World Christianities

Kristendommen er i rask endring og kommer til uttrykk på nye måter både sosialt og politisk. På få tiår er tyngdepunktet flyttet fra det globale nord til det globale sør.

I Vest-Europa blir kirker nedlagt eller solgt. Samtidig fylles megakirker i kristendommens nye bastioner utenfor Europa. Kirkene i Midtøsten taper medlemmer når kristne forlater regionen, mens den ortodokse kirken i Russland knytter seg tettere til staten. Den største veksten av kristne skjer i Afrika. Men også i Kina og flere andre asiatiske land vokser antallet kristne, og i USA spiller kristen tro fortsatt en viktig rolle i politikken.

Samtidig er katolisismen i Latin-Amerika under press fra en raskt voksende pinsebevegelse som forsterker forskyvningen av kristendommens tyngdepunkt fra nord til sør, så vel som fra de gamle etablerte kirkene til nye menigheter.

Med hovedvekt på de mest folkerike landene på hvert kontinent viser forfatterne av «Global kristendom. En samtidshistorie» fram de siste tiårs endringer og diskuterer hvordan kristendom i dag kommer til uttrykk i nye politiske og sosiale sammenhenger.

Medforfattere: Gina Lende, Vebjørn Horsfjord og Ole Jakob Løland

Religious groups can reinforce, complement, or undermine authoritarian domination. This article investigates whether high-status Protestant churches act as democratising civil society organisations by gathering hundreds of Protestants openly outside state structures to change church registration policies. In so doing, they also seek to curtail state domination over religion and, by extension, over all groups in society.

Links to reviews below!
An examination of Christianity in contemporary Russia. It begins with an overview of Orthodox Christianity before focusing on the distinctive aspects of Russian Orthodoxy and Russian Christianity. Explores different manifestations according to geographical variation; provides an overview of the history of Christianity in Russia; explores the history of the past century through the biographies of Russian Christians; the trajectory of Russian theology; and socio-political dimensions of Christianity since the collapse of communism.
Reviews:
https://brill.com/view/journals/jecs/74/3-4/article-p347_17.xml
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=58133
https://readingreligion.org/9781451472509/understanding-world-christianity-russia/

Klaus Koschorke, «"'Dialectics of the Three Selves": The ideal of a "self-governing" native church -from a missionary concept to an emancipatory slogan of Asian and African Christians in the 19th and early 20th centuries», in "InternationaIising Higher Education: From South Africa to England via New Zealand: Essays in honour of Professor Gerald Pillay", eds. Hoffie (J W) Hofmeyr and John Stenhouse (Centurion, South Africa: Mediakor, 2018): 127-142.

This opening article offfers an introduction to the theme of this special issue of Exchange: Jesus traditions and masculinities in world Christianity. Highlighting the historical trajectory of feminist
theological debates on the maleness of Jesus Christ and its implications for confijigurations of gender (read: the position of women) in Christian traditions, the article particularly explores two
recent developments: first, the critical discussion in academic, theological and ecumenical circles of men and masculinities in contemporary Christian contexts, and second, the growing body of scholarship on the masculinity (or better, masculinities) of Jesus Christ in the New Testament in relation to masculinities in the early Christian era. Building on these debates and this scholarship, the article identifijies a new and critical fijield of inquiry that explores the complex and productive relationships between the ambiguous and unstable masculinity/ies of Jesus Christ and the multiple and changing masculinities that are found today in the local contexts of an increasingly diverse global Christianity.

This paper examines the theological claims of Hong Xiuquan (1814-64), the leader of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64). Whilst various aspects of the Taipings' theology and religious culture were characterised by originality, the most unique – and, for many, shocking – feature of their new theological worldview was the belief that Hong was the second son of God and younger brother of Jesus. This belief, which was based on visions that Hong had experienced in 1837, provoked criticism and condemnation from Protestant missionaries who were in China at the time of the Taiping Rebellion. The first part of this paper discusses two particular interpretations of Hong's claims in the reports of those missionaries. The analysis reveals that the missionaries' orthodox lens caused them to misunderstand and misrepresent Hong's claim to be the second son of God. Moving beyond the critical interpretations of the missionaries, the second part of this paper examines the Taipings' specific discourses on the nature of the Heavenly Father and his relation to Jesus and Hong. By analysing Hong's claims within this wider (and previously ignored) theological framework, the paper supports a new interpretation that views the title second son of God not as evidence of the Taipings' heterodox character, but as an access point for understanding their localised doctrine of God.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of proposals for multiple religious belonging. While Sri Lankan theologian Aloysius Pieris is often cited as an exemplar of this phenomenon, he himself grants it no separate space of analytical inquiry. This essay argues that Pieris is crucial to debates over hybrid identities not despite but precisely because of his silence on them. Where his theological assumptions diverge from those governing explicit elaborations of multiple religious belonging, insights emerge into how he and others marginal to the western academy unproblematically embrace and enact multiplicity.

This doctoral dissertation is a historiographical examination of the missionary encounter in Ottoman Syria (modern Syria and Lebanon) during the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Nahda, or Arab renaissance. It begins in 1870, when the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions transferred its Syria Mission to the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. It ends in 1915 with the escalating effects of World War I in the Ottoman Arab provinces. Building upon Middle East mission historiographies, studies in world Christianity, and postcolonial critiques of missions, this study approaches the story of Syrian Protestantism as an enmeshed history in which Syrian and American lives became inextricably entwined. Moving beyond the traditional narrative, which presents American missionary men as the primary actors, this research points to the complex relationship of Syrians with American, British, and other missionaries in Ottoman Syria. It uses rare Arabic publications from the late Ottoman period and archival sources from the US, UK, and Lebanon to underline the agency of Syrian Protestant women and men who built the Syrian Evangelical Church and contributed to the socio-cultural currents of the Nahda alongside other Syrian Christians and Muslims.
This dissertation demonstrates that Syrian Protestants challenged missionary authority in subtle and overt ways, while at the same time employing the resources of mission schools and the American Mission Press in Beirut to engage in the Arabic production of the Nahda. It argues that Syrian Protestant women played a significant, yet largely unrecognized, role in church and society as journalists, novelists, public speakers, and evangelistic preachers. Chapter 1 compares Syrian Protestant conversion narratives to missionary accounts of evangelical conversion. Chapter 2 investigates the American-Syrian Protestant relationship in light of a major schism within the Beirut Protestant community in the 1890s. Chapters 3 and 4 use Arabic books, periodicals, and pamphlets published at the American Mission Press to demonstrate the depth of Syrian Protestant participation in the cultural and religious discussions of the Nahda. Chapter 5 pieces together the stories of Syrian Biblewomen who worked as evangelists for American missionaries and for the female-led British Syrian Mission.

This article offers an extended review of some recent publications in the field of African theology and HIV and AIDS. Hence it critically examines the progress that is made in the engagement with and the reflection on issues related to the HIV epidemic by African theologians. The article notices the emergence of a new strand of Africa theology, a (liberation) theology of HIV and AIDS, which builds on and employs the classic strands of African liberation, inculturation, reconstruction and women’s theology. Moreover, some challenging issues for the further African theological engagement with HIV and AIDS are identified.

While Christianity has existed in Iran/Persia since the fourth century, if not earlier, at the middle of the twentieth century almost all Iranian Christians belonged to an ethnic minority, especially the Assyrians and the Armenians. Ethnic Iranians were almost all Muslims, and then mostly Shi’a Muslims. Since the Revolution of 1979 hundreds of thousands of ethnic Iranians have left Islam for evangelical Christianity, both within and outside of Iran. This paper seeks to explore the multifaceted factors – political, economic and technological – that have helped to create an environment wherein increasing numbers of ethnic Iranians have apostatized from Islam and become evangelical Christians. A concluding section outlines Steven Lukes’ theory of power and analyzes the growth of Iranian Christianity in the light of his theory.

ABSTRACT: The East India Company (EIC), after losing its monopolistic tea trade with China in 1833,  started tea cultivation in earnest in the newly-annexed territory of Assam. As part of its plans, the EIC invited the American Baptist missionaries in Burma to convert and “pacify” the Khamti and Singpho tribes living in the vicinity of Sadiya, the centre of the fledging tea industry. The American Baptist missionaries, who were interested in converting the Shan tribes, accepted the offer on the assumption they would find a passage to Upper Burma and China, regions they were barred from entering by the respective authorities of those kingdoms, from their base in Upper Assam. In March 1836 Nathan Brown and Oliver Thomas Cutter (and their wives) arrived at Sadiya to start the Shan Mission. Cutter’s primary task was to set up the mission’s printing press. Cutter however was dismissed from missionary service in 1853. As a result, he has become a disowned and nearly forgotten figure (in contrast to his famous contemporaries Nathan Brown and Miles Bronson), despite his important role as a pioneer missionary and as the man who introduced print into colonial Assam. Intractable terrain and political instability led the American Baptists to abandon the Shan Mission and instead establish the Assam Mission. However, for a period (roughly between the years 1835 and 1841) the short-lived and misconceived Shan Mission generated great hopes. Like its modern versions, this nineteenth-century “Act East” policy (a joint colonial and missionary project) envisaged bringing great changes in Southeast Asia. Based on, among other sources, the few surviving letters of Oliver Cutter, an attempt is made in this paper to reconstruct the hopes and expectations the Shan Mission gave rise to.

"This research represents a continuation and elaboration on Miller’s research for the Christianity and Freedom project, presented in Rome in December of 2013. This article seeks to understand the challenges and context of Christians who are also ex-Muslims in the Holy Land. Attention is paid to the difference between the contexts in the West Bank and Israel, and how the established Christian Churches sometimes safeguard their own precarious sense of security by turning away Muslims who seek to know more about the Christian faith and converts from Islam."

Since the 1960s, there has been a substantial increase in the number of known conversions from Islam to Christianity. Most of these conversions have been to forms of evangelical or Pentecostal Christianity, but there have also been conversions to Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, and still other converts claim to remain in some way both Muslims and followers of Jesus. This article explains how we obtained estimates of the number of converts, the complexities involved in this task, and an annotated list of countries by continent with the estimated number of believers in Christ from a Muslim background. The article includes charts with maximal, minimal, and medium estimates of this population from 1960 to the present.

This piece is the introduction to the book _The Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity_ (Penn State University Press, 2015). In The Spirit of Praise, Amos Yong and I bring together a multidisciplinary, scholarly exploration of music and worship in global pentecostal-charismatic Christianity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Spirit of Praise contends that gaining a full understanding of this influential religious movement requires close listening to its songs and careful attention to its patterns of worship. The essays in this volume place ethnomusicological, theological, historical, and sociological perspectives into dialogue. By engaging with these disciplines and exploring themes of interconnection, interface, and identity within musical and ritual practices, the essays illuminate larger social processes such as globalization, sacralization, and secularization, as well as the role of religion in social and cultural change.

Bp Suheil Dawani became the Ordinary of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem (Anglican Communion) on this day. Guests from all around the world were present. The author gives some historical background of the diocese and the church building, and then describes the ecumenical liturgy used for the installation. This took place at the Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr in East Jerusalem.

How have Anabaptists and Mennonites followed the Spirit in mission? How might we follow the Holy Spirit in mission? Articles in this issue address these question through examination of Anabaptism and the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement; early charismatic expressions among Russian Mennonite Brethren; Spirit-empowered witness and the church in South Africa; Anabaptist inspiration for the church in postmodern Britain; and the story of the Meserete Kristos Church in Ethiopia. The issue also features poetry and book reviews.

The Iglesia ni Cristo is one of the fastest-growing indigenous Christian churches in the world. They have an estimated membership of 2.25 million adherents in more than 100 countries. In recent years its civic engagements have expanded through bigger relief operations and charity dedicated to the poor and those affected by calamities. These initiatives are typically articulated in terms of unity, duty, and obedience to God. This paper gives attention to this expansion by spelling it out and explaining it in view of its newfound role in civil society. This is an important intervention in the literature. Studies on INC have mainly focused on its successes in the political and religious spheres. INC now repackages itself as a civic organisation that cares about public welfare. My argument is that this is how it manifests its new triumphalism in the Philippines, but with implications on its expanding presence in civil society.

Since the 1960’s there has been a marked increase in the number of known conversions from Islam to Christianity. This thesis asks whether certain of these ex-Muslim Christians engage in the process of theology-making and, if so, it asks what these theologies claim to know about God and humans’ relation to God.

Utilizing the dialectic of contextuality-contextualization of Shoki Coe, and the sociology of theological knowledge of Robert Schreiter, the thesis seeks to answer these questions by the use of two case studies and an examination of some of the texts written by ex-Muslim Christians. Lewis Rambo’s theory of religious conversion and Steven Lukes’ theory of power will be used to clarify the changing dynamics of power which have helped to foster modern contexts wherein an unprecedented number of Muslims are both exposed to the Christian message and, if they choose to do so, able to appropriate it through religious conversion.

The two case studies are of a Christian community which founded a Muslim-background church in the Arabophone world and some Iranian Christian congregations in the USA and UK Diaspora.

Aspects of the contexts of these believers are investigated in some detail, including motives for religious conversion, numbers and locations of the converts, how apostates may be treated by Muslims, changes in migration and communications, and the Christian concept of religious conversion.  The concept of inculturation which helps to describe the meeting of a specific community with the Christian message will aid in analyzing the communities and individuals being studied.

The final chapter brings together the various threads which have been raised throughout the thesis and argues that ex-Muslim Christians are engaged in theology-making, that areas of interest to them include theology of the church, salvation and baptism, and that the dominant metaphor in these theologies is a conceptualization of love and power that sees the two divine traits as inseparable from each other; they represent a knowledge about who God is and what he is like, which, in their understanding, is irreconcilable with their former religion, Islam.""

How might engagement of our religious neighbors take a different shape if we were to ask instead whether if there are elements of truth, beauty,
and goodness in non-Christian religions? More importantly, what would
it look like for evangelicals to insist that “salvation is found in no other
name under heaven” than Jesus, while also seeking to be faithful disciples
of Jesus who search the Scriptures for guidance in how we live alongside
our religious neighbors? Is it possible that those very elements of truth, beauty, or goodness in the lives of their
religious neighbors could play an important part in how evangelicals engage with them? If so, it is important
that Christian discipleship remain under the authority of Scripture, so that being faithful to God remains at the
core of who we are called to be and how we love our neighbors.
In this issue of Evangelical Interfaith Dialogue, Dr. John Goldingay and Dr. Nijay Gupta provide illuminating
resources from the various ways in which both the Old and New Testaments speak about other religions.
Rather than a static posture toward religious people outside the community of God’s people, there is a
remarkable array of engagement revealed in the texts of Scripture. Social and contextual factors play a role
in these different approaches, as does the health and witness of the community in those particular times
and places.
Far from leading evangelicals to a position of relativism, respecting and listening to the diversity of Scripture’s
witness yields tremendous resources for Christians today as we wrestle with how to be faithful disciples in
our own particular contexts.

In the continuing conversation about the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and the rupture of Western Christianity, Bartolome de Las Casas (1484-1566) is frequently excluded from the lists of churchmen and women who contributed to this era. Las Casas, by virtue of his defense of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the critique of the Church's role in the Spanish colonial enterprise, and the alternative he proposes to conversion by the sword deserves a place among the eminent people of this era.

The 16th-century Protestant Reformation not only dramatically impacted the fate of Western Christendom but also profoundly reshaped the trajectory of Christianity as a worldwide religious system. The ways in which the Reformation legacy has taken root and been expressed contextually around the world – particularly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America – invite attention and constitute one of the most vibrant research fields within the academic discipline of World Christianity.  Yet, the relations between the Reformation and the wider world can also be conceptualized in a radically different way. Instead of looking at the Reformation as an initially European phenomenon that became global as a result of worldwide transmission and cross-cultural diffusion of its impulses (predominantly in the 19th and 20th centuries), one can invert this perspective and ask whether the Reformation itself can be seen as a product of the increasing global interconnectedness of the early modern Christian world. In the following, I will argue that non-European actors have a considerable share in what became known as the Protestant Reformation and that the religious knowledge produced by and about them was a substantial influence in the development of early Protestant identities. In order to substantiate this claim, I will focus upon African, and more specifically Ethiopian, agency.

In this paper I will draw on the work of Robert Schreiter to discuss different forms of local theologies. I will suggest that one of those is a form of liberation theology. After some background on the overused word 'contextualization', it will be suggested that within evangelical mission circles the original vision of contextualization as organic has largely been lost as contextualization; it became an additional tool in the tool box of missionary strategies, to be done largely in a directed manner by the missionaries.

This article examines a controversy surrounding the theology of prosperity associated with neo-Pentecostalism: the aggressive soliciting of tithes from largely underclass worshippers, and the eagerness of those worshippers to respond beyond what seems financially sound. Drawing on ethnographic research among Cape Verdean immigrants in a Boston branch of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, I argue that a sense of empowerment often accompanies sacrificial tithing. This sense comes through the insertion of worshippers into multiple relations of reciprocity. Those whom I observed submitting to their pastor's calls to tithe should not, therefore, be glibly dismissed as victims of alienation or brainwashing. Their expressions of devotion are active and creative strategies of self-transformation in response to the precariousness of the migrant's life-world.

"Toronto offers remarkable opportunities to supply retroductive warrants regarding the world Christian revitalization, particularly in the case of Asian reality and those otherwise ignored as non-persons, as sinners, victims, or followers of alien religions. Retroductively generated arguments regarding world Christian revitalization presented here stem from two in-depth case studies presented earlier in this volume. The first is the Rahab Project, which focuses on the largely Chinese migrant women used as workers in massage parlors throughout Toronto. The second is the Jesus Network, which opens the Christian story to members of the largest, most densely populated, and largely Muslim, South and Central Asian migrant community in Toronto. Both cases are about Asian migrants, both are easily and readily overlooked on the economic, social, and religious scene in Toronto, and yet both represent a critical dimension of reality with which world Christian revitalization must contend."

While Christianity has existed in Iran/Persia since the 4th Century, if not earlier, at the middle of the 20th Century almost all Iranian Christians belonged to an ethnic minority, especially the Assyrians and the Armenians. Ethnic Iranians were almost all Muslims, and then mostly Shi’a Muslims. Since the Revolution of 1979 hundreds of thousands of ethnic Iranians have left Islam for evangelical Christianity, both within and outside of Iran. This paper seeks to explore the multifaceted factors—political, economic, technological—that have helped to create an environment wherein increasing numbers of ethnic Iranians have apostatized from Islam and become evangelical Christians. A concluding section outlines Steven Lukes’ theory of power and analyzes the growth of Iranian Christianity in the light of his theory.

En Agosto del 2016 el Dr. Duane Miller entrevistó a Hector Monterroso, obispo del Diócesis Episcopal de Costa Rica. Hablan acerca de los orígenes del Anglicanismo en Centro America, la identidad protestante en Costa Rica, y tensiones presentes en la Comunión Anglicana.

What are China’s Protestants doing outside the walls of their homes and churches? This article is the result of collaboration between the three named authors, all of whom conducted fieldwork for it. It examines the range of community service and charity work (including poverty alleviation, disaster relief, education, nursing homes, medical care, and various forms of evangelism) that Chinese Protestants have in the past and still do undertake within the contemporary Chinese Communist Party-state (CCP). Drawing on extensive fieldwork over several years in multiple sites across the PRC, the researchers ask: (i) in what ways do CCP policies on religion help or hinder Protestant social service? and (ii) to what extent are Protestant efforts in harmony with or beyond the control of CCP religious policies?

As an exercise in interreligious learning, this essay explores the question of multiple religious identity (participation and belonging) of Lakota Catholic Nicholas Black Elk in the context of spirituality and sacramentality. By examining Black Elk’s multiple religious identity and his desire to experience the Wakan, however manifested, in the context of various aspects of Lakota spirituality, a pansacramental worldview emerges in the form of panentheistic and liberal openness. From a non-Native Christian theological perspective, this essay examines Black Elk’s Lakota spirituality insofar as it yields a promising opportunity for non-Native Christians to accept without scandal the possibility of multiple religious identity.

Mission has become complicated in the 21st century owing to the increasing doctrinal and theological diversity within Christianity. But what is prominent in the current literature, and cuts across a wide spectrum of churches, is an emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit in mission. Mission is spiritual and the spiritual ought to be involved in mission: hence the concern of this volume with ‘mission spirituality’ and ‘the spirituality of mission’.