What a century it was. In 1910 a great Protestant missionary conference was held in Edinburgh to plan the evangelization of the world. Fourteen hundred delegates gathered, only eighteen of whom were not from Europe or North America. There was not one African. The assumption, understandably, was that world evangelization meant the expansion of Western Christianity to the rest of the world.

Historian Mark Noll of Wheaton College comments: “What actually happened was dramatically different. The surprises as well as the magnitude of developments in the twentieth–century history of Christianity can be illustrated by considering a series of comparisons for present realities of this past week:

• Last Sunday it is probable that more believers attended church in China than in all of so–called Christian Europe.
• Last Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Episcopalians in the United States combined—and the number of Anglicans at church in Nigeria was several times the number in these other African countries.
• Last Sunday more Presbyterians were at church in Ghana than in Scotland, and more were at church in the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa than in the United States.
• Last Sunday more people attended the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul (Pastor Paul Young–gi Cho) than attended all of the churches in significant American denominations like the Christian Reformed Church, the Evangelical Free Church, or the Presbyterian Church in America.
• Last Sunday, Roman Catholics in the United States probably worshiped in more languages than at any previous time in American history.
• Last Sunday the churches with the largest attendance in England and France had mostly black congregations.

Careful historians such as Noll are generally nervous about making generalizations, but he takes a stab at it:

If it were possible to summarize the momentous changes in world Christianity over the course of the twentieth century, five themes might emerge: First, the decline of Christianity in Europe, as a result of a steady erosion in Western Europe and the traumatic clash with communism in Eastern Europe. Second, the renovation of the Roman Catholic Church, symbolized by the Second Vatican Council, to reflect both cultural conditions of the modern world and the growing presence of the Two-Thirds World in the Church (which now numbers about one billion adherents). Third, the displacement among Protestants of Britain and Germany as the driving agents of Christian expansion by the United States. Fourth, the expansion of Christianity into many regions where the Christian presence had been minimal or nonexistent, including China, Korea, many parts of India, and much of Africa. Fifth, a change in the pressing issues bearing down upon the Christian heartland, from the jaded discontents of advanced Western civilization to the raw life–and–death struggles of poverty, disease, and tribal warfare in non–Western civilizations.

It certainly isn't what the folks at Edinburgh in 1910 expected, writes Noll, but "what actually happened was much more unexpected, much more intriguing, much more threatening, much more complex, and much more an occasion for praising the Lord who sent his witnesses 'to the ends of the earth.'"

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