Demographic shift of Christianity

Editor’s note: The following post arises from small group reflections from The Rise of Global Christianity, 1910–2010, taught by Dr. Todd Johnson at Boston University in the Fall of 2010. Lead by doctoral students, the small groups discussed lectures given by Christian scholars in various disciplines, including significant changes that have occurred in global Christianity over the past 100 years.

This week’s lecture was about the demographic shift of Christianity from 1910 to 2010 and its implication to Christian theology. To calculate the central point of Christian gravity each year and to look at the ramification of the accumulated points is not merely a meaningless thing. The trajectory consisted of the Christian center implies what happened in Christianity as a world religion throughout the history. In a nutshell, the center of gravity has moved from the global north referring to the white European dominance to the global south such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America that used to be recognized just mission fields. Accordingly, global Christianity has moved to the demographic makeup of the time of Christ. As a result, the urgent task the contemporary Christianity faces is to recapitulate the Christian theology from non-western perspectives, i.e. the globalization of Christian theology through the vernacularization. With acknowledgements from the lecture and the required reading, our group discussed over these questions.

1. What insights did you gain from the lecture?

• I could better realize the implications of global Christianity. Changes are either good or potentially good. The Western mind is not the be-all and end-all. (Amy)

• Religious education from different cultural perspective penetrates the traditional concept of Christianity. (Edward)

• Missionaries from the West are still constructing theology. The benefit of this is the abundant of theological resource, but the bad thing is the western imperialism and paternalism. For example, Christology is to see Christ as a healer rather than to have the western view propagating theological landscape. (Sam)

• To calculate Christian gains and losses by the number of immigrants is problematic. It is much of over generalization to think the immigrant is gain and emigrant is loss because in Asian context, there are many immigrants of other religions. (Earl)

2. What do you think about the theological implications of the demographic shift between the north and south?

• Theology affected by the change caused by intersection between Christianity and other faiths. The vitality is at the boundaries. Theologically three things go together: conservatism, communal outlook and supernaturalism. (Sam)

• Christian theology is so far the monopoly of the western white men. The demographic change pushes us to adopt other views on Christianity. The integral view by having diverse scopes is the very implication. (Gun)

• I can see that huge variety of preachers had already changed Christian communities very much. (Edward)

• There is a tendency to see old views as bad and newer views as good. Theologically it isn’t necessarily so. (Sam)

• Methodist issues the same argument. (Amy)

• The theological implication of the demographic shift refers to what incarnation of the Christ means. It is vernacularization or indigenization of Christian theology. Just as the painter draws a picture with diverse colors on the canvas, Christian theology as a world religion must reflect all colors from all people. (Gun)

Gun Cheol Kim, discussion moderator