The fourth category is that of “religious studies,” which is the approach taken by researchers who seek to be dispassionate and descriptive. Their goal is not to help Christians advance their faith around the world (like missiology) or to encourage Christian unity (an ecumenical perspective) or to champion a less western understanding of Christianity (the postcolonial approach). Instead, the goal of the religious studies approach is to understand and to describe how and why Christianity has taken root in various parts of the world and what those different varieties of Christianity look like. While no scholar can be completely objective or perfectly fair, the intention of religious studies is to avoid making normative judgments about which kinds of Christianity are better than others. From the perspective of religious studies, differences within the Christian movement are seen as mere differences, not as matters that require moral or spiritual assessment. While personal beliefs, values, and ideals will inevitably seep into any human endeavor, scholars who take a religious studies approach seek to bracket their own biases as much as possible. Their key research question is the simple query: How is Christianity practiced similarly and differently around the world and why? The World’s Christians uses this religious studies approach.
How This Book Is Organized
The goal of this book is signaled in the volume’s subtitle: to explain who the world’s Christians are, where they currently reside, and how they got there. The “who” section describes the main theological and organizational divisions that exist among the world’s Christians, the “where” section identifies the particular experiences of Christians living in various regions of the world, and the section on “how they got there” provides a brief history of Christianity’s global growth and development.
“Who are the world’s Christians?” is answered in Part I by describing the four largest Christian sub‐traditions, which are called “mega‐traditions” in this book: Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Pentecostalism. Taken together these four groups account for roughly 97 or 98 percent of all Christians worldwide. The chapters in this section of the book describe the spirituality (the lived character and general religious ethos) of each of these traditions, how each group understands the Christian idea of salvation, the institutional structure of each group, and the story of each group’s origins and subsequent development.
Part II of The World’s Christians describes how Christianity came to assume its current global shape. It includes four chapters, each covering 500 years of Christian history. These chapters explain both the internal (spiritual and theological) developments of the Christian movement and Christianity’s external engagement with the world’s different cultures. This section of the book underscores the dynamic character of Christianity, how it grew from being a tiny religious movement in the Middle East into the incredibly complex faith it is today. While Christianity has been a world religion for a very long time, its global shape has changed dramatically over the course of the last two thousand years, and it is still changing today.
Part III – the largest part of the book – is organized geographically and describes where Christians are living in the present. Nine regions are identified as representing distinctly different zones of Christian life and experience. These regions are: (1) the Middle East and North Africa, where Christianity is barely surviving; (2) Eastern Europe, where Orthodox Christianity is dominant; (3) Central and South Asia, where Christians represent only a very small minority of the population, but have ancient roots; (4) Western Europe, which was the undisputed center of world Christianity for almost five hundred years; (5) Sub‐Saharan Africa, where Christianity is currently growing faster than anywhere else; (6) East Asia, where Christianity is more unevenly distributed than anywhere else on earth; (7) Latin America, where close to half of the world’s Catholics now live; (8) North America, which is the most Protestant region of the globe; and (9) Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands), where Christianity was only recently introduced.
The increasing diversity of contemporary Christianity is made obvious in these nine chapters. In contrast to past centuries, world Christianity no longer has any identifiable spiritual or geographic center that controls the movement as a whole. Instead, Christians now inhabit a “flat” world, a world where the Christian population is spread out more or less evenly around the globe and where new and varied experiments are being lived out regarding what it means to be a follower of Jesus today.
PART I Who They Are: Four Christian Mega‐Traditions
Introduction
To be a Christian is to be a follower of Jesus Christ, but not all Christians follow Christ in the same way. Those differences become apparent with a quick survey of the social structure of contemporary Christianity. Christians are institutionally divided into more than 35,000 separate and distinct organizations, ranging in size from the enormous Roman Catholic Church, which has more than a billion members worldwide, to the grandly named Universal Church of Christ, which has only a few hundred members, almost all of them in the Caribbean. Every week, Christians gather at more than five million local churches and parishes to worship God. And that’s just the formal structure. Informally, there are millions of additional Christian groups that meet in homes, schools, and places of work for Bible study, prayer, and mutual support.
The diversity that now exists within Christianity is so broad and multifaceted that some scholars have begun to use the term “Christianities” (instead of “Christianity” in the singular) to describe the movement. There is a logic to this plural terminology. World Christianity has become so divergent that it can sometimes be very hard to see what binds together all these groups and individuals. But, despite an enormous variety of beliefs and practices, some important commonalities still define the movement, and these distinctive ideas, practices, and understandings of human life are shared by all or almost all Christians.
What Christians Hold in Common
The broad contours of participation in the Christian movement are relatively obvious. The vast majority of Christians worldwide share the practice of gathering for worship on Sunday; most Christians, if they can afford it, meet for worship in a building called a church; and almost all Christians view the Bible as uniquely the “word of God” that Christians are called to follow. Additionally, almost all Christians worldwide share a common understanding of Jesus as Christ, of God as a Trinity, of salvation as a gift from God, and of sacraments as church rituals that help Christians in their walk with God.
Jesus as Christ: The most obvious point of connection among Christians is their faith in Jesus. The historical Jesus was an unlikely religious leader. He lived the first thirty years of his life in relative obscurity as the son of Mary and her husband Joseph, who was a carpenter in the small town of Nazareth. Then, for just a few years, Jesus took on the role of a wandering Jewish prophet and teacher, first in the rural region of Galilee and later in Jerusalem.
Jesus’s message was simple but profound. As a faithful Jew, he affirmed much of the Judaism