What happens when the church you can see is shrinking, and the church you can't see is the largest it has ever been? In a country town in New South Wales, Australia, a woman counts nineteen heads in a hall that once held two hundred and tells the story as though it were Christianity itself. On that very same Sunday, in Lagos and Nairobi and Seoul and São Paulo and Chennai, churches are packed to the doors and spilling into the street. The center of the Christian faith has moved, and most of us who grew up in Western churches were never told.

In this episode, Graham explores world Christianity, the astonishing shift of the faith toward Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He lays out the numbers, from 381 million European Christians in 1900 to a Global South (i.e., Majority World) that now holds most of the world's believers and is projected to hold 77 percent by 2050, and the prediction that China will soon have more Christians than any nation on earth. He traces the long story, from Antioch and the African theology of Augustine and Athanasius, to the Church of the East reaching Xi'an in the seventh century, to the Thomas Christians of Kerala, and shows how the center of this faith has always moved. He grounds it in Scripture, from the promise to Abraham that all the families of the earth would be blessed, to Pentecost and the languages God multiplied instead of erasing, to the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, to Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3 that we might grasp the love of Christ together with all the saints. He engages with voices such as Lamin Sanneh, Andrew Walls, Philip Jenkins, Kōsuke Koyama, Kwame Bediako, and Emmanuel Katongole, and he's honest about the hard questions, too: nominal growth, the prosperity gospel, and the danger of romanticizing the Majority World church. And he asks what all this means for a shrinking church in western Sydney, and for anyone who spent a lifetime assuming they were standing at the center.

Book recommendations: "World Christianity: An Introduction" by Graham Joseph Hill, "Global Christianity" and "Women in World Christianity" by Gina Zurlo, "Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West" by Lamin Sanneh, "The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity" by Philip Jenkins.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

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