I joined a book club this year at Evangel University. Our first book is by Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn. State University. The essence of the book is that Christianity is moving southward to Latin America, Africa, and Asia. I have only read through the second chapter. In the second chapter the author traces the rise and spread of Christianity from the beginning to the present. This is nothing new. What is new is that the author traces this movement not, as most, in its westward movement, but rather to the east. He makes a very important point about the rise and spread of the church in the first 1300 years; the spread of Christianity was mostly eastward and southward, not westward. Few historians ever consider this fact; most know only of the spread of the church to the West, and how Western imperialism forced its religion on the rest of the world. This may not seem like an important issue, but I am convinced that if we knew more of the eastern history of the church far fewer people would be so quick characterize Christianity as a white, western ideology that has been foisted upon the pristine religions and cultures of the East and Africa. According to Jenkins, this idea is dead wrong. The error, he says, is all the more striking since the historical records that speak against it are so plentiful. According to Jenkins, before AD 1400 "at no point did the West have a monopoly on the Christian faith" (p. 20). Despite the prevailing views of most modern historians, Christianity has for the majority of the "church age" been non-western.

The author points out something few historians care about today. In fact, just about every one I know is of the view that Christianity was brought to the East and Africa and imposed upon them by white westerners only sometime after AD 1000. Jenkins points out that the West did not originally take Christianity to the East and Africa; it came there in its initial movement from Jerusalem beginning in the first century. It predates Islam, and as a religion is more native to those lands than Islam. Jenkins also points out "when twentieth-century African Americans sought religious roots distinct from the mainstream [white] culture that spurned them, a substantial minority opted for the Muslim faith that they regarded as authentically African. Christianity was seen as the tool of the slave-master" (p. 19). Little is ever said, however, of the long history of Arab Muslim slave enterprises in Africa. Clearly, the West has a history of imperialism in the East and Africa, but it is also the case that in those lands Christianity predates Islam. Those Christian communities that lived there after the rise of Islam have a long history as an enslaved persecuted minority to their Muslim rulers.

In a day when it is so popular to heap guilt on modern Western Christians for the medieval Crusades and Western Christian imperialism, Jenkins presents a side to the issue that few acknowledge. He is not defending Western wrongs, but he is very well documented by sources that are quite creditable. I am not a historian and maybe none of this is significant, it just seems that so often whole groups of people are labeled good or bad according to some historical event that can be attributed to them. I don't think this is fair; there's just too much bad that has been done in history. If that's all we look at, we won't like anyone.

This much by chapter 2, I'll let you know how the rest of the book goes.