Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing...
Review: I'm reminded of a line from the movie "High Fidelity": "How can a man with no interest in music own a record store?" Similarly, I ask, how can a man who knows so little about Christianity and the developing world write about Christianity *in* the developing world.Sure, jenkins gets most of the broad outlines right. The growth of christianity in the developing world, it's "orthodoxy" and conservatism (versus churches in Europe and North America), the explosive growth of pentecostalism. BUT THERE IS SO, SO MUCH HE MISSES! What about the role of "house churches." Where is the discussion of Watchman Nee, Roland Allen, Lesslie Newbigin, Bahkt Singh... How can one hope to deal with churches in the Muslim world without reference to Phil Parshall or Kenneth Cragg. About his chapter on the muslim world, the less said, the better!
While early on, he makes an important point against Samuel Huntington's currently fashionable "Clash of Civilizations" theory, in the relevant chapter, he swallows it hook, line, and sinker. Indeed, he introduces as "evidence," stuff not even Huntington and Daniel Pipes would cite: namely, the turkish genocide against armenians, and turkish actions against greek orthodox. What wrong with this picture? The Turkey was led by the very militant (and very secular) Kemalists at the time! But no bother every ethnic conflict is reduced to a religous conflict, whether it's the balkans (how devout is Milosevich, really?) or East Timor. Yes, there is persecution of Christian minorities in Muslim nations and missionary activity is resisted, sometimes agressively. And yes, this will continue for the forseeable future. But it's just plain stupid to equate the Taleban with Suharto or Alia Itzabegovich! Then to add insult to injury, he mentions how many christians in the muslim world are critical of the State of Israel, raising, without *any* support whatsoever, the specter of retrograde christian anti-Semitism reinforced by Islamic anti-Semitism. What's breathtaking, is how lightly he writes such a libel and then moves on, but then that's the book in a nutshell. Literate, but profoundly superficial.
Rating: 
Summary: Death of Christianity? Think again.
Review: If you are interested in the future of religion in general and Christianity in particular, the one must read book this year has been written by Phil Jenkins. A respected professor at Penn State University who has been known for "going against the flow," Jenkins argues that the rapid growth of primitive/Pentecostal Christianity around the world (both within and alongside existing traditions) will literally reshape the world, with possible religious conflict affecting everything from historic European denominations (already happening in Anglicanism) to geopolitics. In a post-modern world, religion returns to center stage, and Jenkins has already turned on the spotlight. This is a must-read for all futurists--including the armchair variety such as myself. After reading Jenkins' seemingly airtight (even understated) analysis, it is difficult to give credence to any author suggesting the passing of Christianity. For every empty cathedral in Europe, there is a burgeoning congregation in Africa or Latin America. In fact, the western, modern version of Christianity may be be all but swept away in the next 50-100 years, but the primitive variety is reemerging at an incredible pace. Not many works from Oxford University Press read like thrillers. This is an exception.
Rating: 
Summary: Hope for the Faith
Review: In recent years, many have decried the decline of Christian religion. By this what they most often intended to communicate is that worship attendance and church membership rolls have decreased in Europe and the United States. Moreover, public morality today, as exemplified by public figures, is not what it was decades ago. For many that change is also tied to a perceived loss in the Church's power, population and prestige. Into this morass of self-pity, too often expressed by uninspired and uninspiring Christians in the developed world, Professor Jenkins infuses the hopeful truth. The simple fact is that Christianity is expanding, rather than contracting. However, most of the growth is in the global South, rather than in the developed world. Professor Jenkins explores how this growth of Christianity among the world's poor, disenfranchised and forgotten might change the expressions and forms of religion in coming years, while maintaining the heart of the historical faith. He draws the obvious parallels between the growth of Christianity today and the growth of Christianity in the earliest days of the Church among the world's outsiders. Professor Jenkins' book strikes a glorious note of hope. Individual sanctuaries may close, but the faith will continue. Religion may find new forms of expression, but faith in Jesus Christ will go on. If you are concerned about the current crisis that the Church in the developed world has created for itself, then read Professor Jenkins' work, and see that there is yet hope. God continues to act in our world. The faith continues to grow.
Rating:
Summary: Prepares you for a new world
Review: In this fascinating book, professor Philip Jenkins proclaims that there is coming, within this 21st century, a new Christendom. The first chapter looks at the Christian Church of the past, and shows that the popular conception of a Christian West surrounded by a purely non-Christian world is fallacious; that Christianity took root in other parts of the world than Europe, and survived there all the way to the present. After that, the book looks at the spread of Christianity in the so-called "Third World," the same parts of the globe that are experiencing the fastest population growth. Having (to my satisfaction, anyway) shown that soon many times more Christians will be living in other parts of the globe than Europe *and* North America combined, the author then goes on to suggest that this new phenomenon will potentially change the very face of Christianity. Prepare to see a new Christianity, one as different from the modern, Western Church as the Medieval Church was from the Church of the Roman Empire. I must say that this is one of the most fascinating books that I have read in a long time! The author punctures many comfortable ideas about the Church, and prepares the reader for the coming of a new world, a world that will not look like the one we have now. If you are interested in Christianity, or even just in trends that are bound to affect the world you live in, then you must get this book!
Rating:
Summary: Christianity is not European
Review: Jenkins tell us plainly: the Next Christendom is not ethnically White, not culturally European or American, and not in decline. Global Christianity is Southern. It is experiencing vicious persecution, often at the hands of Muslims and often in the shadows of the media. It lives in cities, it welcomes the supernatural, it feeds the starving and heals the sick, it holds dear to traditional family values and clings closely and literally to the Scriptures. All these facts, Jenkins contends, hold significant consequences for the Church in the North and for the peace security of the world. Christians, it seems, should heed his warning that global Christianity is dramatically different from the stereotypes that still reside in university classrooms, and even in churches, in Europe and North America. Jenkins also seems to be saying that Christians should be encouraged by the creative vigour with which the gospel is being inculturated around the world, and draw inspiration from the fact that as far as the experts can see, faith in Jesus Christ will inspire billions of adherents to live out their faith.
Rating:
Summary: Spengeler was right!
Review: Jenkins' book projects a variant of the "population explosion" argument with a positive twist: Christians are the population that is exploding, all over the Third World. As the nominal Christians of the West and Russia fail to have enough live births to maintain, yet alone increase present population levels, the poor of the Earth are finding the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and they take to it, Jenkins argues, because their lives - with hard labor, hunger, poverty, and death as much a reality under opressive regeimes - is much like the New Testament world of the early Church.
And what kind of Church will it be? Jenkins thinks that your run of the mill, secularized, Christmas-and-Easter churchgoing Episcopalean or cafeteria Catholic will be shocked to find their coreligionists, even within their denominations, believing in and practicing a kind of primative, liturgical, Catholicism-(pre-Vatican II)cum-pentecostalism. This is the world that Spengeler foresaw: he called the first, Catholic millenium of Church history the Age of Peter; the Reformation to his time the Age of Paul; the next millenium, the Age of John, of ecstatic, primitive, mystic faith, a resurgence of Eastern, "Magian" civilization following the Suicide of the West (as he titled his book).
Conflict with Islam may bring on a "clash of civilizations," as Huntington and others have predicted, but the protagonist will be Southern Christendom, coalescing around the twin heartlands of Africa and Latin America, and not the West, as has been imagined. This makes intuitive sense, because be they saints, martyrs or suicide bombers, some will dare to die for their faith, but who will die for consumerism, secularism, or the morgasbord of causes that drive what passes for intellectual and cultural thought in our society? Even the Communists (really the greatest of heretics, according to Igor Scharevich) had a transending vision that could motivate a Felix Derzinsky to choose death in its' support.
Where the book loses me is in the optimistic population projections, carried out, it would seem, on some kind of least-squares baseline, with steady rates of growth to the mid-century. As Buchannan did ("Death of the West"), Jenkins assumes that the present trend is the future trend. At some point, diminishing returns will kick in, if for no other reason that because, to name an example, Yemen is short of water today: to become the 10th most populous nation on Earth by 2050, with over 90 million souls, they will need water, which they do not have and are unlikely to find. AIDS, famine, and war will further erode the projected out-year gains, as will continuing migration to the west, for as long as that lasts. War, in the age of WMD, is another limiting factor. Not that I do not wish for Jenkins' prediction to come true: I would rather share the planet with fellow Christians of any race that with the alternative.
A final word: It is heartening to se the Churches of the East get their due. Ethiopia, predicted to be a leading Christian nation of the next half-century, has been Christian officially since 341, 10 generations before Clovis. With the late Halie Selessie claiming descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and their continuous Christan tradition dating back to the fourth century, they, not France, have the best claim to being called "the Eldest Daughter of the Church"(along with Armenia, Christian since ca. 304).
A Christmas bit of good news, well worth the read, and a more positive vision of the future than Rapsail's "Camp of the Saints" or Buchannan give us.
-Lloyd A. Conway
Rating:
Summary: A (perhaps unintended) endictment of "northern" Christianity
Review: Jenkins's *The New Christendom* is an incredibly thought-provoking estimate of the new faces Christianity will wear in the next half century. Given that population and religious enthusiasm is waning in the northern hemisphere, and just the opposite is going on in the southern one, Jenkins predicts that Christianity's center of gravity will migrate to Africa and Central and South America in the immediate decades ahead. This will result in the emergence of new symbols, new styles of worship, new metaphors, and new ethical sensibilities, all of which mean that Christianity will no longer be dominated by an Eurocentric history and ethos. Because southern Christianity will become increasingly pentecostal, evengelical, and politically and morally conservative, northern sensibilities, which already tend to take the Christian message with an urbane grain of salt, are likely to dismiss Christianity even more. It will be dismissed as "jungle religion," (p. 169) contrary to both enlightened and postmodern ways of viewing the world. Thus the north will find pseudo-legitimation for its steady move toward secularism in religious revival of the south. In defending this thesis, Jenkins indirectly raises serious concerns about the spiritual health of North American and European Christianity. If his predictions are in any way true--and they certainly have the ring of plausibility--then it follows that mainstream institutional Christianity, Catholic and Protestant alike, needs to reflect seriously on both its style and convictions. If it's become so indifferent to its own message that it finds enthusiastic support of that message distasteful, things have reached a sorry state. In predicting the rise of a "southern" Christendom, then, Jenkins has done more than suggested a demographic migration. He's also implicitly invited "northern" Christians to take a hard look at themselves and their beliefs, and ultimately to cut bait or fish. Jenkins is a good writer with a fluid and lively style. The first four chapters, in which he makes the statistical and demographic case for his predictions, are nonetheless rather slow-going. Readers with no head (or patience) for statistical tables might wish to read the first two chapters and then skip immediately to Chapter 5.
Rating:
Summary: An important statement, though somewhat dry
Review: Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University, amasses an impressive set of statistics in support of his thesis that Christianity is growing explosively in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. According to Jenkins, "Christianity is flourishing wonderfully among the poor and persecuted, while it atrophies among the rich and secure." By 2050, he estimates, only one Christian in five will be a non-Latino white. Jenkins shows that these new Third World Christians are more traditional, morally conservative, evangelical, and apocalyptic. He speculates that religion succeeds best when it takes seriously the New Testament's profound pessimism about the secular world. While his arguments seem generally persuasive, the statistics and abundant factual descriptions may cause many readers' eyes to glaze over.
Rating:
Summary: Christianity relocates head offices
Review: Philip Jenkins collates data and trends from a number of sources into a cohesive argument about the future of Christianity's shifting its "head offices" from Europe to Africa and Latin America. Jenkins points out for at least the first 1000 years of its history, Christianity was a Mediterranean movement headquartered and entrenched in the Middle and Near East, North Africa, and the Italian and Greek peninsulas. That as recently as 1915 there were, still, some 400,000 Christians in Turkey, the former head office of eastern Orthodoxy, before a pogrom virtually wiped or drove them out. He describes the far-reaching influence of the Syriac, Nestorian, and Coptic Christians, and how these strands were subjected to outbreaks of attacks from Muslim majorities. As a cultural phenomenon, Jenkins insists Christianity tends to inculturate itself wherever it goes, notably pagan Europe where pagan, high holy days were adopted as Christian holy days, including Easter and Christmas. As he develops this theme, Jenkins observes parallels with the inculturation which the Roman Catholic Church encouraged in Latin America and which now unfolds in Africa. Sometimes it becomes a syncretism, but Jenkins finds that the Christianity of the global South tends to have more in common with ancient Christianity than with the bloodless, soul-less (faithless?) variety practiced by European and North American liberal Protestants. He further traces the impact of Pentecostalism as a world influence even pushing the Roman Catholic Church to adopt certain of its characteristics in some mission fields. Jenkins picks up the thread of Christian-Muslim conflict as it is unfolding in Africa and Asia in both Muslim and Christian majority countries: Islamic states replete with Sharia law versus self-proclaimed Christian countries tending toward a Christendom recreated. Overall, the author gives the lie to the secularist, anti-supernaturalist, global North who would ignore or misrepresent the ongoing global influence of supernaturalist Christianity. He notes that what has been described as "American exceptionalism," with respect to the durability and growth of organized Christianity in the United States, is mainstream when considered globally. According to Jenkins, "European (and Japanese) exceptionalism," exemplified in its thoroughgoing secularization, is closer to the current situation. Far from fading away, in Philip Jenkins's account, Christianity is still a global force to be reckoned with. What Jenkins doesn't address adequately is the extent to which the Christian world view has been removed from public discourse and the cultural mainstream in the United States. While certain churches are full to overflowing and are multiplying congregations, Christianity's cultural, intellectual, and discursive power, where it exists, tends to be confined to a ghettoized influence among practicing Christians, albeit a "ghetto" that claims a significant share of the American populace. The question he could have raised and addressed might go: While Christianity claims an increasing number of Americans, why does its cultural, intellectual, and discursive influence wane or, at least, remain static? Jenkins's book presents a challenge to Christian political theorists as to how Christian-majority countries emerging in the global South can learn the lessons of both pre-Enlightenment, western Christendom and post-Enlightenment, western secularization. That is, how should Christian-majority countries arrange their polities and treat religious minorities? Jenkins's account brings a parallel challenge to proponents of constitutional democracy: Will newly emerging, Christian-majority countries want to adopt the conventions and principles of constitutional democracies whose regimes insist on driving religion to the margins of public life?
Rating:
Summary: Catholics and Pentecostals
Review: Regarding the reviewer who claims Jenkins' book is about the growth of "primitive Christianity and Pentecostalism," readers should be aware that "The Next Christendom" spends the bulk of its pages describing the growth of Catholicism. One wonders why a reviewer would fail to mention it. Jenkins' main thrust is that conservative and orthodox Christian faiths are growing faster in the Southern Hemisphere than they are declining in the North.
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