1. The Christian World Presence.
About 2.3 billion Christians are found around the world in most countries and continents. In cultures not historically Christian, like China, there are at least 50 million. In others, like Russia, where persecution has taken place, Christianity has returned strongly since 1990. Of course, these groups are different in language, culture and often outlook, but there is a great deal they share. The Bible has been translated into almost all languages and most Christian worldwide interact with it often at least once a week. There is a focus on the teaching and life of Christ at the centre of their faith and they meet and share their lives in varying degrees.
The model of Christian growth around the world is also not quite accurate. It is sometimes seen as spread with western colonialism. But that is not fully true even in the Roman Empire. Christianity spread through migration often, and more especially through missionaries, perhaps the most ignored group in human history. The Spanish Empire was substantially a conquest of state and religion, but many missionaries went beyond imperial boundaries, were outside the patterns of conquest and even worked against the imperial power from which they had come. The New Testament model of “go and tell” spread the Christian faith mainly on the basis of coming to faith as a communal and personal matter.
A further aspect of the Christian presence, often ignored, is of the level of persecution and suppression present throughout the 20th century and until the present. In Germany the Kulturkampf signalled a determination to subject Catholicism to the prior loyalty of the State. The Communist Revolution was ideologically secular aiming to eradicate Christianity from the USSR after 1918. The Nazis attacked the Churches and replaced it with a Nazi Church, and Mussolini similarly brought the Catholic Church under the Italian State. This pattern was extended to the Eastern European block after 1945 and the Chinese Communist Revolution had a similar focus. Throughout much of the later 20th century Christianity has been substantially repressed in the Muslim world right up to the present. This makes the two billion figure remarkable.
The other dominant perception of Christianity is of churches and denominations which divide its loyalties. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant groups were followed by a spate of Protestant denominations and them more recently Pentecostal and Charismatic groups. These groups, it is suggested, inhibit the sharing and commonality of Christians, just as different loyalties are present in Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. There is some truth to this, but it may be changing. For example, the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism at the Reformation have effectively been buried in recent Encyclicals, and denominations work together at all kinds of levels. More than this, the denominational difference which seemed so toxic in earlier centuries are now of little or less import. Most Christians value and enjoy the contributions of other Christian traditions in teaching, faith, music, worship, thinking and community, rather than seeing it in oppositional terms. The globalisation of contemporary culture makes these patterns of Christian international contact easier and they are happening on an enormous scale. A Christian friend flies in from New Zealand on her way to a tree nursery in Uganda which she mentors that has now produced a million trees. Vast patterns of Christian co-operation are underway that seldom hit the headlines.
In truth Christianity has been global in intent since Jesus invited Christians to go into all the world to share the Gospel and global Christianity has developed through mission, translation, education, hospitals, aid and a range of other patterns of co-operation and sharing. Now global Christianity has come and we are entitled to ask what it looks like. It is not a pattern of conquest, though some earlier Christians made that mistake. It sadly has and does involve some persecution though really Christianity offers no threat. It is a worldview and faith within which people live, and the challenge today is expressing and understanding the scope of its significance in world history as well as within the lives of us ordinary Christians. This piece tries to paint the picture.