ATLANTA — Kwame Bediako, a pastor and theological educator from Ghana, called it “a shift in the center of gravity of Christianity,” a seismic lurch from north to south.
It means this:
· Asia, Africa and Latin America are producing many new Christians — Christians who have their own understandings of faith and religious diversity and much to teach those who live in the north.
· More Christians from those countries are moving to the U.S., knocking on the doors of churches here, bringing with them their own cultures and experiences of God. Some see the secularized north as the next Christian mission field.
· And more people from other faiths are moving north as well — meaning that even Americans who don’t leave home will be much more likely to encounter Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others, and will live out their faith in contexts in which Christianity can’t be assumed as the norm.
At a global mission conference in Atlanta, Presbyterians — most of them from North America, many struggling to figure out what the new configurations will look like — considered some of the new realities.
“You will hear a great deal about the dynamism of the church in the global South,” preached Marian McClure, director of the Worldwide Ministries Division of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), during the opening worship service. “You will hear about the fact that far more missionaries are now sent from and within these regions than from the traditional places of sending. They have more membership growth. More seminary students. More everything except maybe money.”
For North American at this time, “a little discomfort isn’t bad,” McClure said.
But she also said that “God is not through with us” and “the point here is not that the axis of Christian history no longer passes through our continent. Don’t conclude that we can settle in on the sidelines with pitiful, dejected faces and turn against each other for somehow being the cause of the loss of dynamism in our own church.”
God doesn’t want “a pity party,” McClure said, but fruitful, dedicated disciples.
And some of the changes talked about at this gathering Oct. 20-22 at Peachtree Presbyterian Church — a conference co-sponsored by The Outreach Foundation, Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship and the Worldwide Ministries Division — are for many a cause of celebration, a sign of God’s working in the world.
Sameh Maurice Tawfik, co-pastor of Kasr El Dobarah Evangelical Church in Egypt, where 7,000 people attend, said more than 1,000 people from his church gather every Monday to pray for three hours for revival in Egypt, “knocking, knocking, knocking on the doors,” and as a result have seen amazing things. A Muslim imam saw Jesus in Mecca, Tawfik said; a young man gave up addiction to heroin and sex to start a prayer meeting in northern Egypt.
James Oudom, the first ordained Laotian minister in the PC(USA), described the multicultural congregation he pastors in Cornelia, Georgia — perhaps a portent of changes other churches in the U.S. can expect to see as well. “We sing the same hymn but two languages, Laotian and English,” Oudom told the conference. Now the church has Latino and Chinese members too — so the languages First Presbyterian uses to worship have grown to four.
“We now find ourselves in a situation where the Christian faith has emerged as the religion of the poor of the earth, centered in the more vulnerable parts of the world,” while economic power still resides in the post-Christian west, Bediako said.
And “we are now in a situation in which we are called to learn mission again, not flowing from the haves to the have-nots, but flowing from the people of God to everywhere . . . To learn to be the church without borders, bearing witness to the reality of God.”
