From everywhere, to everywhere

From everywhere, to everywhere is problematic.

1 Christianity has globalized.

• Christians have spread out into virtually every country, and in the process have created five major traditions and over 40,000 denominations.
• Denominations themselves have globalized, spreading into different countries Ned taking on different forms in each.
• The recent discussion of whether priests can marry within the Catholic tradition: the pope indicated, as most familiar with the nuances of Catholicism know, that African priests and the eastern rites could already marry.

**2 the isolated forms of Christianity in the various countries have for many years been exposed to forms in other countries, with fairly expected results. **

Perhaps the sharpest example in this issue is Patrick Johnstone’s note, in his article, that over 80% of the Anglican Communion was African and evangelical. What he doesn’t note but everyone knows is that this strand of the Communion is far more conservative than the European strand. The result is that more conservative Anglicans are opting to sever ties with the UK branch and move under the African branch, and vice-versa.

3 of course missionaries have long gone from the more Christian portions of the world to the less.

But an interesting thing has happened with globalization: some evangelists have gone from the traditionally lesser Christian places to the more -that is, as bits of Africa and Asia have become more Christian - and more evangelical for a variety of reasons - they have sent powerful evangelists to places that have been swamped with Christianity and become culturally or nominally Christian. In Paris, the largest churches are African. And so it would seem that if we want to revitalize Christianity in the West, we could do far worse and little better than to encourage immigrant believers to come as apostolic church planters and missionaries. This week’s article about Nepali Christians coming to America and planting churches is a case in point.

4 further, as Christian immigrants leave their less Christian home countries and migrate to the west, they are also changing the shape of Christianity in those countries.

5 we might think that the revitalization of Christianity in miniminally Christian fields has a simple solution I’m this trend. But it is never so easy. The rising tide of nationalism is afraid of outsiders, whether they share the same faith or not. A gifted evangelist from Ukraine might be welcome. A gifted evangelist from Somalia would likely be less so.

6 part of the reality of these trends is that while some may be in favor of working with immigrants, others will not be. They will be afraid of the intentions, beliefs, motives, personalities, thought styles, languages of immigrants.