It was a strange headline that appeared two years ago in The London Times: "Christianity Almost Beaten in Britain, says Cardinal."

The stunning statement was made by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, when he addressed a gathering of Roman Catholic clergy in England in 2001.

And who could blame him for his pessimism? Christianity in the West appears to be in the process of retreating everywhere under the advancing assault of secularism and New Age spirituality.

What should encourage believers everywhere, however, is a phenomenon that is developing, for the most part, outside the notice of much of the Western press. In what is called the "Global South" -- Africa, Latin America and Asia -- Christianity is growing in staggering fashion, promising in the next 50 years or so to eclipse the West as the spiritual home of the faith.

Relocation and Rebirth

This is not what Western elites in the media or on college and university campuses thought was happening. "For over a century, the coming decline or disappearance of religion has been a commonplace assumption of Western thought, and church leaders have sometimes shared this pessimistic view," says Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, in his book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.

That secularists expected the demise of Christianity is not hard to understand. After all, they viewed that faith as a Western religion, and Jenkins admits that "[u]ntil recently, the overwhelming majority of Christians have lived in White nations ...."

If Christianity were mainly a religion of the peoples of Europe and North America, as secularists have always thought, then Jenkins says it made sense that "the growing secularization of the West [could] only mean that Christianity is in its dying days."

However, a strange thing has been happening: rather than dying, Christianity has spread in unexpected ways. Mark Hutchinson, chairman of the church history department at Southern Cross College in Australia, says that "what many pundits thought was the death of the church in the 1960s through secularization was really its relocation and rebirth into the rest of the world."

Jenkins says, "We are currently living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide .... The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning."

The numbers boggle the mind. In Africa in the year 1900, for example, there were approximately 10 million Christians on the continent. By 2000, the number had grown to 360 million.

The Anglican Communion is a perfect example of this worldwide trend. Whereas in its U.S. branch -- the Episcopal Church -- membership has declined over the last 40 years to 2.3 million, in Uganda alone there are more than 8 million Anglicans.

Worldwide, evangelical Christians are a thriving part of the Christian community. Yet, 70% of evangelicals live outside the West.

'God Goes Where He's Wanted'