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TechnoratiRecently, many scholars around the world are noticing how the trend of Christianity is losing its light in the West but rising as the new light in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
According to Ed Vitagliano, news editor for AFA Journal, a monthly publication of the American Family Association, noted how Christianity is waning in the West because of the “advancing assault of secularism and New Age spirituality.” However at the same time he explained of a developing phenomenon that Christianity is growing in the other parts of the world so called “Global South” – Africa, Latin America and Asia and in the next 50 years he assumed those regions will become the new “spiritual home of faith.”
Calling it a pessimistic view, Philip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, discussed in his book, ‘The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity,' that for over a century, the decline of religion has become a common Western thought.
Whether or not it is hard to believe, there is a new hope rising: Christianity is still spreading in the other parts of the world.
Jenkins continued saying that we are living through “one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide” as Christianity is rising in the South.
Mark Hutchinson, chairman of the church history department at Southern Cross College in Australia, also noted that "what many pundits thought was the death of the church in the 1960s through secularization was really its relocation and rebirth into the rest of the world."
Vitagliano wrote in his commentary that in Africa in the year 1900, for example, there were approximately 10 million Christians on the continent and by 2000, the number had grown to 360 million. He also included the declining number of members of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. whereas in Uganda alone there are more than 8 million Anglicans. In terms of evangelical Christians, who are recognized as most thriving group within the Christian community, he noted that 70% of them live outside of the West.
According to researcher David Barrett, author of World Christian Encyclopedia, Africa is gaining 8.4 million new Christians a year and according to Jenkins, South Korea grew in number of believers from 300,000 in 1920 to 10 to 12 millions now, which is about 25% of the population.
Author and journalist Philip Yancey, said he has noticed how God doesn’t stay at one place but moves geographically where He is wanted. He said, "As I travel I have observed a pattern, a strange historical phenomenon of God 'moving' geographically from the Middle East, to Europe to North America to the developing world. My theory is this: God goes where He's wanted."
Rev. David Cornick, the general secretary of the United Reformed Church in Britain, said, "In Western Europe, we are hanging on by our fingernails. The fact is that Europe is no longer Christian."
Most scholars and Christian leaders, including the pope, who complained on the proposed constitution of the European Union, which excluded any reference to God or its Christian past, blame on prevalence of secularism for the cause of diminishing Christianity.
One other factor to the cause of diminishing Christianity in Europe would be the decreasing percentage of church attendance. Vitagliano noted that according to a major survey in the 1990s, the percentage of people attending church on an average Sunday in some European countries is a mere fraction of the total population: England (27%), West Germany (14%), Denmark (5%), Norway (5%), Sweden, (4%) and Finland (4%).Continue »
