Embracing global Christianity: a missiological challenge.

Challenge of the time

What reform is the Christian community mostly in need of today? In this essay I focus on the need for Christians to reclaim and live out their global belonging for the sake of affirming and sharing the richness of God's creative presence among humanity and the whole of creation.

Like everyone else, Christians are not just imitative beings. Our distinct trait as humans is that we are reflective beings. Reflective insight will help the community reexamine the historical determinants of social reality and move beyond routine and habitual acts to conceive a new sense of being global Christians. (1)

The new millennium started with a significant gathering of religious leaders of the world. This event did not get much publicity in Christian circles. For the first time the United Nations summoned a religious and spiritual leaders meeting in New York City just before the millennium Assembly of the heads of states and governments from September 6-8, 2000. The so-called Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders took place August 28-31, 2000. More than 1,000 religious and spiritual leaders from around the globe were present for this gathering. It was a recognition by the world political leadership that people belonging to historic faith traditions have a significant role to play in global peace and justice. Religious bodies are, to use Peter Berger's term, "mediating institutions" between peoples and communities who make a difference in the affairs of the world.

At the end of the Summit the participants unanimously adopted a "Commitment of Global Peace," affirming their role in peace and justice in the world in cooperation with the United Nations stating: "[W]e declare our commitment and determination: To collaborate with the United Nations and all men and women of goodwill locally, regionally, and globally in the pursuit of peace in all its dimensions." (2)

In some sense the outcome of the Summit actualized what United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has envisaged about the religious and spiritual dimension of the work in the United Nations.

The United Nations is a tapestry, not only of suits and saris but of
clerics' collars, nuns' habits and lamas' robes; of miters, skullcaps,
and yarmulkes.... There is a basic affinity between the teachings of
the great religions of the world and the values of the Charter of the
United Nations. (3)

The Summit also was an acknowledgment of the global resurgence of religions in the post-Cold War environment and the role they are playing in shaping the lives of people and communities locally and globally. In Bringing Religion into International Relations, Jonathan Fox and Shmuel Sandler state that the resurgence of religions especially outside the West is compelling scholars to give serious consideration to religions in the international relations theories and recognize their social and political influence:

Religion is rarely included in most major theories of international
relations and when it is addressed, it is usually through viewing it as
a subcategory of some topic that is considered more important such as
institutions, terrorism, society or civilizations. In the few cases
where it is addressed directly, "religion tends to be characterized as
fundamentalist, extreme, radical or militant" rather than as a normal
element of political process. (4)

The changed world situation makes the inclusion of religion as a variable in future research on international politics unavoidable.

The prevalence of globalization calls Christians, especially in countries like the U.S.A., to focus on the world church, engage in Christianity as a global fellowship, and promote it locally. Parochialism is a strong tendency among almost all Protestant denominations and groups. Ethnic, linguistic, and cultural territoriality is a common constraint among historic Christian communities. There is always a great temptation for a Christian community to get too focused on the local and regional affairs and thereby miss its larger belonging and commitment.

A new way of being a global Christian community is possible today through the growing strength of Christianity in the non-Western world, the migration of a section of these Christians to the Western hemisphere, and the easy interconnectedness made possible through the modern phenomenon of globalization.

Emergence of Christian vitality in the south

In 1974 Walbert Buhlmann (for some time a Swiss missionary of the Capuchin Order in then Tanganyika, now Tanzania) published Coming of the Third Church: An Analysis of the Present and Future of the Church. He coined the term "Third Church" on the analogy of Third World to refer to Christian communities in Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. In the introduction to the book he noted:

There is far too much talk about crisis in the Church, far too little
about the opportunities we are offered. In the course of history, if it
were not so, the Church would not have survived. The outstanding
opportunity of the present time is the coming of a Church which I would
like to call the "Third Church", that is to say, the Church of the south
as distinct from the Churches of east and west. This coming is an
epoch-making event within the one Church of Christ. (5)

According to Buhlmann, the demographic shift in the Catholic Church had contributed to this coming of the Third Church. He observed that by 1970 the Roman Catholic Church reached a critical point: "by then 51 percent of all Catholics were living in the southern continents: Latin America, Africa, Asia-Oceania. Until 1980 the proportion went on rising to 57.76 percent. By the year 2000 a good 70 percent of all Catholics will be living in the southern hemisphere." (6) Because of this demographic tilt to the South, Buhlmann concluded, "the Catholic church no longer simply has a third world church, it is now a third world church--with Western and European origin." (7)

In 2002 David Jenkins published a book somewhat similar to that of Buhlmann, which also covered the Protestant and independent church bodies. Titled The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, the book pointed to the fact that over the past century Christian populations as a whole in the global North (Europe and North America) have either held steady or declined, while in Africa, Asia, and Latin America--the "global South"--the numbers have risen significantly and in some cases dramatically. (8) For example, in 1900 the continent of Africa had about 10 million Christians out of the total population of 107 million, or about 9 percent. In 2000 the African Christian population had risen to 360 million out of 784 million, about 46% of the population. Today there are more Christians living in the global South than in the North (Europe, North America, Russia, and Japan). By 2025 the Christian population in Africa and Latin America is expected to account for 50 percent, and an additional 17 percent will be in Asia. (9) So, even the Protestant family has become a third-world church.

It is not only the numerical strength but also the passion with which Christianity is lived out in the global South that is making an impact on world Christianity. Jenkins notes that the faith expression of Christians from the South predominantly resembles that of pre-Vatican II, as far as Roman Catholics are concerned, and neo-orthodox to conservative as far as the mainline Protestant denominations are concerned, with the strong influence of rapidly growing Pentecostal, charismatic, and independent churches. (10) Within a century (since its founding in 1906) the Pentecostal movement has the following of 400 million people, mostly in the global South, and it is predicted that by 2050 that number will reach one billion.

On moral and theological issues there is already a divide between the liberal attitudes of Christians in the North and the predominantly traditional or conservative attitudes in the South. The historical process the two regions have gone through and the existing societal situation in these parts of the world has contributed enormously to that divide. Jenkins sketches the scenario as follows:

These newer churches preach deep personal faith and communal orthodoxy,
mysticism and Puritanism, all founded on clear scriptural authority.
They preach messages that to a Westerner appear simplistically
charismatic, visionary, and apocalyptic. In this thought-world, prophecy
is an everyday reality, while faith healing, exorcism, and dream visions
are all basic components of religious sensibility. For better or worse,
the dominant churches of the future could have much in common with those
of medieval or early modern European times. On present evidence, a
Southernized Christian future should be distinctly conservative." (11)

The key issue in the South is the prevailing worldview that subscribes to a belief in direct divine intervention in the daily lives of people. The divine power that is mediated through Christianity can provide healing of mind, body, and soul, and these three entities of a person cannot be separated. Besides, the age-old local beliefs about visions, prophecy, and healing also have contributed to Southern Christianity's distinctive supernaturalism. Such worldviews prevailed against the expectation that modernity, through Western education and technological know-how, would defuse and decimate them. On the contrary, in many communities the opposite was the case. Peter Berger comments:

The world today is massively religious, is anything but the secularized
world that had been predicted (whether joyfully or despondently) by so
many analysts of modernity. There are, however, two exceptions to this
proposition, one somewhat unclear, the other very clear.... In Western
Europe, if nowhere else, the old secularized theory would seem to
hold.... The other exception to the desecularized thesis is less
ambiguous. There exists an international subculture composed of people
with Western-type higher education especially in the humanities and
social sciences that is indeed secularized. This subculture is the
principal "carrier" of progressive, Enlightened beliefs and values. (12)

Even though Jenkins concludes that these distinct developments in the South and North seem to be very divisive, there does exist, as Berger observes, a certain level of solidarity between the conservative leadership in the South and the North as well as a certain level of comradeship between the liberals of the North and the South.

The issue here, Fox and Sandler point out, is that

Social scientists in general and political scientists in particular
envisioned that modernity would marginalize primordial loyalties. By
creating the powerful territorial state, modern man would throw off his
need to turn to God to supply his basic material and spiritual needs....
Surprisingly primordial loyalties survived the onslaught of the modern
state. (13)

The primal traditions and religiosities managed to survive in spite of the Westernizing ethos promulgated by colonization, sometimes resurfacing as indigenous Christianity.

The emergence of Christianity in the global South, especially in Africa and Asia, is in fact closely associated with the resurgence of the so-called Third World countries in the middle of the last century. In the words of Thomas Scott,

The global resurgence of religion also manifests the search for
authenticity and development in the Third World. The global resurgence
of religion in developing countries can be seen as part of the "revolt
against the West." (14)

The resurgence of world religions and the indigenous expressions of Christianity in these newly independent countries were closely associated with the struggles for political independence from the colonial regime and its imposition of Western culture. Hinduism in India; Islam in a wide range of countries in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa; Buddhism in countries such as Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and others in the South East and North East Asia were able to provide the needed spiritual stamina and political courage to fight colonial rule. Indigenous Christian movements include the Kimbanguist church, which came into being in 1921 in what was then the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo; the Musama Disco Christo Church (MDCC), which started around 1922 in Gold Coast, the present Ghana; several other African Independent Churches (AICs); (15) the Hindu Church of the Lord Jesus, founded in 1858; the Calcutta Christo Samaj, founded in 1887; the National Church of Madras, founded around 1887 in India; (16) Mukyokai, "We-Need-No-Church-Principle" (No-Church), a movement attributed to Kanzo Uchimura (1861-1930) of Japan; (17) and the China Christian Council with its compatriot "Three Self Movement."

It is an irony of history that the political freedom of a large section of humanity in the twentieth century was gained from the Western "Christian" countries through the ethical, spiritual, and communitarian strength of the prevailing world religions and that an indigenous expression of Christianity emerged out of or was inspired by Western missionary Christianity. The attempt by the colonial rulers and missionaries to subdue such efforts eventually did not succeed.

The end of colonial rule in many of the newly independent countries resulted in the loss of the protection of the colonial powers and in some cases even loss of support from European and North American missionary societies. Local Christians had to survive on their own. Christian leaders of the global South had to step in and continue the ministry in a lingering situation of poverty, disease, hunger, persecution, and exile with steadily dwindling mission support from overseas.

The leadership crisis was acute. With the departing of overseas missionaries, the institutional and management center eroded rapidly, and the indigenous leadership on the margins was forced to move to the center to protect the ecclesiastical and mission structure from collapsing and the fellowship from disintegrating. Whether the inherited infrastructure needed to be maintained as it was or reformulated to suit the local need and resources was debated relentlessly. Theological and leadership training was severely disrupted due to the lack of trained personnel and the dearth of literature and finance. In many circumstances the crisis was further escalated by economic hardships resulting from the process of reconstruction of the newly independent nation states. Furthermore, the demands made by the emerging political forces and the challenges of localized religions and faith traditions were mild to severe depending on the local standing of Christianity and its mission history.

These new realities forced the Christian communities in the South to develop their own ways of organizing and sustaining local faith communities. New ways of engaging with the Bible and local cultures/traditions were necessary. Rereading the Bible contextually and indigenizing Christian faith and practices to suit the local need were revived. As R. S. Sugirtharajah has shown, "The major phase in the development of hermeneutics in the colonies began with the anti-colonial and national rehabilitation movements of the nineteenth century." (18) There were no other easy options to bring the Christian message of hope and to motivate people in facing boldly the socioeconomic hardships with courage. In that task they found the worldview of the New Testament to be much closer to their reality than what was taught by the missionary Christianity from the North. Therefore, to a large extent, the so-called conservative nature of Christianity in the South was shaped by social circumstances and the failure of the inherited Western Christianity to provide an answer.

Ecumenical endeavors of the south

In order to venture into ecumenical and global relations, Southern Christians had to navigate carefully through the newly imposed loyalty to nation states as well as with the inherited ecclesiastical structures and missionary mindset.

There are several positive expressions of self-assertion by churches and Christians in the South. They are pursued with a spirit of indigenization, inculturation, contextualization, and ecumenism. Some amount of daring soul searching and reflection facilitated the creating of new fellowships and institutions. These include the formation of the united churches that go beyond the constraints of the inherited denominations by being rooted in the local contexts, incorporating the richness of local socio-religio-cultural heritages. United churches in some sense were a witness to the catholicity of the church in the South as well as a challenge to the Northern churches to reconsider their historic captivity. Regional conferences of churches were established--such as the All Africa Council of Churches, Caribbean Council of Churches, Christian Conference of Asia, Pacific Council of Churches, Latin American Council of Churches, Middle East Council of Churches--for the sake of common witness and acting cooperatively in facing the local issues and regional/global challenges. The establishment of the regional Association of Theological Schools, to strengthen theological education and ministerial formation, gives attention to local needs and challenges. The formation of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) in 1976 at Dares Salaam as a world forum for theologians around the world, especially from the South and minority/marginalized Christian communities in the North, gives voice to theologies and missiological concerns from the underside. (19)

Even global ecumenical bodies were challenged to open up to the issues of the South and appoint leadership from the South in order to create an ethos of global culture and fellowship in these institutions. That includes the World Council of Churches, YMCA and YWCAs, World Christian Student Federations, and world confessional bodies, missionary societies and boards. Much was accomplished through these attempts and experiments. The recent practice of inviting theological teachers and ministers to come and serve in Northern institutions, national church offices, and congregations for longer or shorter periods of time is another attempt toward affirming ecumenical commitment and upholding the catholicity of the Christian faith.

Expanding horizon

The church is placed in the midst of the world as a messenger of God's good news. Christianity, which started its journey at a location, Jerusalem, has come full circle. To use Karl Rahner's imagery, the "planetary diaspora" of Christianity is complete, giving birth to the world church. (20) The first apostolic church of the Mediterranean and North Africa gave way to the second church of Northern Europe, eventually embracing the Northern hemisphere of the Euro-American tradition. The world mission outreach of the last two centuries has enabled Christianity to embrace the Southern hemisphere, creating a grand human family of Christians drawn from the East and West, North and South, joined together in a new tapestry of world Christianity. We do not have a full picture of that Christianity, as many pieces still have to be lifted up and integrated into that larger picture. However, we are able to witness its signs of unfolding and flowering. Perhaps, as Hans Kung has noted, there exists a "polycentric Christianity in a polycentric world." (21)

Christianity needs to work on its global perspective, not for the sake of profit making but for the sake of being enriched with the gifts and talents of the other. The good news is that the world of humanity is reshaping itself. Today it is hard to find a newspaper or magazine without columns or sections dealing with the world at large. Radio and television flood us with stories and pictures from around the globe, although they often are selected according to the ideology of the management and in many cases provide negative images, except for some of the documentaries aired through public broadcasting and nonprofit channels. Malls and shopping centers are making commodities from around the world easily available to their customers. Most metropolitan areas are adorned with eating places offering foods from a variety of countries and ethnic communities, some authentic and some poor imitations.

Already a number of schools and institutions of higher learning are either adding courses or reorganizing curriculum in order to inculcate a sense of human solidarity and global community among their graduates. When a question was put to the entering class at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia about how many of them had taken courses, undertaken field trips, or done independent study of cultures, societies, and/or religions other than their own, a majority and almost all those who were straight from colleges answered affirmatively. The number of people being exposed to global realities is expanding. How are these students going to experience the preparedness of their congregations and communities for being connected to the richness and beauty of the wider human community? How the Christian community is going to build on such emerging global consciousness is a missiological challenge.

The changed geographical and demographic situation calls for a reformation of the church's role in this emerging new global era. Most Christians belonging to the Protestant tradition tend to understand their church community narrowly in association with their respective nations. The Protestant Reformers' close collaboration with the emerging nation-states in Europe in the sixteenth century was a political necessity in achieving their task of reforming. Although denominations (that emerged out of the Reformation) were mostly named for a place (Church of England, of Germany, of Scotland, of India), the Christian community should not be narrowly understood as a nation-state entity. Such a reference to social reality neither wholly defines nor exhausts its authentic global and universal nature. A dialectic between social and theological realities of the Christian community should always be maintained to uphold its true nature.

For Christians, it should not be difficult to comprehend the global dimension of the human community. Christianity is not a status of birthright. It is a gift of grace. It is through baptism that an individual is privileged to join a community of the faithful. However, what many do not realize is that while through baptism one becomes a family member of the existing local Christian community, one also thereby becomes a member of the global Christian community and becomes connected to those who have gone before and those who are yet to come--the one holy catholic and apostolic church. Unfortunately, to stretch the imagination to that level may be a daunting task. It is easy to think that by baptism one is just becoming a member of a local congregation or at most the denomination. Since most of the Protestant denominations operate within the framework of a nation-state, one's imagination of a Christian community often takes on that same limitation. (22)

Christians carry that mindset even when they migrate to a new country. At baptism, in fact, Christians are called for a life of adventure as disciples of Jesus Christ in God's world. However, they are not going to be in control of this adventure or of its outcome. As Anthony Gittins states, "An adventure is, by definition, associated with risk and uncertainty in a way other journeys are not." (23)

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When Jesus taught his disciples the "Lord's prayer," he began with a generic word, "Our Father." Addressing God as Father, or relating to God as a parent, signifies the universal character of Christian faith. Parent is a biological category, an easily understood metaphor in all human circumstances. This metaphor not only speaks of the close relationship between God and humans but also binds the human community together as a family.

In the same prayer, there is another globally and even universally embracing phrase: "Your kingdom come." The citizenship of Christians is in God's kingdom, which transcends all earthly borders and human-created barriers. Even though it is difficult to fully comprehend the global and universal dimension of this petition, every Christian is called to be a part of such a reality. When Christians are motivated to ponder their status as children of one God, creator of the one common world for all humans to share, they will be able to think beyond their congregation, region, or nation and recognize the need for solidarity among Christians, near and far, in order to be faithful to God's mission in the world. (24)

Above all, the central confession of the church is that through incarnation God embraced the whole of humanity/creation in a special way. In the light of that affirmation, if any intolerance and indifference toward other humans is promoted intentionally by a Christian community, preventing its members from embracing the global family, such a practice is surely a counterwitness to the truth of incarnation and the core vision of Christianity.

Global consciousnesses and globalization

If the nineteenth century was predominantly a Western European century, the twentieth century has been preeminently a North American one, with the United States possessing strong economic and military power. As far as the twenty-first century is concerned, it is projected to be the beginning of a global millennium. There is little scope for communities to live in isolation today. Nation states, financial institutions, and business enterprises are more interconnected and interdependent than ever. So it is also with other organizations, be they government or nongovernment, academic or cultural, business, military, or civil, sports or entertainment, even religious or other nonprofit bodies. The continued success of any of these organizations, institutions, and enterprises depends on its current and anticipated participation in the world communities. Political and economic interests have made nation states create large forms of mutual interest such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), European Union (EU), Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), African Union (AU), and Arab League. Regional and global forums are cropping up everywhere, formed by human associations and organizations committed to similar goals, to be more effective and beneficial for a larger section of humanity, for a better utilization of resources, and to involve persons from a wide spectrum of communities.

Globalization has an upper hand in shaping global human relations. We can hardly have serious conversation on issues relating to church and society without reference to the power of globalization. Robert Schreiter summarizes the phenomenon of globalization thus:

Globalization is ... first of all about extension. It extends the
effects of modernity (and with it elements of Western culture)
throughout the entire world via the communication technologies that
create a network for information flow. Computers, modems, faxes, and the
Internet make possible this swift transfer.... It has a compressing
effect as well. Technological innovations compress both our sense of
time and our sense of space. Events happening around the world are now
experienced instantaneously. (25)

The consequences of globalization are very mixed. As the world gets steadily compressed through globalization, cultural clashes and tensions are intensified in spite of the fact that it contributes to the "expanding and deepening consciousness of the world as a whole," observes Roland Robertson. (26) Consequently, it creates an atmosphere of globophobia, to use Robertson's term, on the part of some. The issue is whether religious communities should be globophobic, terrified by the changing world, or should minister in such an environment with a positive global vision of humanity. (27)

Christianity from its inception had a vision of reaching out to all people and becoming a religious metaculture. (28) In that sense globalization was at the heart of Christianity. According to Christian traditions, disciples of Jesus spread out widely in the then known world. The miracle of the day of Pentecost was the disciples' opening up to the wider community. David Roozen states this as follows:

For the Christian church "globalization" is, in many respects, a late
20th century equivalent of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-3; 6-12). To be
self-conscious about globalization is to be amazed and perplexed by the
growing interdependence of the world's diversity and disparity. To open
oneself to globalization is to be confronted with a new reality and to
ask: "What does this mean?" (29)

To overcome the present atmosphere of defeatism in the North due to the steady loss of members in mainline churches and to connect with the vitality of the South, the perspective of global belonging can be of a help. For example, the ELCA may be better able to handle the loss of membership provided it stops thinking about itself primarily as a national church. If it shifts its imagination and sees itself as a global family, there is a lot to celebrate, as Lutheran membership is increasing the world over. Further, if it courageously relates to new local and yet global/transnational Christians in its neighborhoods and opens its congregations to these disciples of Jesus with a genuine spirit of catholicity, there is even less reason to mourn. Such courage calls for a radical shift in the ethno-communal mindset for the sake of embracing the hitherto considered "problematic other," who are in reality fellow disciples. In India and Asia as a whole, in spite of the presence of Christianity there for 2,000 years and the intense mission work in the last five hundred years, official Christian population still remains less than 3 percent. But that does not dishearten Indians or Asians who are Christians. Their sense of being a minority in their immediate locale does not immobilize them as they focus on their wider global family and cherish being part of the world Christian community, their extended family. Without such a sense of belongingness, Christians in a given locality can fail to draw on the abundance of richness they possess as a global Christian community.

Community of communities

Christian communities through the centuries have evolved many models of the church. In Models of the Church Avery Dulles groups them into five broad categories demonstrating their uses and limitations (30)--church as Institution, Mystical Communion, Sacrament, Herald, and Servant, as well as the later added Community of Disciples, Body of Christ, and Pilgrim People of God. Veli-Matti Karkkainen traces a number of them from different church traditions and denominations, (31) including Communion of Saints, Priesthood of All Believers (1 Pet 2:9), Household of God, Graced Covenant Community, Exodus Community, Fellowship of Believers, Charismatic Fellowship, Elected Community, the Community of the Holy Spirit, Gathered People of God, Assembly, Women-church, Cyber church, Universal, Messianic, Participatory, and Missionary ecclesiologies.

It is likely that all of these ecclesiologies include reference to the global dimension of Christian community and its larger societal responsibility. For example, here is a familiar quote from Bonhoeffer:

The Church is Church only when it exists for others. To make a start it
should give away all its property to those who need. The clergy must
live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or
possibly engage in some secular calling. The Church must share in the
secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and
serving. (32)

In spite of similar strong pleas for public engagements, in most ecclesiologies the global inclusion and catholic fervor of embracing global Christianity unconditionally do not hold a central place. It is understandable. Like other doctrinal formulations these ecclesiologies are also shaped by the social, political, philosophical and ecclesiastical realities of the time and place.

In recent decades the demand for global solidarity has intensified. Serious debates and concrete plans are proposed and implemented by different forums like the United Nations Summit mentioned earlier and the well-known Willy Brandt Commission Report, North-South, published in 1980. Global consciousness is on the rise. It was only in 1968 that the photograph of the earth as a big blue-and-white marble in the blackness of space, taken by astronauts of Apollo 8, contributed to a new awareness that beyond one's village, town, city, and country, the planet is the common home of us all. In 1964, communication theorist Marshall McLuhan popularized the concept of the "global village." (33) McLuhan was optimistic that through radio and television the world would be closely connected and everyone would become neighbors in a global village. Digital technology and the Internet have furthered McLuhan's vision.

As already mentioned, these breakthroughs in communication and the phenomenon of globalization make it almost impossible for societies and communities today to be isolationist. Nonetheless, it is a recognized fact that the present functioning of globalization is not value free and does not function without some people and communities benefiting more than others. Concerned and knowledgeable individuals, institutions, and organizations have raised voices against new imperialistic and colonialist tendencies within the elemental forces of globalization and strive to use it for the betterment of humanity.

Can the Christian community do better? I think we can, provided we take our global connectedness seriously and do not stoop to easy compromises. A community that enjoys a following of about 33 percent of the world's population and possesses abundant talents and resources can make the key players of the world take its voice seriously if concerted effort is devoted and the needed resources are channeled to this missiological calling of our time. A number of such engagements of solidarity have been carried out ecumenically in the recent past, and they need to be lifted up even as similar attempts are promoted.

The goal of Christianity (according to St. Paul) is to strive toward the unfolding of the new cosmic community (reign of God) in which God intends to gather all things (Eph 1:10) and reconcile all things (Col 1:20) and in which God will be all in all (1 Cor 18:28). (34) It is to affirm the cosmic communio nature of Christians, that is, their existence shaped by "deep communion between God, human creatures, and the broader community of life." (35) The New Testament understanding is that while the local congregations live out their catholicity (global and universal nature) in their faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, they are cognizant of their connectedness to other disciples of Jesus Christ far and near. They are related to one another because they are serving the same Lord, the head of the one body, the church. Differences that may crop up have to be discussed and sorted out in a conciliar spirit.

The local and the global are not opposed to one another but rather flow from one to another with complementary ease, a "glocalization." (36) People may not be aware of its functioning, but that does not deny the reality. It refers to the dynamic of catholicity that was in operation from the inception of the church. Such catholicity is affirmed when the members of a congregation remember that they are part of the global koinonia (fellowship) and carry on their congregational life from such a perspective and commitment. The divine foundation of the church makes it imperative that its universal dimension is not forgotten in spite of the fact that the Christian faith is exercised and experienced in local koinonia.

These proposals are not an outcome of nostalgia for a new type of Christendom or a new triumphalistic global Christian civilization. It is recognizing that "The global era now upon us is a new kairos with new demands." (37) It points a way forward for Christians to reclaim their authentic identity as a global community. It is a call for giving up self-imposed and unexamined isolationism. Every congregation and church body has a personality. That corporate personality, beyond verbal messages, constantly sends out nonverbal communication heard by the communities surrounding it, and contributes to views others have of it. The credibility of the gospel message is at stake when there exists a glaringly visible gap between what is preached and what is practiced. As an old wisdom saying goes, if people find what Christians say to be truthful and useful, probably they will try to embrace and practice it: "Christianity is not always taught but often caught."

Global Christian community becomes a reality when Christians are prepared for new ways of being community and begin to reappropriate Christianity as a community of communities of disciples of Jesus Christ among all human communities both religious and nonreligious. My inspiration in framing this formula comes from a somewhat similar proposal arrived at during a mission conference of the Christian Conference of Asia. The conference articulated the place of Christians as the people of God within a world community as follows: "The people of God among all God's peoples." (38) Such a new reality is possible if Christians would begin to assert their global belonging and commit themselves to a concerted effort to build trust relationships between communities across nations and continents. This entails not just tolerating but embracing differences through open conversation, negotiation, and experimentation. Charles Foster and Theodore Brelsford state that "The capacity to trust in the gracefulness of an open-ended future has an eschatological dimension to it." (39)

To begin this process in North America, I concur with the prophetic plea of Douglas John Hall that Christians disestablish and disengage themselves socially and ecclesiologically from current values that have perpetuated a narrow way of understanding themselves and reengage with others with a global perspective, reappropriating the sense of being "the disciple community described by the Scriptures and treasured throughout the ages by prophetic minorities." (40) Christianity in fact has become a world religion, and the church has become a world church. The missiological challenge therefore is how Christians will live out that global belonging and embrace global Christian community.

The United States as a laboratory of global Christianity

As it is now, U.S. churches have a great opportunity to be an exemplar and model for Christians everywhere in this new missiological challenge of reappropriating Christianity as a global fellowship. Two factors contribute to that possibility: first, the U.S. is the home of the world's largest Christian community; and second, a steady flow of migrants from all corners of the world has enriched the U.S. with a unique global ethos/culture, which has prompted Molefi Asante to state, "Once America was a microcosm of European nationalities. Today America is a microcosm of the world." (41)

The U.S. has the largest Christian population in the world--around 235 million Christians, accounting for 85 percent of the total population. (42) According to projections, even half a century from now, in 2050, the U.S. will retain this status with a Christian population of 330 million forming 82 percent of the total population. (43) However, immigration will change the ethnic composition of the Christian community along with the rest of the population. Some of the early signs are already on the horizon. In the Boston-Cambridge area, about half of the congregations that are active today worship in languages other than English. (44) The Hispanic population has already reached the rank of being the second largest ethnic community in the U.S., with a population of 37 million, and the Asian and the Middle Eastern populations are showing a steady increase. With the continuing migration of Afro-Caribbeans and people from Africa, even the African-American identity is in the process of being redefined.

Already in 1991 Ben Wattenberg pointed to the fact that the U.S. has emerged as the "first universal nation" and that accepting the reality of multiculturalism is its only option. Wattenberg based his proposal on certain demographic changes:

Until 1960, about 80 percent of American immigration had come from
Europe; since 1960, about 80 percent came from places other than Europe.
They are predominantly Hispanics, Asians, Moslems (Middle-Easterners)
and Caribbean and African blacks. We are becoming what we had professed
to be, the first universal nation, and we're very successful at it. It
is very much in the American interest--commercial, geopolitical,
demographic, and ideological--to encourage this tendency toward
diversity. We ought to encourage it, even if it itches a little. It's
one big reason America is, and will be, the omni-power. (45)

Therefore one cannot think of a country other than the U.S. being a possible exemplar for unveiling this authentic nature of Christianity as a global community by embracing Christians both at home and abroad. The needed reformation, for Christianity to reclaim its global belonging, is anticipated to happen in the U.S. This vision can be accomplished in cooperation with Christians at home and around the globe. Missiologist Andrew Walls narrated this as follows:

The great issues of twenty-first century Christianity ... will be about
how African and Indian and Chinese and Korean and Hispanic and North
American and European Christians can together make real the life of the
body of Christ. The principal Christian significance of the United
States may now be in the fact that--thanks to the immigration law of the
1960s--nearly all the main Christian discourses have functioning
congregations there. More than in any other nation in the world, the
body of Christ could be realized--or fractured--in the United States.
(46)

With this missiological possibility imminent, if a national flag is still to be kept in the sanctuary, it is time that the United Nations flag complements it or replaces it. Better still, symbols representing the diverse global community need to be appropriately displayed and affirmed, giving a signal to the world that the reformation to become a world church is on and forthcoming from the United Sates. As in the days of Martin Luther, the world is writing the agenda, and church is called to respond appropriately.

H. S. Wilson

Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia

1. Ann L. Cunliffe and Jong S. Jun, "Reflective as Intellectual and Social Practice." Paper prepared for the annual meeting of the Public Administration Theory Network, May 29-31, 2002, Cleveland, Ohio (www.pat-net.org/Ann.html).

2. Found at www.millenniumpeacesummit.com/mwps_about.html.

3. From www.millenniumpeacesummit.com/item4.html.

4. Jonathan Fox and Shmuel Sandler, Bringing Religion into International Relation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 9.

5. Walbert Buhlmann, The Coming of the Third Church: An Analysis of the Present and Future of the Church (Slough, England: St. Paul Publications, 1976), ix.

6. Walbert Buhlmann, The Church of the Future: A Model for the Year 2001 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), 4-5.

7. Walbert Buhlmann, With Eyes to See: Church and World in the Third Millennium. Trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 8.

8. Phillip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: the Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8.

9. Phillip Jenkins, "A Christian Revolution Is Rising in the Third World," Arizona Daily Star (January 5, 2003), B10.

10. Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 8.

11. Ibid.

12. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter L. Berger (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1999), 9-10.

13. Fox and Sandler, Bringing Religion into International Relations, 3.

14. Thomas Scott, "The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Changing Character of International Politics," in God and Globalization, Vol. 3, ed. Max L. Stackhouse with Diane B. Obenchain (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2002), 114.

15. John Pobee and Gabriel Ostitelu II, African Initiatives in Christianity (Geneva: WCC, 1998), 23; Veli-matti Karkkainen, An Introduction to Ecclesiology: Ecumenical, Historical, and Global Perspectives (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2002), 194-98.

16. Kaj Baago, Pioneers of Indigenous Christianity (Bangalore: CISRS/CLS, 1969), 11.

17. John F. Howes, "Japanese Christianity and the State: From Jesuit confrontation /competition to Uchimura's Noninstitutional Movement/Protestantism," in Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity, ed. Steven Kaplan (New York University Press, 1995), 83-94; Karkkainen, An Introduction to Ecclesiology, 166-74.

18. R. S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Reconfigurations: An Alternative Way of Reading the Bible and Doing Theology (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2003), 1.

19. One of the EATWOT program highlights was the meeting of Third World Theologians and Western Theologians held in Geneva, Switzerland, in January 1983.

20. In Buhlmann, With Eyes to See, 8.

21. Hans Kung, Christianity (New York: Continuum, 1995), 793.

22. H. S. Wilson, "Globalization for Global Community: A Challenge to Ministerial Formation," Currents in Theology and Mission 30 (2003): 175.

23. Anthony J. Gittins, Ministry at the Margins: Strategy and Spirituality for Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 4.

24. Wilson, "Globalization for Global Community, 175.

25. Robert Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and Local (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 9-11.

26. Roland Robertson, "Globalization and the Future of 'Traditional Religion,'" in God and Globalization, Vol. 1, ed. Max L. Stackhouse with Peter J. Paris (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2000), 53, 61.

27. Tim Dearborn, "A Global Future for Local Churches," in The Local Church in a Global Era, ed. Max L. Stackhouse et al. (Grand Rapids, MI.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 209.

28. Even though the metaculture tendency has been challenged from the beginning, right at the first Jerusalem Council.

29. David Roozen, et al., Changing the Way Seminaries Teach: Globalization and Theological Education (Hartford, CT: Hartford Seminary, 1996), 11, 22f.; Wilson, "Globalization for Global Community," 177.

30. Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, [1974] 1988). For more information see www.mcauley.acu.edu.au.

31. Karkkainen, An Introduction to Ecclesiology.

32. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 203-4.

33. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 8, 31.

34. Globalization and Its Victims as Seen by the Victims, ed. Michael Amaladoss (Delhi: ISPCK, 1999), 218.

35. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 103.

36. Robertson, "Globalization and the Future of 'Traditional Religion,'" 56.

37. Diane B. Obenchain, "The Study of Religion and the Coming Global Generation," in God and Globalization, Vol. 3., ed. Max L. Stackhouse with Diane B. Obenchain (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2000), 106.

38. The People of God among All God's Peoples: Frontiers in Christian Mission, ed. Philip Wickeri (Hongkong: CCA, 2000), 9.

39. Charles R. Foster and Theodore Brelsford, We Are the Church Together: Cultural Diversity in Congregational Life (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press, 1996), 19.

40. Douglas John Hall, The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity (Valley Forge, PA.: Trinity Press, 1997), 51.

41. Ken Uyeda Fong, Pursuing the Pearl: A Comprehensive Resource for Multi-Asian Ministry (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1999), 28.

42. World Christian Encyclopedia, 2d ed. (2 vols.), ed. David B. Barrett et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 772.

43. Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 90.

44. Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 101.

45. Ben J. Wattenberg, The First Universal Nation: Leading Indicators and Ideas about the Surge of America in the 1990s (New York: Free Press, 1991), 45-46.

46. Andrew F. Walls, "From Christendom to World Christianity: Mission and the Demographic Transformation of the Church," in The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 69.