Christianity of the Non-Western World
Philip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, had an article in The Christian Century a couple months back reflecting some of his continued thinking about the shifts going on in global Christianity. Here’s a section from the beginning:

To adapt a phrase from missions scholar Lamin Sanneh: Whose reading—whose Christianity—is normal now? And whose will be in 50 years?

Let us imagine a (probable) near-future world in which Christian numbers are strongly concentrated in the global South, where the clergy and scholars of the world's most populous churches accept interpretations of the Bible more conservative than those normally prevailing in American mainline denominations. In such a world, surely, southern traditions of Bible reading must be seen as the Christian norm. The culture-specific interpretations of North Americans and Europeans will no longer be regarded as "real theology" while the rest of the world produces its curious provincial variants—"African theology," "Asian theology" and so on. We will know that the transition is under way when publishers start offering studies of "North American theologies."

Jenkins goes on to do some wonderful interpreting and giving some excellent insight into what this is doing, what it could mean and some ideas about why the Bible is considered so fresh, relevant, and immediate for the people in most of the non-Western world.

Not the least of these is, of course, the fact that the environment of most of the world is more like First Century Palestine than anywhere in Europe or North America. When poverty is the rule, when sheer existence is the focus of the day, the Bible takes on a whole new image. Suddenly the partisan political interpretations that battle against each other in the West, become no more significant in the long run than debating the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin. My hunch is that we will also see some significant re-aligning of denominations along theological lines rather than the historic ones we have. How that plays out in the non-Western world will be downright interesting.

Jenkins’ work is groundbreaking and certainly challenging. If, in the long run all this helps all Christians appreciate the Bible in new and richer ways, it will be quite a change in how we do the faith!

By the way, Jenkins’ new book The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South has just been published by Oxford University Press.