Where the Action Is

Week of Monday, January 27, 2003

I remember driving through a Mexican town one spring break vacation, trying to make sense of the foreign sights, sounds, food, culture, language and so on, and asking myself something like the following: “It feels so foreign here, so poor, so dirty, so marginal. Do I really believe that the Spirit of God is working here as much as I believe that He is back at home?” In my head I knew the correct answer to this question but in my heart my knee jerk reaction was very self-centered. I would guess that I am not alone. If you listen carefully to the way that many Christians describe the work of the Spirit in history, it often sounds very self-referential. We insinuate that the Spirit is most active in my own back yard, as if we've got the magic and others do not. This is tragic because it is not true.

Christians believe that the Spirit of God who “hovered” over the creation long ago (Genesis 1:2) works today in all of human history, blowing and ministering where, when and how He so chooses (John 3:8). Is it possible to identify more objectively where we see Him blowing today beyond our own narrow little worlds?

From a mere human perspective, and that is the only perspective that one has, I think that we can describe the Spirit's work in a theological way. By this I mean that it appears that much of the powerful work of the Spirit today is taking place in the charismatic movement. From its obscure beginnings with Charles Parham, founder of Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, and William Seymour, a black pastor with one eye who founded the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles, in a little less than one hundred years what we broadly describe as the “pentecostal movement” has exploded to number about 500 million Christians. According to current projections, in fifty years their numbers will double to one billion. They already constitute the largest distinct group of Christians except for Roman Catholics (who now number about one billion), and thrive in every country and in every denomination.

Size is not everything. You can find the excessive and the bizarre at the margins of the charismatic movement. Further, it is rather off-putting to be told, as is the case in classic Pentecostalism, that it is normative for every believer to be “baptized in the Spirit” and to speak in tongues as evidence of this baptism. What Christian wants to be so relegated to second class status? Still, it beggars the Christian imagination to try to grab this pentecostal tiger by the tail, and to grasp its scale and scope. From a theological perspective, the charismatic movement appears to be where the action is.¹

To this theological perspective we can add a social scientific viewpoint that overlaps with some of the observations just made. This social scientific perspective is especially interesting because for the most part people have failed to see it or appreciate the magnitude of its dimensions. Beginning with the 1982 publication of David Barrett's book World Christian Encyclopedia (and its new edition in 2002), missiologists began to document a growing change in Christianity's center of gravity. With Barrett's updated revisions just published, and with the remarkable new book by Philip Jenkins, The New Christendom; The Coming of Global Christianity (2002), we can now say with confidence that a massive shift has occurred in Christianity, away from the wealthy and primarily white regions of the northern hemisphere, to the poor and non-white regions of the southern hemisphere.² These changes roughly follow the trends of population growth, where we observe declines in the north and explosive growth in the south.

Here in the north and west you can hardly pick up a newspaper without reading of religious scandals, declining church attendance, arguments about clergy celibacy, the place of homosexuality, or the ordination of women. For many who care about these issues, there is enormous pressure for what Jenkins calls a new Reformation to address these crises in the church. To take one example, the infamous Bishop John Selby Spong argues in his two recent books, A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying and How a New Faith is Being Born (2002) and Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1999), that traditional Christianity is provincial and dated, utterly inadequate for our modern, scientific world.³ He strips Christianity of any and all of its traditional vestiges, proclaiming that the belief in a supernatural deity who lovingly cares for us is “a human coping device, created by traumatized self-conscious creatures to enable them to deal with the anxiety of self-awareness.” He believes that Christianity must become non-theistic.

Spong is partly right that for many people the Christian Gospel holds no appeal, and it is always refreshing and challenging when people deal with their faith struggles with such candor. But there is nothing at all “new” in his version of an eviscerated Christianity; these are the same ideas of Freud and Ludwig Feuerbach that religion is nothing more than a human projection. What I find most interesting about an influential person like Spong is how utterly provincial his views are. He might rightly describe a small part of the recent west, but seen globally, this is but a minor trend.

While here in the north and west there is clamor for a New Reformation (admittedly, not all as radical as that called for by Spong), as Jenkins and social scientists have shown, there has already occurred a massive Counter-Reformation in the south that is oriented toward traditional beliefs in the Gospel, a literal belief in the supernatural (seen in healings and exorcisms), and an overall conservative stance on social and political issues. With the failures of governments in many of these nations to provide basic goods, services, health care, education, and so forth, the leaders in these ascendant Christian movements enjoy increased social and political power. This southern Counter-Reformation, says Jenkins, runs “utterly contrary to the dominant cultural movements in the rest of the world.”⁴

But with the exponential growth of the church now taking place in Africa, Latin America and Asia, “the rest of the world” matters far less than it used to matter. Africa had about 10 million Christians in 1900 out of a population of about 107 million people (10%); today about 46% of its 784 million people are believers. In fifty years, half of the world's Christian population will be in Africa and Latin America, and only about 20% of believers will be non-Latino whites. The implications of these demographic changes could be staggering. In the Catholic Church, for example, “the next time a papal election takes place, fifty-seven of the 135 cardinals eligible to vote, or more than 40 percent, will be from southern nations. Early this century they will constitute a majority.”⁵ A Nigerian pope? It is only a matter of time.

Where is the Spirit blowing today? Think charismatic. Think global. Then pray that since “we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25).

1. For three good books on this subject see Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the 21st Century (DeCapo Press, 2001); Murray Dempster, Byron Klaus, and Douglas Peterson, eds., The Globalization of Pentecostalism (Oxford: Regnum, 1999); and Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard, 2001).
2. For a shorter version see Philip Jenkins, “The Next Christianity,” in The Atlantic Monthly (October 2002), pp. 53–68.
3. Spong was the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey for twenty four years before his retirement in 2000.
4. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom (Oxford, 2002), p. 55.
5. Ibid., p. 96.