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Twenty-First Century Christianity
Pentecostalism is the dominant force in global Christianity today. By looking at the characteristics and trends of this movement of the Spirit, we can see how far it has come since its inception in the early twentieth century and the directions in which it is moving. In particular, we will look at the expansion of Global Christianity in the majority world. The Global South now has more Christians than the Global North and will play a significant role in shaping the future of the faith.
Worldwide, the growth of Christianity continued after World War II as majority nations were liberated from colonial powers. A great shift was underway: Christianity was decreasing in the West, but increasing in the Global South: Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The Pentecostal revivals of the early and mid-twentieth century mushroomed to a global scale, bringing hundreds of millions of souls to salvation in Jesus Christ. Today, those nations that follow the United States in numbers of missionaries sent out are not from the West, but include South Korea, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, and Argentina.
In the 1960s, European and American churches encountered opposition from secularists, humanists, atheists, and others antagonistic to the gospel: free-sex and same-sex advocates, consumerism capitalists, theological and philosophical liberals, and religious pluralists. The Western churches could not mount an effective defense against these assaults and shrank, entering an era of post-Christianization. While the Western church lost power in the domains of politics, social authority, and education, these are not the greatest losses. Greater is the loss of the power and outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
The first church in Jerusalem was born from the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The church flourished through the Spiritâs power, which made possible divine healings and other miraculous signs. Not only in Jerusalem, but in other parts of the Roman Empire as well, manifestations of the Holy Spirit were seen as churches grew in the Middle East, Asia Minor, North Africa, and Mediterranean Europe. However, these spiritual experiences declined in the third and fourth centuries after since Emperor Constantine recognized Christianity and the church became institutionalized. The former vitality of the Spirit within Christian services and the spiritual lives of individuals gave way to a structured, institutional religious system rather than a living extension of the Holy Spirit.
For centuries, the church was governed by a hierarchical system, dogmatic discipline, clerical orders, and ritualized worship. Church and political structures became intertwined, and the church became a cultural commonality among European nations, where a monopoly of church and state was the norm. Rationalism by way of the Enlightenment led to the separation of secular and sacred, culminating in an erosion of shared Christian mores, ethics, morality, values, and worldviews. European churches began shrinking. American churches, while vital at first, began to show a downturn in the middle of the 1960s. Now, with the rise of Christianity in the Global South, the obvious question is: Whatâs going on, and whatâs next?
Global Changes
As of 2010, the majority of Christians worldwide can no longer be found in the West, but in non-Western regions such as Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The greatest number of Christians reside in Asia, yet Asian Christians are not the majority in their own nations. Andrew Walls states:
Once more the pattern of Christian advance appears as serial rather than progressive, withering at the centre, blossoming at the edges. The great event in the religious history of the twentieth century was the transformation of the demographic and cultural composition of Christianity brought about by the simultaneous processes of advance and recession. It means that the representative Christians, the Christian mainstream, now belong to Africa and Asia and Latin America, with intellectual and theological consequences still to be comprehended.1
Christianity has transitioned on an axis from Jerusalem, to Europe, and to North America and is now turning in multiple directions to Latin America, Africa, and some countries in Asia today.
The Decline of the Global North
In medieval Western Europe, the Catholic Church sustained a homogenous religious predominance, while Eastern Europe was dominated by the Eastern Orthodox Church. These churches were not known for spiritual experiences, except for a few cases in monasteries and occasional ascetic movements. The Reformation was successful at reforming the systems and doctrines of Catholicism, but failed to restore the spiritual empowerment common in the early church. Smaller groups from Reformed traditions tried to rediscover the spiritual vitality of the first-century church, such as the Quakers, Moravians, Pietists, and Methodists. Free Reformed, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican, and Congregational (early Puritan) churches did not have the same empowerment of the Holy Spirit as on the day of Pentecost. From institutionalization, the church found revitalization through the revivals and awakenings. Sometimes, there were schisms within the revival and awakening movements themselves, such as the Old Lights and New Lights among Congregationalists in the First Great Awakening, the New School and Old School and New Measure and Old Measure among Calvinist Presbyterians and the Reformed church in the second awakening, and the fo...