The New Shape of World Christianity: Part 1 of 5

In The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith, Mark Noll sets out to define the place of American Christianity in the rapidly changing shape of world Christianity. Noll concludes that while American expressions of Christianity have been important in shaping a new era in Christian history, it has not been primarily due to direct American influence, but because “the world is coming more and more to look like America” (189). The purpose of this review is to note the missiological lessons—the opportunities and challenges the global Church faces—as taken from Noll’s book.

Missiologist Andrew Walls speaks of the gospel’s ability to incarnate—to make itself at home—in a new cultural setting, just as Christ did in taking on human flesh. The gospel, without compromising its message, enters into new cultures and orients itself in a new cultural setting. Noll’s book develops Walls’ point about the indigenizing gospel by arguing that the new shape of world Christianity is not advancing by replicating American Christianity; instead, Christianity continues to grow through this indigenization process by making the gospel at home in a new setting.

Three possibilities may be considered when examining the role of American Christianity in the global expansion of Christianity: first, America has exercised direct influence on the Church in the Majority world; second, America has exerted active influence that the Church in Majority world has chosen to accept; or, third, similarities exist between the American and Majority world Church because of loose American influence and similar historical circumstances. Noll suggests that America’s influence upon the Majority world church might best be described as a combination of the second and third options.

Noll highlights the example of the growth of the Korean Church in the 20^th century as an example of how the Church grew not by American manipulation, but by Korean ownership and the indigenization of the gospel in the Korean context:

“…it was the dedicated distribution of [the Hangul New Testament, a translation of the Bible into the ordinary Korean language] through the work of Korean pastors, cell group leaders and above all Korean Bible colporteurs that made the Hangul Scriptures into a great engine of spiritual renewal and then of social and cultural transformation” (157). 

While missionaries and Bible translators may have played a role in translating the Bible into Korean, it was the local ownership of the gospel—the gospel coming to dwell in a local culture—that sparked “spiritual renewal and… social and cultural transformation”.

A similar conclusion of the importance of the indigenization of the gospel is drawn, according to Noll, by looking at the East African revival.

 “Is the East African Revival only twentieth-century Western evangelicalism transplanted into a new setting? A brief summary of the revival and its prominent characteristics cannot answer such questions completely. Yet it can point to the conclusion that, even with much borrowed from the Christian West and much that imitates some forms of Western Christianity, the East African Revival again illustrates more an American pattern of development rather than an overwhelming American (or Western) influence” (172, italics added for emphasis).

Dr. Joseph Church, a missionary doctor in Rwanda, began a preaching and teaching ministry in East Africa. His ministry was met with great success, in part, because Church’s style encouraged African ownership of the gospel message.

“Through wide travels that Church later undertook with African colleagues, the revival message moved on to South Africa and several places outside of the African continent. But although Church was the most visible leader to Western eyes, his style of missionary activity was always deliberately cooperative. The practice of forming teams of workers—both mixed white and black as well as all-African—was from the start the chief vehicle of dissemination” (179-180).

In both the spread of Christianity in Korea and in the East African revival, local leadership and the indigenization of the gospel was key. If the East African revivals or the growth of the Korean church was transplanted Western Christianity, one would expect to find nothing but dead religion upon the end in the post-colonization era. This is not the case. The gospel spread, not where America successfully exerted its influence, but where the Christian message was allowed to take root in the hearts of local believers and proclaimed in native tongues.