Newsletter October 7, 2009
From the Senior Pastor. . .
I spent Monday reading Mark Noll’s latest book, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith. Dr. Noll is an evangelical scholar who serves as Professor of History at Notre Dame University.
On November 13-15, we will hold our annual missions’ conference. In that light I want to share with you a few of Dr. Noll’s comments and observations.
∙ “More than half of all Christian adherents in the whole history of the church have been alive in the last one hundred years. Close to half of Christian believers who have ever lived are alive right now.”
∙ “This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called ‘Christian Europe.’”
∙ “This past Sunday there were more members of Brazil’s Pentecostal Assemblies of God at church than the combined total in the two largest U.S. Pentecostal denominations, the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ in the United States.”
∙ “This past Sunday Roman Catholics in the United States worshiped in more languages that at any previous time in American history.”
∙ “This past Sunday the churches with the largest attendance in England and France had mostly black congregations. About half of the churchgoers in London were African or African-Caribbean.”
∙ “Today, the largest Christian congregation in Europe is in Kiev, and it is pastored by a Nigerian
of Pentecostal background.” Kiev is the capital of Ukraine, one of the former Soviet Socialist Republic states.
∙ “This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. Most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia.”
Dr. Noll suggests that these three questions “hint at the challenges of theological rediscovery posed by the church’s recent history around the globe”:
∙ How close is the world of spirits to the everyday world?
∙ What is the unit of salvation? “Much of the emerging Christian world has not experienced conversion individually. Conversion, instead, has taken place by families, villages or even lineages extending back in time.”
In light of this question, Dr. Noll writes: “Once before . . . a great world power passed through tumultuous times as Christian ranks expanded on the margins of society. It was late in the third and early fourth centuries. In that turmoil the Emperor Constantine was converted and became, from the top of the imperial system, a supporter of Christianity as a new glue for the empire. Is it impossible to imagine that a new Constantine might exist somewhere in the junior ranks of the Chinese Communist party?”
∙ How should believers read the Bible? Which parts of the Bible are the keys to understand the whole Bible? For many, in the West, it has been the Pauline epistles and the Gospels. For many new world Christians it is the book of Acts, or the book of Revelation, or the book of Psalms, or the Prophetic books, or the book of Proverbs (or James), or even, the book of Leviticus — “Its legal regulations concerning holy objects, sacred days and sacred placed speak directly to the cultures” inherited by many new world Christians.
Near the end of his book Dr. Noll quotes from Isaiah 60.2,3: “For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” He then quotes Revelation 21.24: “The nations will walk by [the light of the glory of the Lord (see vs. 22,23)], and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.”
Obviously these passages speak “about the universal outreach of the gospel. . . for Americans who read this stirring account of the fulfillment to which the whole world points, it should be enough to imagine that one of those ‘kings’ will come from the White House — but only one.”
Pastor Caines