meet in house churches characterized by spontaneous spoken prayer, singing and fellowship, miraculous healing, exorcisms of evil spirits, and love and charity to neighbors.
The translation of Christianity into African cultures was most obvious in the life and work of so-called African Independent or African Initiated Churches (AICs), defined by Harold Turner as churches founded in Africa, by Africans, primarily for Africans. By 1984 Africans had founded seven thousand independent, indigenous denominations in forty-three
Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:23:49.
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countries across the continent. By the 1990s, over 40 percent of black Christians in South Africa were members of AICs. Chafing under white domination and racism, African-led movements began breaking off from mission churches in the 1880s. The earliest independent churches emphasized African nationalism in ecclesiastical affairs. They received the name “Ethiopian” in 1892 when a Methodist minister, Mangena Mokone, founded the Ethiopian Church in the Witwatersrand region of South Africa. Believing that Africans should lead their own churches, Mokone cited Psalm 68:31: “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands to God.”16 During the early twentieth century, important African prophets and evangelists emerged throughout the continent, often to be arrested and persecuted by colonial authorities who deemed spiritual independence a dangerous precursor to political independence.
By the mid-twentieth century, the largest group of AICs were known as Spirit churches, often called Aladura in western Africa and Zionist in southern Africa.17 Spirit churches were characterized by a prophetic leader, a high emphasis on the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal phenomena such as speaking in tongues and exorcisms, and often a holy city or “Zion” as headquarters. With Bible translation into many African languages, prophetic African leaders interpreted the Scriptures for themselves in line with African cultural practices. Zionists, for example, permit polygamy, which exists both in the Bible and in traditional African cultures. Their lea
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