The twentieth century — martyrdom, and the move south

In 1900 roughly 80% of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America. Today roughly two thirds live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Nothing on that scale has happened to the geography of the faith since the Arab conquests, and it happened inside a single lifetime.

This article is about the century that did it, which was also the century in which more Christians were killed for their faith than in any before it.

Azusa Street

In April 1906, in a former livery stable at 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles, a revival began under William J. Seymour, a one-eyed Black preacher, the son of former slaves, who had learned his theology sitting in a corridor outside a segregated classroom because Texas law would not let him sit inside it.

The meetings ran for three years, more or less continuously. Reports of healing and speaking in tongues drew visitors from across America and then from abroad. What scandalised contemporary observers as much as the tongues was the room: Black and white, men and women, Mexican and Chinese, worshipping together and preaching to each other in 1906. One early participant wrote that "the colour line was washed away in the blood".

It did not last — most Pentecostal denominations segregated within a generation, and the American ones only formally repented of it in 1994. But the movement that came out of that stable is now, on any counting, the fastest-growing movement in Christian history: some 600 million people, overwhelmingly in the global South, and the dominant form of Christianity in much of Latin America and Africa.

The church under the swastika

When the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, the largest Protestant body in Germany had a well-developed theology of the state, considerable social prestige, and almost no capacity to say no.

The German Christian movement went further than accommodation: they wanted a de-Judaised Christianity, the Old Testament removed, an Aryan Jesus, and church offices closed to anyone of Jewish descent. They won the church elections of 1933.

Against them, a minority organised. In May 1934 the Confessing Church met at Barmen and issued a declaration, drafted principally by Karl Barth, whose central sentence is a refusal:

Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God's revelation.— The Barmen Declaration, thesis 1, May 1934

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the figure everyone knows, and he is worth knowing accurately. He was safe in New York in 1939 and went back, writing to Reinhold Niebuhr that he would have no right to take part in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after the war if he did not share the trials of that time with his people. He joined the conspiracy against Hitler, was arrested in 1943, and was hanged at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945, two weeks before the camp was liberated.

The gulag, and the closed countries

The Soviet Union set out to eliminate religion as such. Churches were closed in tens of thousands, seminaries shut, clergy shot or sent to camps; the League of the Militant Godless ran a state atheism programme in the schools. Believers of every confession — Orthodox, Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim — filled the camps. What emerged after 1991 was not the absence the state had planned for.

In China, the missionaries were gone by 1952. Protestant Christians numbered perhaps a million. The state organised what remained into the Three-Self Patriotic Movement; those who would not join met in houses. During the Cultural Revolution every church building in the country was closed, and pastors like Wang Mingdao and Samuel Lamb served long sentences — Lamb, asked later about his years of hard labour, is reported to have said that more work means more blessing.

When the churches reopened in the late 1970s, the people who came back were not the remnant the authorities expected. Estimates of Chinese Protestants today run from around 60 million to over 100 million; nobody has an exact figure, and everyone agrees on the direction.

Lausanne, 1974

By the 1970s Western evangelicalism was confident, well-funded, and exporting. Billy Graham, who had preached to more people in person than anyone in history, convened a congress in Lausanne to plan world evangelization.

It did not go entirely as planned, and that is why it mattered.

C. René Padilla of Ecuador and Samuel Escobar of Peru told the congress that the gospel it was exporting had absorbed the culture it came from: individualism, prosperity, an American political programme, and a conception of salvation that concerned the soul while leaving hunger, dictatorship and injustice untouched. Padilla called it "culture Christianity". The response in the hall was mixed and sometimes hostile.

John Stott, chairing the drafting of the final statement, listened and changed his mind in public. The Lausanne Covenant that came out of the congress contains a paragraph — number five — confessing that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of Christian duty, and that the church had often kept them apart.

The Spanish phrase the Latin Americans gave for it, misión integral, has since become standard in world evangelicalism. It is one of the clearest instances in church history of the periphery correcting the centre and being heard.

Where the church actually is

The numbers are the argument.

Nigeria has more Anglicans in church on a Sunday than England. South Korea, with a Protestant population that barely existed in 1900, has been among the largest missionary-sending countries in the world for two decades. Brazil sends missionaries to Portugal. The largest congregations in London, Kyiv and Amsterdam are led by Africans, and the phrase for this — reverse mission — tells you whose map is still the default.

The theologians of that church are now writing for the whole church, and this library cites them: Kwame Bediako on Christian identity in Africa, Byang Kato on where contextualisation becomes syncretism, Vinoth Ramachandra on the idols of the modern West, K. K. Yeo on reading Paul in Chinese, René Padilla on mission that is one thing rather than two.

What the century teaches

Three things, and they are not comfortable.

Proximity to power is the standing danger. The German church did not fail because it was weak but because it was established, respectable and patriotic. Every church near a throne has the same problem, including the ones currently sure they do not.

The gospel survives the loss of everything the West thinks it needs. No buildings, no salaries, no legal status, no seminaries, no denominational structures — and in China, in the Soviet camps, in Ethiopia under the Derg, it grew.

The centre moves. It has moved before, and every time it moved, the churches at the old centre were the last to notice. The question for a Western Christian now is not whether to be troubled by the decline of Christendom, but whether to learn from the people who are currently carrying the thing Christendom was supposed to be about.

"A great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages" (Revelation 7:9). The twentieth century is the century in which that stopped being a distant promise and started looking like a demographic description.