Associated Press writer Richard N. Ostling wrote an article this week on Christianity's enormous growth in what is often called the "Two-Thirds World" or "Global South," in contrast to the secular West.
Gordon-Conwell seminary's Center for the Study of Global Christianity says 62 percent of the world's 2 billion Christians live in Africa, Asia and Latin America, a percentage that's destined to rise.
Africa's Christian boom since 1900 "may well be the largest shift in religious affiliation that has ever occurred, anywhere," said Penn State historian Philip Jenkins.
Christianity's extraordinary rise in the Global South is chronicled extensively in Philip Jenkins' widely regarded The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (2002 - and now in process of being updated). Jenkins has most recently published The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, which focuses primarily on Africa and Asia. Late 2007 will see the publication of yet another Jenkins' book, this one on Christianity in Europe. Columnist Ostling writes:
Compared with Westerners, Jenkins observes, younger churches demonstrate "much greater respect for the authority of Scripture, especially in matters of morality; ... a special interest in supernatural elements of Scripture, such as miracles, visions and healings; a belief in the continuing power of prophecy; and a veneration of the Old Testament."
He calls their strict adherence to biblical teachings traditionalism, not fundamentalism, and says it underlies both spiritual deliverance and political liberation, which in the Global South are fused.
Exorcisms, belief in the devil and "spiritual warfare" against demonic powers thrive in situations where paganism, witchcraft, omens and even allegations of human sacrifice persist. And Christian alternatives help overcome people's fearfulness.. . . While Westerners face pressure to interpret the Bible in terms of secular trends, in the Global South secular ideologies "appear false and destructive," representing corruption, sin and death. Churches' moral conservatism is also influenced by Islam and other non-Christian faiths.
Read the whole article.