Dana and I had been invited to make this presentation because we had written an article called “World Growth of The United Methodist Church in Comparative Perspective: A Brief Statistical Analysis”.  In that article, we compared growth rates for national branches of the UMC and growth rates for national branches of independent Methodist denominations, African-American Methodist denominations (AME, AMEZ, and CME), Anglicans, Nazarenes, and Christianity as a whole.  Thomas Kemper, General Secretary of the GBGM found our article provocative and wanted us to present our findings to the Board.

I won’t recount the findings of the article.  If you’re interested, you can read it online here.  Basically, the UMC is growing slower than these comparison groups in most countries around the world.  Instead of recounting the article in depth, I’d like to say something about the three discussion questions we presented to the Board.  Thomas wanted our piece to spark conversation among the board members, and Dana and I figured the best way to do that was to challenge our listeners with some questions.  I’d like to share them here, hoping they may challenge you, too.

The first question we asked the Board was, “How important is church growth to The United Methodist Church?”  Our article pointed out that the UMC was growing slower than these other groups and implied that was a problem, but that’s not necessarily the case.  I think especially as Americans and as capitalists, we think that the highest possible growth is always the best possible thing.  Indeed, as Christians we do want to make sure the gospel is available to all.  Yet there are good reasons for not buying into a mindset in which numerical growth in members is the sole important measurement of whether a church is headed in the right direction or not.  At the same time, knowing to what extent growth is important allows us to not be distracted by less important aspects of our mission.  How do we balance a desire to spread the gospel to all people with other important commitments to which God calls us?

Our second question for the Board was, “How do we balance diverse local expressions and global unity in the UMC?”  Anyone who has read the past couple of months of this blog will not be surprised by this question.  One of the points we made was that certain models of being the church may not be applicable for all national or cultural settings in which the UMC is present.  To assume they are can lead to cultural imperialism and hinder growth in those locations where they are inappropriate.  So, some adaptability is necessary.  Yet at the same time, if The United Methodist Church is to be united, not just in the United States, but globally, there must be some forms of global unity.

Third, we challenged the Board to answer, “What are the UMC’s gifts and graces relative to the world church?”  Talking about slower growth rates or declines in membership can quickly become an exercise in negative thinking in which people can end up feeling helpless and depressed.  That was certainly not Dana’s and my intention.  We asked this question out of a conviction that all parts of the body of Christ have contributions to make to the whole.  The UMC, at whatever rate it is growing, has gifts and graces to contribute.  Knowing what these are will help us to perform the ministry God has given us with effectiveness and satisfaction.

Those are the three questions then.  From the feedback we received, even though the questions weren’t part of the original research, they were just as useful to our audience as any other part of the presentation.  I pray that they may be of use to you, too.

This question is especially pressing because whatever there is holding us together as Christians and as members of particular denominations, there is also much dividing us.  As American society has become more pluralistic and the diverse societies of the globe have been brought together into a pluralistic world society, so has American Christianity become more pluralistic and so has World Christianity become an increasingly pluralistic enterprise, to the point where some scholars are now beginning to talk about “World Christianities” instead of “World Christianity”, implying that Nigerian AICs (African Initiated Churches) have so little to do with Swedish Lutherans that they cannot be thought of as the same thing.

Yet as Christians, we have a theological commitment to believe that Nigerian AICs and Swedish Lutherans are part of the same thing.  One of the basic tenants of Christianity is the catholicity of the faith.  Catholicity in this sense means universality.  It means that Christians believe that Christians everywhere are bound together in the body of Christ.  Now, I know that some Christians believe that their group has the Truth and all others are heretics and thus outside the body of true believers.  Such groups certain pose a challenge to the doctrine of the catholicity of the faith, but they do not negate it.

For those who are members of a particular denomination, there is more than just the doctrine of the catholicity of the faith that necessitates us thinking about what it is that binds us together.  We must live, work, fellowship, and worship with our denominational sisters and brothers and find a way to do so despite the differences that divide us.

And those differences are not always insignificant.  We may like to think that good Christians would not let race divide us, but Martin Luther King, Jr. famously remarked that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.  Related to, but distinct from race, is the question of ethnicity.  Ethnic churches are very common in America and have many strengths to offer their members and the wider body of Christ.  Nevertheless, they do pose the question of how Korean UMCs relate to Hmong, Mexican, Brazilian, African-American, and Anglo UMCs.  The question is complicated when there are linguistic as well as ethnic differences.

Economic differences separate Christians from each other to a much larger extent that we are comfortable acknowledging.  These economic differences are often related to geographic differences.  How do the middle or upper-middle class churches of the newer suburbs relate to the poor churches of the inner cities and the working-class churches of the older suburbs?  Geography also plays a differentiating role on a larger scale: How do the churches of the Northeast and those of the South, the Midwest, and the West Coast relate to each other?

Then there is the role of theology, and here is where the question really becomes pressing.  What cords bind Christians or members of a denomination together when they are divided in how they view the Scriptures, what they think of homosexuality, whether or not they’re willing to let women be pastors, their views on science, how they understand free will and God’s agency vs. human agency, what they believe to be the divinely-ordained or just best form of church government, and a whole host of other questions?  Even divisions that are partly stylistic, like whether to use hymns or contemporary praise music in worship, often take on theological dimensions as well.  Since these theological divisions really get at the heart of the matter of religion for most, they are often the divisions that run deepest.

Hence, just as last week, I mentioned that societies as a whole need to ask what common commitments, beliefs, and values hold them together as societies lest they fall apart, so too, do Christians and in particular Christians united in particular denominations need to ask ourselves what holds us together lest we fall apart.  At stake is not just a sentiment of “Wouldn’t it be nice if we all just got along?” but our testimony to a God who is able to bind us together in love.

When most people talk about things we can learn from non-Western Christians, they talk about things like being enthusiastic about your faith, worshipping in non-Western ways, appreciating what you have materially, and, if you’re conservative in your theology, how to uphold the fundamentals of faith that the godless people in America have abandoned.

What people don’t often talk about, but what I’d like to talk about, is how we can learn to think about our social situation as Christians and our relationship to the wider national culture.

I think this is something that American Protestants (especially mainline Protestants) need to think more about.  American Protestantism had this great quest from the First Great Awakening through the 1950s to build a Protestant America characterized by white, Anglo-Saxon values.  This project failed (and for some good reasons) in the 60s.  Since then, evangelical Protestants have alternated between building a Christian subculture (a project they’d actually been working on since the 1920s) and reasserting language about American being a Christian nation.  We mainline Protestants haven’t known what to do with ourselves since then.  We have nostalgia for a time when we were the cultural center of America, a growing realization that time is long over, and few if any ideas about what to do in our new socio/cultural situation.

I would like to suggest that one thing which might help us figure out what to do with ourselves as American (mainline) Protestants is listening to Christians who aren’t American.  One of the ways to think new possibilities about your own social situation is to learn how other people think about their social situations which are different than yours.  That’s why Gramsci wanted Italian school kids to learn Latin – so they would be introduced to a different way of thinking about the world that would then allow them to think differently about early 20^th century capitalist, fascist Italy.  We don’t have to learn Latin to do that, though – we can listen to Christians from other countries in the world.

In particular, I think we would do well to listen to Koreans.  Why Koreans?  Korea, like America, is a country with a lot of Christians.  But not a majority of Christians.  (Which, I recognize, the US does have, at least nominally).  Christianity is a sizable presence in Korea, but it doesn’t define the cultural or social mainstream nor (and here’s the important contrast) did it ever.  Korean Protestants have been going through their own handwringing about plateauing growth in the past decade.  In some ways, Korean Christians are in a social position that’s similar enough to but different enough from the US to make them good conversation partners from which we could potentially learn a good deal about how to think of ourselves in relation to the rest of American society.

Of course, we can learn from other Christian groups around the world, too.  Nigerians, Kenyans, Indonesians, and Malaysians all have things to teach us about how to interact with Muslims.  Zimbabweans can teach us some things about the relationship between religion and ecology.  The list goes on.  But as we Americans think about our relationship to non-American Christians, we must be sure to have the humility to let at least one facet of that relationship be learning.

As acknowledged, The United Methodist Church has some problems – problems with membership numbers, finances, structures, etc.  As the article my advisor and I wrote, these problems are not just an American phenomenon, but that’s primarily how they’re thought about.  Part of this bias toward focusing on the American problems is that mainline American Protestantism has problems that are different from the types of problems Protestantism around the world faces, and United Methodism reflects that.  Part of this bias is that the United States is still the membership and financial center for The UMC.  Part of this bias is just Americans being bad at thinking about the rest of the world.

Yet we American United Methodists do need to think about the rest of the world as we’re trying to solve the problems of the denomination here.  We must be aware that, as a globally-connected church, the actions we take in the United States have implications around the world.  Solutions we implement for problems in the United States have the potential to cause new problems elsewhere (as well as new problems here, as all solutions do).  This presents a tension for United Methodists: how do we address the critical and pressing questions of the church in America while at the same time not losing sight of how those solutions affect the church around the world?

This also raises a set of questions: What does it mean to be a globally-connected church?  What does the Methodist concept of connectionalism mean when it is extended across geographical, political, cultural, and linguistic boundaries?  What does it mean for United Methodists in Nigeria, say, to be part of the same church as United Methodists in Cambodia, Lithuania, and the Philippines, as well as the United States?

This problem seems to me to be uniquely a Methodist one, too.  Certainly, some other denominations have trans-national aspects to them.  Yet none has quite the same structural/ecclesiological relationship between different national branches as The UMC does (with the probable exception of other American Wesleyan bodies).  In large part this is because of the uniqueness of Methodist polity/ecclesiology.

On the one side of Methodism, you have churches where church is defined primarily in congregational terms.  This category includes churches coming from the Reformed tradition such as Reformed, Baptist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, etc.  It also includes most Pentecostal churches, non-denominational megachurches, church from the American Restorationist movement (Disciples of Christ and Churches of Christ), and a whole host of others.  While there are structures which connect these local churches, some of which are transnational, these transnational structures don’t raise the same issues, as what matters most is the local church.  At the end of the day, the important decisions are made in local churches, and whatever larger associations that local church may have, it is ultimately only responsible to and for itself in the decisions it makes.

Then there are churches with an episcopal polity, including Lutherans, Anglicans, and most notably the Catholics (as well as some pentecostals and AICs, interestingly enough).  Most of these churches have a diocesan understanding of the bishopric (i.e., bishops are responsible for a particular geographic area), and, while you can argue that The UMC has effectively adopted a diocesan model of bishops, in theory at least The UMC is not a diocesan church.  In churches organized on the diocese model, diocese tend to be grouped together into national churches, which tend to be geographically or perhaps ethno-linguistically based, though recent developments in the Anglican church challenge this organizational pattern.  There are often larger structures that connect the various national churches, but each national church, while connected to the church as a whole, has a degree of local autonomy.  Thus, the national church serves as a buffer between the greater structures of the church and local congregations.  This is less true for the Catholics, who have strong centralized authorities, than it is for Anglicans or Lutherans, where such centralized authorities are less well-developed or lacking.  And certainly such a system has its own problems (Anglicans, I’m looking at you again).  But in general, national churches can adopt policies and mainly worry about how those policies will affect the faithful within that nation.

In The United Methodist Church, however, the heart of the denomination is neither the local church nor the diocese nor the national church but the connection as a whole.  In Methodism, the church is the connection.  So we don’t have a sense that each local church can make its own decisions in all matters.  Nor do we allow geographic sub-units of the church to make their own standards for policy that differ from each other.  Neither Annual Conference nor Jurisdictional Conferences have the authority to really set policy in ways that differ greatly from the denomination as a whole.  Only General Conference really has the power to set policy for the denomination.  This means, however, that General Conference, a body which meets in America with mainly American delegates, needs to think about how its decisions affect the entire church, not just America.

I think with the various stresses and conflicts which General Conference 2012 is facing, that it is likely that General Conference will end up making some decisions that significantly impact United Methodist polity.  Ideally, these decisions would be part of some well-thought through vision for United Methodist polity, but I think it is more likely that we will pass revisions to our polity for the sake of trying to enable more effective ministry and will only later realize how significant the decisions we made were.  I’m okay with this approach, too, actually, because I feel like that’s often how The UMC and its predecessor bodies have operated – our approach to church organization is more practical and experimental than systematic.  I just pray that when we make whatever changes we are going to make to our polity, intentional or not, that they serve as an opportunity for us to really think about what it means to be both connectional and global and that they may be changes that release the Spirit’s power for ministry and mission not just in this country but around the world.

At first blush, it might seem like Global Christianity, being primarily a non-Western phenomenon, and (post)modernity, being primarily a Western phenomenon, might not have a lot to do with each other, but I think there are at least two ways to connect them.  I would like to suggest that both can be tied to the trends of globalization and pluralism.

One way of answering how World Christianity fits into a narrative of modernity is to talk about the relationship between World Christianity and globalization, assuming that globalization is an outgrowth or full flowering of modernity or (as I would probably argue) an important part of the context of postmodernity.

Christian mission has a long history as both a form of globalization and as a force that’s been tied to other forms of globalization.  In fact, that’s what I’m writing my dissertation about.  Religion has long been something that’s bound people together across the globe.  In addition, there have been close (though complicated) connections between Christian missions and other globalizing forces, like commerce and colonialism.

But where I think Christianity and especially World Christianity ties best into globalization is that it reflects the same global/local (or glocal) nature one sees in secular forms of globalization.  Christianity is at the same time a pre-eminently global religion and a pre-eminently local religion.  It is global by virtue of the catholicity of the faith.  It is local by the propensity of the faith to adapt itself to local cultures (a process called inculturation).

Furthermore, scholars have argued that conversion from traditional religions to Christianity is a means of establishing new, stable, global connections in a world where destabilizing global connections are threatening traditional ways of life.  Yet at the same time, Christianity can be a way of preserving (though at the same time changing or reinterpreting) elements of traditional ways of life, from language to ethnicity to cultural habits to social structures.

So there’s a dialectic between Christianity as a global religion and Christianity as a local religion, where there are tensions between the two, but in which the two feed into each other – Christianity’s global connections are often what generate local appeal, but without the ability to adapt locally, Christianity wouldn’t grow globally.

Another way is to tie the story of World Christianity into (post)modernity is to talk about World Christianity as another form of pluralism or diversity which undercuts the sorts of grand narratives that modernity wants to construct and thus fits with the postmodern world.  Here, I’m using pluralism not as a value to be promoted, but rather as a term describing the diversity of the world around us.  Often, pluralism causes tension and conflict, and I think the question of how to live in a pluralistic setting is one of the most pressing questions of postmodernity/what comes next.

World Christianity reflects the pluralism of our world in several ways.  First, when examining World Christianity, you find a lot of pluralism within Christianity.  There is denominational pluralism.  Catholics, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Independents, Orthodox, and Protestants think, believe, worship, and practice differently.  There is an abundance of cultural pluralism within World Christianity.  This cultural pluralism within Christianity can lead to misunderstanding and conflict, both within and between cultures.  There are theological differences, differences in worship, differences is ecclesiology, etc.  In particular, there are differences in theologies and in access to resources between Western and non-Western Christianity.

World Christianity also reflects pluralism between religions.  Christians outside the West often live in situations where they share societies with a significant number of non-Christians and in many instances (especially in Asia) are minority populations in predominantly non-Christian contexts.  This raises the question for Christians of how one reacts theologically, ethically, politically, etc. to people from other faiths, especially other world religions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.  How should Christians deal with certain eastern religious settings were religion is additive rather than exclusive, and Jesus can be another god in the pantheon?  How should Christians deal with violence or political restrictions imposed on them by other religious groups?

This question of political restrictions raises another form in which World Christianity reflects the postmodern problem of pluralism.  Many nation-state governments see pluralism as a problem and seek to repress ethnic or religious diversity out of fear that it will destabilize the state.  Brian Grim recently released a study saying that 70% of the world’s population lives in countries with high or very high levels of political or social restrictions on religion.  Not only are Christians persecuted for being Christians, they are also in many places persecuted for being ethnic minorities, like the Karen in Myanmar.

Interestingly, both of these connections between World Christianity and (post)modernity also tie in to the theme of the contextualization of Christianity – of recognizing that theology is developed from within social and cultural contexts.  When people talk about contextuality, they are also often seeking to promote the development of indigenous theologies from within non-Western contexts.  But contextuality isn’t only non-Western.  We in the West have a context, too, and connecting Christianity and that context is part of why I blog.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the southern shift of Christianity, it refers to the transformation of Christianity from a primarily European religion at the beginning of the 20^th century to a truly global religion today, with large numbers of adherents in not just Europe and North America, but Latin America, Africa, and Asia as well.  This transformation is also referred to as the rise of Global Christianity or World Christianity.  It’s part of what I study in school.  Really, I should just refer you to the article by my advisor, Dana Robert, entitled “Shifting Southward: Global Christianity since 1945” or Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.  But neither of those is available in blog form, so I’m writing this post.

At its most basic level, this shift southward is a demographic transformation.  In 1900, two thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe.  Today, less than a quarter do.  Currently, the majority of the world’s Christians live in South America, Africa, and Asia, areas referred to variously as “non-Western,” “the (global) South,” “the Two-Thirds World,” or “the Majority World.”  That’s a significant change.

Christian growth in the global South has come from two main sources: conversion of peoples from other religions and high population growth rates among Christians (and non-Christians) in the Global South.  Both of these trends should continue, ensuring that the numerical dominance of southern Christianity will only increase in this century.  At the same time as the number of Christians in the South has been increasing because of conversions and reproduction, the number of Christians in the North has stayed stable or declined as people have become secularized or had fewer babies.

Although this transformation is usually talked about using the language of World Christianity inclusive of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania, demographically, it is largely an African story.  In 1900, less than 10% of Africans were Christian.  Today, over half are.  The African population has also grown significantly.  The percentage of Christians in the Asian population has grown, too, as has the overall Asian population, but the change in number of Christians is most dramatic in Africa.

Part of the shift southward, though, is not just demographic but a shift southward (and eastward) in thinking.  This is where Latin America and Asia become more important.  Latin America has been largely Christian for a long time, but people are now paying more attention to the unique flavor of Christianity in Latin America.  Asia has neither the dramatic demographic switches of Africa nor the long history of Christianity in Latin America, but still manages to make up a decent percentage of the world’s Christians and is home to some of the places where Christianity is growing fastest, like China.  So people’s thinking has shifted to think about Christianity as an Asian religion, too.

At the same time there’s been a demographic shift and a shift in thinking as part of the southern shift, there’s also been a shift in the makeup of Christianity.  While the traditional image of Christianity in non-Western countries is that of missionaries firmly in control of churches containing those few natives who have been willing to turn their backs on their communities and cultures and “become white”, that is no longer the case.

First, the relationship between Christianity and culture is much more complex.  Christianity certainly changes local cultures and rejects certain elements of local cultures, but it also gives new life to other elements of local cultures.  In terms of language alone (Protestant) Christian missions have been perhaps the greatest force for the preservation of indigenous languages in the world because of their practice of Bible translation.  Scholars talk about the process of inculturation as Christianity adapts to new cultures.  Thus, there’s been a cultural shift in Christianity.

In addition, missionaries are, by-and-large, no longer in control on non-Western churches.  Even where missionaries are still present, they’re often not leading local churches, but rather teaching or filling other supportive roles.  Most Christian churches around the world are led by leaders local to where the church is.  In some cases, that manifests itself as local control of local branches of an international religious body (like the United Methodist Church), but often it includes locally-formed religious bodies, which then may expand and become international missionary bodies themselves (e.g., Redeemed Christian Church of God from Nigeria, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God from Brazil, Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa [ZAOGA], from Zimbabwe).

The rise of independent denominations and churches is just one aspect of the denominational shift that has gone along with the southern shift of Christianity.  The biggest winners in the shift south have been Catholicism, independent churches, Pentecostalism (which overlaps with independent churches), and Evangelicalism (which overlaps with the last two).  Traditional mainline Protestantism has not benefitted nearly as much from the expansion.  More Christians are now part of Independent churches (African, Asian, and other) than are part of Protestant churches (427 million to 376 million).  Catholicism is still the largest branch of Christianity (with about 1.1 billion followers, about half the Christians in the world).

Along with these changes in denominations go changes in theology, worship style, etc.  In general, theology is more conservative and worship style more charismatic.  Theology and worship around the world also draw on cultural elements that are foreign to those in the West.  The role of ancestors in Christianity, whether indigenous music can be used in worship, exorcising demons, ecstatic worship experiences, and questions of ritual power and purity are all concerns that aren’t very important in the West but are very important in other areas of the globe.

There’s a lot more one could say about this topic, but I think I’m going to wrap up the post here.  Look for the follow-up in a few days: how these shifts relate to (post)modernity.