Evangelical Christianity shifting outside West

Here's an interesting article on the nature of Evangelical Christianity outside of the US. If you've read Philip Jenkins' "The Next Christendom" you'll be familiar with the themes, but Nussbaum's article adds some fresh perspective that is worth reading.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

Philadelphia Inquirer | 02/20/2006 | Evangelical Christianity shifting outside West:

Evangelicals in the global South and East are, in many ways, at least as conservative as their U.S. counterparts. But they often diverge on such issues as poverty and war.

'On abortion or gay marriage, they sound like American conservatives. But on war and peace or economic justice, they sound like the Democratic Party,' Carpenter said. 'And I have not met one foreign evangelical leader that approves of American foreign policy.'

Non-Western evangelicals may already be charting new directions with new leaders that the old bastions of Christianity are unaware of, said Mark Noll, a professor of history at Wheaton College.

'Historically, in unpredictable places and unpredictable times, you get real savvy leaders,' Noll said. 'I suspect that in Beijing, Nairobi or Cape Town, things will be very well along with innovation before Philadelphia, Chicago or London is aware of it.

'Almost everything that's significant takes place below the radar screen,' he said."

...

As the new evangelicals expand their influence and their territory, they face confrontation with other religions, most often Islam. The issue of how the world's two biggest religions will interact "is a fantastically important question," said Lamin Sanneh, the D. Willis James professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School.

Muslims represent about 20 percent of the world's population, compared with Christians' 33 percent. But Islam is growing more rapidly than Christianity, largely because of faster population growth in Muslim countries, and it may surpass Christianity as the world's most popular religion in this century.

Sudan, Nigeria and the Balkans offer recent examples of violence between Christians and Muslims. But there are other examples, such as South Africa, where the two religions coexist peacefully, said Sanneh, a native of Gambia who is the author of Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West.

In Islamic countries, the Western notion of separation of church and state is largely unknown, and Sanneh said American Christians ought to better explain the advantages - to both religion and government - of keeping the two separate.

"The American experience on that is relevant to the rest of the world in a remarkable way," Sanneh said. "Americans confronted that centuries before the rest of the world."

After centuries of receiving missionaries from colonial powers in the West, evangelicals in Africa and Latin America and Asia are now planting churches in the United States and Europe. As immigrants arrive here, many bring their own brand of evangelical Christianity with them, while others start churches specifically to minister to "post-Christian" Westerners.