The Pilgrimage of World Christianity

on December 18, 2012
African Children's Choir
(Photo credit: Blogspot)

By Bart Gingerich

Researchers and scholars filed into the Library of Congress on December 13 to hear former Reformed Church in America general secretary Wesley Granberg-Michaelson discuss global Christianity. Much of his audience seemed disturbed by the international ascendancy of orthodox Christian faith.

A visiting scholar at the LOC’s Kluge Center, Granberg-Michaelson already boasts quite the resume: an aide to the late liberal Republican Senator Mark Hatfield, a former board member of  the National Council of Churches, and a six-year stint as director of church and society for the World Council of Churches. Besides the usual DC patrons-of-the-arts and taciturn library researchers, Sojourners chief Jim Wallis attended the event with his wife, Joy.

Granberg-Michaelson opened by remarking on the titanic cultural shifts brought on by the 15th century’s movable-type printing press. “Christianity is in the midst of another pilgrimage,” he asserted. The Church is undergoing “the most dramatic geographical shift of this sort in all 2,000 years of its history.” He showed the statistical center of Christianity over the centuries. The demographic center of the Church began in the Middle East, moving somewhat west over the centuries. The center shot up northwest circa 600-700 (Granberg-Michaelson failed to note that this corresponded to Islam’s conquests of North Africa and the Middle East); the point shifted out into the Atlantic Ocean after the 1500s (with the discovery of the Americas). However, at the rise of the modern missionary movement in the 1800s up to today, the center boomeranged around to the southeast.

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