The New Shape of World Christianity - Part 1

I will be blogging through my reading of Mark Noll’s new book. This is part 1.

Mark A. Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (IVP Academic, 2009).

This book surveys American evangelicalism using the analytical mirror of global Christianity, or in the words of the subtitle, it looks at how the American experience of Christianity reflects global faith. Noll asks the question how we should understand the role of American Christianity and American history in shaping global Christianity. The central argument is that American Christianity is incredibly important for the world, not necessarily though, because of its direct influence on the multiplicity of indigenous Christian forms throughout the world, but because the development of American evangelical Christianity in the eighteenth century is the model for Christianity’s development throughout the majority world; in Noll’s own words, “American form rather than American influence has been the most important American contribution to the recent history of Christianity” (p. 15).

Noll begins in chapter 1 by laying out the magnitude of changes in global Christianity since 1900. His examples are no less than incredible: this past Sunday more Christian believers worshiped in China than all of “Christian Europe”, this past Sunday there were more Presbyterians at church in Ghana than in Scotland, etc. These changes have been documented in length also by Phillip Jenkins in his global Christianity trilogy. Noll also explains briefly how the multiplicity of new Christian expressions – most of them direct products of the singular task of Bible translation (!) – have tremendous implications for economics, policy formation, nation building, and international relations. New Christian expressions (”new” in their incredible predominance since 1900) have also revealed 3 main theological questions for Christianity: How close is the world of spirits to the everyday world? What is the unit of salvation? And how should believers read the Bible?

I fear that books on global Christianity are undervalued in Western evangelicalism – probably because of their academic style as well as their unfortunate classification as “missions” literature, rather than “theology” or “ecclesiology” literature. But books like this challenge the fundamental conscious and unconscious assumptions of every day Christians about their mundane religious thinking and practices.

It is good for us to evaluate our own American Christian expressions by the standard of Chinese ecclesiology, or by Ghanaian worship forms, or by Nigerian missiology, or by Indian theology. Indeed, this is one of the great, unique, aspects of the Kingdom of God – our diversity reflects the God who is, as Jonathan Edwards once described, the “admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies”. The multiplicity of Christian expressions arising out of the teaching of a single Book keeps us humble and constantly investigative in our own forms of the Christian life. In this way, global Christianity, in its diversity, is a tremendously sanctifying gift of grace to the local church.