"After a long time in Africa, and a lot of time elsewhere in the Southern parts of the world, I am convinced that there is such a mighty fissure growing within Christianity that will cause such huge mutations that our liberal Northern version of the faith will simply disappear."
he date was April 20; the setting, a hotel in downtown Toronto, site of the 2004 annual convention of the Associated Church Press, a society that brings together editors and other communication professionals from a wide range of Christian denominations. And the luncheon keynoter uttering those startling words was Hugh McCullum, a journalist recently returned to Canada after 13 years in Africa. Perhaps, like all the others gathered for the occasion, I'd been expecting the typical after-dinner address--educated, informative, but nothing to write home about.
Instead, a bombshell.
We are living at a time "as epochal as the Reformation of 500 years ago," McCullum declared. The whole of Christendom is changing, "growing and mutating in ways that Northern observers have failed to see." In the coming years it will be Christianity (and not Islam) that will be the force to reckon with in the world. But it will be a new Christianity--Southern Christianity.
It wasn't as if we'd never heard sentiments like those before. But there was a starkness about the way McCullum presented them--an urgency. There's a crisis coming, he seemed to say--a spiritual showdown, if you please, in which Southern Christianity comes into its own, no longer taking its marching orders from its older, worldly sibling in the North. The belief among liberal Christians in the North, he said, is that much of the current tension in the church "derives from archaic and primitive beliefs about homosexuality, women and a more generalized fear of sexuality. [But] anyone should be able to see [the liberals argue] that the idea that God, the Creator and Lord of the universe, is concerned about sexuality is on its way out."
It's not easy in 750 words to give a proper feel for the actual situation of McCullum's 35-minute speech, but the following extended quote gets to the heart of his message:
"If we look beyond the liberal West . . . , largely still without the saving grace of technology, we find . . . [a] very different Christianity from that one called for in affluent suburbs and upscale urban parishes. We find a church that is highly supernatural, ultraorthodox and inclined to see Jesus as the embodiment of divine power who overcomes the evil forces that inflict calamity and sickness on the human race. In the global South--the part we used to call the Third World--there are huge and growing Christian populations--more than 500 million in Latin America, nearly 400 million in Africa and nearly 325 million in Asia, compared with a rapidly declining 215 million in North America. Some scholars are beginning to call it the Third Church, a form of Christianity far more distinct than Roman Catholicism is from Protestantism or Orthodox. The revolution . . . taking place in Africa, Asia and Latin America is far more sweeping than any current liberal shifts in North America, be they Catholic, Anglican or Protestant. No matter what the terminology, however, an enormous rift seems inevitable, far greater than the first reformation which changed forever the face of Europe in the sixteenth century."
I don't have to agree to everything, but I pay attention to people from the front lines. "The changes that liberal reformers are trying to inspire today in North America and Europe," McCullum said-changes they see as "essential if Christianity is to be preserved as a modern relevant force"--such changes "run utterly contrary to the dominant cultural movements in the rest of the Christian world."
Not many of us knew exactly what to make of the speech; and in conversation after conversation following the presentation, everyone I talked to seemed keen on beating me to the first question: "What did you think?" Like me, they were struggling to know what all McCullum meant, the implications of what he said, and where we go from here.
This much seems clear: the entire global ground is shifting; something big is happening in our times; and we must grapple with whether or not God's behind it. If we conclude He is, then we must use our theological conservatism and the church's global reach to seize the moment.
_________________________
Roy Adams is an associate editor of the Adventist Review.
he date was April 20; the setting, a hotel in downtown Toronto, site of the 2004 annual convention of the Associated Church Press, a society that brings together editors and other communication professionals from a wide range of Christian denominations. And the luncheon keynoter uttering those startling words was Hugh McCullum, a journalist recently returned to Canada after 13 years in Africa. Perhaps, like all the others gathered for the occasion, I'd been expecting the typical after-dinner address--educated, informative, but nothing to write home about.
We are living at a time "as epochal as the Reformation of 500 years ago," McCullum declared. The whole of Christendom is changing, "growing and mutating in ways that Northern observers have failed to see." In the coming years it will be Christianity (and not Islam) that will be the force to reckon with in the world. But it will be a new Christianity--Southern Christianity.
"If we look beyond the liberal West . . . , largely still without the saving grace of technology, we find . . . [a] very different Christianity from that one called for in affluent suburbs and upscale urban parishes. We find a church that is highly supernatural, ultraorthodox and inclined to see Jesus as the embodiment of divine power who overcomes the evil forces that inflict calamity and sickness on the human race. In the global South--the part we used to call the Third World--there are huge and growing Christian populations--more than 500 million in Latin America, nearly 400 million in Africa and nearly 325 million in Asia, compared with a rapidly declining 215 million in North America. Some scholars are beginning to call it the Third Church, a form of Christianity far more distinct than Roman Catholicism is from Protestantism or Orthodox. The revolution . . . taking place in Africa, Asia and Latin America is far more sweeping than any current liberal shifts in North America, be they Catholic, Anglican or Protestant. No matter what the terminology, however, an enormous rift seems inevitable, far greater than the first reformation which changed forever the face of Europe in the sixteenth century."
