An Opportunity for Impact
Daniel J. Egeler, EdD, serves as ACSI’s vice president of International Ministries. Before coming to ACSI in 1999, he served for a total of 13 years as a teacher, a soccer coach, the high school principal, and the director at the Alliance Academy, an international ACSI member school in Quito, Ecuador
As I travel around the world, I can clearly see that the center of Christianity is shifting or has already shifted. There has been explosive growth in the Christian faith in what is termed the global south—Africa, Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, and Oceania—and this growth is now beginning to dwarf the bloc of Christians in Europe and North America. Philip Jenkins writes the following in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (2002, 2–3):
Christianity should enjoy a worldwide boom in the new century, but the vast majority of believers will be neither white nor European, nor Euro-American. According to the respected World Christian Encyclopedia, some 2 billion Christians are alive today, about one-third of the planetary total. The largest single bloc, some 560 million people, is still to be found in Europe. Latin America, though, is already close behind with 480 million, Africa has 360 million, and 313 million Asians profess Christianity. North America claims about 260 million believers. If we extrapolate these figures to the year 2025, and assume no great gains or losses through conversion, then there would be around 2.6 billion Christians, of whom 633 million would live in Africa, 640 million in Latin America, and 460 million in Asia. Europe, with 555 million, would have slipped to third place. Africa and Latin America would be in competition for the title of the most Christian continent. About this date, too, another significant milestone should occur, namely that these two continents will together account for half the Christians on the planet. By 2050, only about one-fifth of the world’s 3 billion Christians will be non-Hispanic Whites….
This global perspective should make us think carefully before asserting “what Christians believe” or “how the church is changing.” All too often, statements about what “modern Christians accept” or what “Catholics today believe” refer only to what that ever-shrinking remnant of Western Christians and Catholics believe. Such assertions are outrageous today, and as time goes by they will become ever further removed from reality. The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning. The fact of change itself is undeniable: it has happened, and will continue to happen.
Joel Carpenter, another scholar who researches and writes on global trends in Christianity, reinforced Jenkins’ point when he stated the following in a plenary address at the Congreso Internacional 2006 for the International Association for the Promotion of Christian Higher Education:
So Christianity is becoming predominantly non-Western. What ought that fact imply to us? It ought to say, among other things, that what happens in Africa, Asia and Latin America will have a growing influence on what Christianity will be like worldwide. Conversely, what happens in Europe and in North America will matter less. Tite Tienou, the West African theologian who now heads Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago, insists that “the future of Christianity no longer depends on developments in the North.” Missions historian Andrew Walls concludes that “it is Africans and Asians and Latin Americans who will be the representative Christians, those who represent the Christian norm, the Christian mainstream, of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.” The rising Christianity of the south and east is no longer distant or exotic. It is in fact starting to change the whole church, even up in the North….
… The most compelling public leaders and thinkers for the Christian church are beginning to come from the global south and east. If you asked who is the leading Christian public theologian or intellectual 50 years ago, people might say Karl Barth, a Swiss theologian. Today, it is Desmond Tutu, a South African.
… Christians from Africa, Asia and Latin America are enlivening Christian witness and fellowship in the global North. The largest congregation in London is headed by a Nigerian Pentecostal. The same is true in Kiev. In the United States, the Catholic Church is being transformed, once again, by immigrants. Three thousand U.S. Catholic parishes now have Spanish-language masses each week. There are three thousand African Christian congregations in Great Britain. Twelve hundred Chinese evangelical congregations now grace the U.S. and Canada. In Grand Rapids, in addition to the burgeoning Latino presence in Catholic and evangelical churches, we have Korean, Cambodian, Syrian, Kenyan, Sudanese and Ethiopian congregations. Religious demographers tell us that the main reason why Christianity continues to grow in the U.S. is because of immigration.
It is not difficult to predict, then, that in our North Atlantic world, Christians will more and more take their cues from the parts of the world where Christianity is on the rise, where the churches are becoming movers and shapers in society rather than declining, and where critical and compelling, life-and-death struggles abound.
My friends, this is where the main stage for Christianity is today, where the average Christians live and give witness. We from the North stand on the far reaches of a global religious network whose heartlands are to the South and East.
Considering that the center of Christianity has already shifted to the global south and that this tectonic shift will accelerate in the next decade, it is quite obvious that this shift will also make an impact on the global Christian schooling movement. The center of Christian schooling will follow the overall shift of Christianity to the global south. I call this the second wave of missions. God has blessed the church-planting efforts of the global north; the daughter has now grown taller than the mother. Now the indigenous church wants to train up its children in “the way [they] should go” (Proverbs 22:6) and to disciple the nations (Matthew 28:19–20) through Christian schooling. That secondary, unplanned Christian school movement will also surpass the movement of the global north.
Will the Christian schooling movement in North America stand on the sidelines and wave while the parade of nations passes by, or will the North American movement step into the parade and share its resources and wisdom of experience with those just beginning their journey? At ACSI, we have made a commitment to step into this parade, and we are aggressively identifying, equipping, and empowering top Christian school leadership in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It is critically important to have ACSI leaders who are representative of the people they serve because those leaders understand the culture and the language and possess the expertise to strengthen Christian schooling movements that are relevant to their cultural contexts.
The process of identifying, equipping, and empowering these leaders will take a significant financial investment. We are inviting anyone interested in partnering with us in this endeavor to invest in the Leadership Legacy Society, which will identify, train, and empower these leaders who are making an impact on their respective continents. A multiyear investment would be incredibly strategic because one would be investing in leaders who will in turn have an impact on an entire hemisphere as they train leaders who will rise up in their specific countries.
Samson Makhado is one of the leaders who is making a hemispheric impact. Samson has a framed, innocuouslooking picture that hangs on the wall over his desk. It’s a picture of a tree, and the reason that it is so significant is that this tree served as his classroom for a significant portion of his elementary school years. Samson was raised in the northern part of South Africa and was educated in a remote village. He showed great promise as a young man and was handpicked to assume the prestigious role of witch doctor for his village. It was during this time that he came to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and refused this honor of becoming a witch doctor to pursue a career path as a Christian educator. When he had assumed the role of principal of a Christian school, Samson had a visit from a single, retired Christian schoolteacher from Canada. She toured Samson’s school and after the visit informed Samson that she had set aside a savings fund to invest in an African Christian school leader. She informed Samson that he was the leader that she had been looking for. This investment has paid rich dividends. Samson has completed his PhD, and he is now the ACSI director for Africa. Samson has five more years before he retires, and he is investing those years by serving in an ambassadorial role in which he identifies and cultivates the next generation of African leaders so that they can lead their Christian schooling movements. These gifted and godly men and women want to make a difference and to encourage African voices to offer solutions for African challenges. If you would like to make an investment similar to that of the above retired Christian school educator and strategically invest in a leader like Samson, I encourage you to contact the ACSI development office.
We live in exciting times in which the Spirit of God is moving in miraculous ways. May we be encouraged, and may we be open to ways in which God wants to use us to join in this parade of nations!
References
Carpenter, Joel. 2006. Christian higher education as a worldwide movement. Plenary summative address at the Congreso Internacional of the International Association for the Promotion of Christian Higher Education, Granada, Nicaragua.
Jenkins, Philip. 2002. The next Christendom: The coming of global Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Global South 12.2