As many lament the decline of Christianity in the United States in the early stages of the twenty-first century, very few have recognized that American Christianity may actually be growing, but in unexpected and surprising ways.² The American church needs to face the inevitable and prepare for the next stage of her history—we are looking at a nonwhite majority, multiethnic American Christianity in the immediate future. Unfortunately, despite these drastic demographic changes, American evangelicalism remains enamored with an ecclesiology and a value system that reflect a dated and increasingly irrelevant cultural captivity and are disconnected from both a global and a local reality.

A Booming Global Christianity

One of the most significant developments in the new millennium is the dramatic shift away from a northern and western hemisphere-centered Christianity to a southern and eastern hemisphere-centered Christianity. As Philip Jenkins asserts in The Next Christendom: “Over the past century [the twentieth century] . . . the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. . . . Christianity should enjoy a worldwide boom in the new century, but the vast majority of believers will be neither white nor European, nor Euro-American.”³

Parallel to the undeniable reality of the changing demographics of global Christianity is the reality of Western Christianity’s inability to grasp the implication of such dramatic changes. As Jenkins reveals, “Perhaps the most remarkable point about these potential conflicts is that the trends pointing toward them have registered so little on the consciousness of even well-informed Northern observers. What, after all, do most Americans know about the distribution of Christians worldwide? I suspect that most see Christianity very much as it was a century ago—a predominantly European and North American faith.”⁴

Fifty years ago, if you were asked to describe a typical Christian in the world, you could confidently assert that person to be an upper middle-class, white male, living in an affluent and comfortable Midwest suburb. If you were to ask the same question today, that answer would more likely be a young Nigerian mother on the outskirts of Lagos, a university student in Seoul, South Korea, or a teenage boy in Mexico City. European and North American Christianity continue to decline, while African, Asian and Latin-American Christianity continue to increase dramatically. In the year 1900, Europe and North America comprised 82 percent of the world’s Christian population. In 2005, Europe and North America comprised 39 percent of the world’s Christian population with African, Asian and Latin American Christians making up 60 percent of the world’s Christian population. By 2050, African, Asian and Latin American Christians will constitute 71 percent of the world’s Christian population.⁵ These numbers do not account for the fact that a majority of Christians in North America will be nonwhite. Global Christianity is clearly nonwhite. Thankfully, there is a growing recognition and an increasing awareness of these global changes. More literature is now available exploring global Christianity and its impact on missiology and theology.⁶ But understanding the dramatic changes in Africa, Asia and Latin America is only a part of the equation.