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Christianity enters the twenty-first century in a state of profound and paradoxical transformation. In Western Europe traditional church attendance has fallen so sharply that commentators speak of a "post-Christian" society; yet globally the faith is growing, and growing fastest in the very regions — sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, East Asia — that Western missionaries once regarded as the periphery. The result is a double story of decline and vitality that resists any simple verdict on Christianity's prospects. This lesson examines the secularisation of the West and the debate over the secularisation thesis; the dramatic shift of Christianity's centre of gravity to the global South and the explosive growth of Pentecostalism; the new forms of church (Fresh Expressions, the House Church movement, new monasticism, digital church) by which Western Christianity is attempting to renew itself; the ecumenical movement; and the major theological questions that will shape the Church's future. Throughout, the governing evaluative question is whether the secularisation thesis is correct — whether Christianity is disappearing — or whether it is being transformed, declining in one place while flourishing in another.
The most discussed development in modern Western Christianity is the steep decline of institutional religion. A number of indicators chart its scale:
Several explanations have been advanced, and a candidate should be able to distinguish them:
Key term: Secularisation — the process by which religion loses social significance and influence. It is usefully analysed at three levels: the societal (religion's declining role in public institutions, law and politics), the organisational (falling membership, attendance and resources), and the individual (the waning of religious belief and practice in personal consciousness). Confusing these levels is a common student error.
The secularisation thesis, once treated as sociological orthodoxy, is now sharply contested, and the debate is central to this topic. Its defenders (Bruce) point to the unmistakable European data. Its critics make several replies. First, the global picture flatly contradicts any claim that modernity as such destroys religion: religion is resurgent across much of the world, and the United States — a modern, scientific, affluent society — remained markedly religious far longer than the thesis predicted. Second, sociologists of the "religious economy" school (Rodney Stark and others) argue that religious vitality depends less on modernisation than on the supply of religion: where a free market of competing faiths exists (as in the USA), religion thrives, whereas state-monopoly churches (as in much of Europe) breed complacency and decline. Third, Davie's "believing without belonging" suggests that what is happening in Europe may be a mutation of religion rather than its disappearance. The upshot, increasingly accepted, is that Europe may be the exception rather than the rule — that the relevant question is not "why is religion declining?" but "why is Europe secularising while most of the world is not?". This reframing is exactly what the global story, to which we now turn, brings into view.
While Christianity contracts in Western Europe, it has grown explosively in the global South:
The historian Philip Jenkins, in The Next Christendom (2002), argued that the demographic centre of gravity of world Christianity has shifted decisively from the North Atlantic to the global South, so that the "typical" Christian of the twenty-first century is no longer a white European but, very often, an African, Latin American or Asian woman. This is one of the great reversals in the religion's history: a faith that for five centuries was identified with Europe and its colonial reach has become, demographically, a faith of the southern continents.
Key term: Global South — a term for the regions of Africa, Latin America and much of Asia, used in the study of world Christianity to name the area to which the faith's demographic and energetic centre has shifted; contrasted with the "global North" (Europe and North America) where, in Europe especially, the faith is in numerical decline.
The shift carries profound consequences. Southern Christianity tends to be more theologically conservative, more supernaturalist and more experiential than the liberal Christianity of the Western academy: the authority of the Bible, the reality of miracles and healing, the experience of the Spirit, and traditional moral teaching are typically central. This creates real tension within global communions — most visibly in the worldwide Anglican Communion, where rapidly growing, conservative African provinces have clashed with liberalising Western ones over sexuality. The numerical future of the faith now lies disproportionately with churches whose instincts differ sharply from those of Western liberal theology — a fact that complicates any neat narrative of "progress".
One striking symptom of the reversal is the phenomenon of "reverse mission": where for centuries European missionaries carried the gospel to Africa, Asia and Latin America, churches of the global South now send missionaries to the secularised North, and immigrant congregations — Nigerian Pentecostal churches in London, Brazilian and Korean churches across Europe and North America — are among the most vigorous Christian communities in Western cities. Some of the largest single congregations in Britain are African-led. This inversion dramatises the central paradox of the chapter: the regions once regarded as the "mission field" have become the heartlands of the faith and the senders of missionaries, while the old Christian heartlands have become, in the eyes of southern Christians, themselves a field for mission.
Much of the southern surge is powered by Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, the fastest-growing form of the faith worldwide and, by some reckonings, the most successful religious movement of the past century. Born in the early twentieth century — its symbolic origin is usually placed at the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles (1906), led by the African American preacher William Seymour — Pentecostalism is marked by:
Pentecostalism's appeal in the global South is much debated. Sociologists point to its capacity to offer the poor and dislocated a tight, supportive community, a sense of personal dignity and agency, an experience of God's immediate power, and a disciplined ethic (sobriety, fidelity, hard work) that can bring real material improvement — what one classic study called the way Pentecostal believers "reform their own lives". Whatever the explanation, its scale is undeniable: there are now estimated to be well over half a billion Pentecostal and charismatic Christians worldwide, and the movement has reshaped not only the global South but, through charismatic renewal, the older churches of the North as well.
Key term: Pentecostalism — the family of churches and movements (taking its name from the Day of Pentecost, Acts 2) that emphasise a direct, experiential relationship with the Holy Spirit, the charismata (gifts of the Spirit) such as tongues, prophecy and healing, and lively participatory worship. The closely related charismatic movement brings these same emphases into the historic denominations.
Pentecostalism poses a genuine challenge to the secularisation thesis and is therefore central to this lesson's argument. It is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of modernising societies — the burgeoning cities of Latin America, Africa and East Asia — yet it is intensely supernaturalist, the opposite of what the thesis predicts modernity should produce. Some sociologists (notably David Martin in Tongues of Fire) argue that Pentecostalism functions as a modernising force in its own right, instilling literacy, discipline and self-reliance, so that far from being a relic swept away by modernity, it is one of the ways the global poor are entering modernity. The movement is not without its critics, however, even from within Christianity. The "prosperity gospel" — the teaching, prominent in some Pentecostal streams, that faith (and financial giving) will be rewarded by God with health and wealth — is widely attacked as a distortion that exploits the poor and confuses the gospel of the cross with material success. Pentecostalism's theology can also be thin and its lay leadership prone to authoritarian or scandalous excess. Yet its vitality is the single most important fact about twenty-first-century Christianity, and any verdict on the faith's prospects that ignores it is worthless.
If the global South offers growth, the West has responded to decline with a wave of experiment in the forms of church. Two are explicitly named in the AQA specification.
The House Church movement (and the closely related "new church" or "restorationist" networks that grew from the 1970s) abandoned inherited denominational structures and buildings in favour of informal congregations meeting in homes, with charismatic worship, lay leadership and a stress on the immediacy of the Spirit. It represents a deliberate return to what its adherents saw as the New Testament pattern of the church (cf. the "house churches" of Paul's letters).
Fresh Expressions is an official initiative of the Church of England and the Methodist Church, launched in 2004 following the influential report Mission-Shaped Church (2004). A Fresh Expression is defined as "a form of church for our changing culture, established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church". Its key features:
Key term: Missio Dei — Latin for "the mission of God". The conviction that mission is first and foundationally God's activity in the world, into which the Church is invited, rather than a programme the Church initiates. It is the theological engine of Fresh Expressions and of much contemporary missiology.
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