The explosive southward expansion of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and 
Latin American has barely registered on Western consciousness. Nor has 
the globalization of Christianity--and the enormous religious, 
political, and social consequences it portends--been properly 
understood.       Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom: The Coming of 
Global Christianity is the first book to take the full measure of the 
changing face of the Christian faith. Jenkins asserts that by the year 
2050 only one Christian in five will be a non-Latino white person and 
that the center of gravity of the Christian world will have shifted 
firmly to the Southern hemisphere. Within a few decades Kinshasa, Buenos
 Aires, Addis Ababa, and Manila will replace Rome, Athens, Paris, 
London, and New York as the focal points of the Church. Moreover, 
Jenkins shows that the churches that have grown most rapidly in the 
global south are far more traditional, morally conservative, 
evangelical, and apocalyptic than their northern counterparts. 
Mysticism, puritanism, belief in prophecy, faith-healing, exorcism, and 
dream-visions--concepts which more liberal western churches have traded 
in for progressive political and social concerns--are basic to the newer
 churches in the south. And the effects of such beliefs on global 
politics, Jenkins argues, will be enormous, as religious identification 
begins to take precedence over allegiance to secular nation-states. 
Indeed, as Christianity grows in regions where Islam is also expected to
 increase--as recent conflicts in Indonesia, Nigeria, and the 
Philippines reveal--we may see a return to the religious wars of the 
past, fought out with renewed intensity and high-tech weapons far 
surpassing the swords and spears of the middle ages.     Jenkins shows 
that Christianity is on the rise again, and to understand what that rise
 may mean requires a new awareness of what is happening in Africa, Asia,
 and Latin America. The Next Christendom takes the first large step 
towards that new awareness.                

The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity PDF

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