The Transformation of Christianity: an interpretation of the 20 th Century

An Inaugural Professorial Lecture

Catrin Finch Centre, Glyndŵr University, 11 Jan 2011

William K Kay
Professor of Theology
Glyndŵr University
Wrexham LL11 2AW
 2

We can explore the transformation of Christianity in the 20th century by examining the
church in the year 1900 and then again 100 years later. By making this comparison we can
see the extent to which Christianity has been transformed, and also the extent to which it
has remained unchanged.

We will try to divide up the forces which brought change into those which are external to
Christianity, those which are internal to it, and those which are both.

In order to make this comparison we begin with a sketch of Christianity in its general
outlines. It exists in three major forms: Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. Although
there are varieties within Roman Catholicism including, for instance, the Eastern rite
Catholics, the standard expression of Catholic Christianity, especially in 1900, was
remarkably uniform all over the world, and this was one of its attractions. The Orthodox
Church divided from Roman Catholicism in 1054 and had organised itself upon largely
national lines such that there were Syrian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox and
other forms of Orthodoxy but they shared a similar liturgy and spirituality. They differed
from Catholicism in their refusal to acknowledge papal authority and in some aspects of
their theology of the Trinity in that they believed the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father
alone rather than from the Father and Son together. And then Protestantism, formed in the
16th century, as a reforming and breakaway movement from Roman Catholicism has itself
become theologically and organisationally diverse. If we divide Protestantism up into its
own groups we can then form three more: Anglican, old Protestant (i.e. Congregational,
Baptist, Presbyterian) and Independent (including classical Pentecostal and neo-
Pentecostal). Such an analysis leaves what are sometimes called ‘marginal Christians’ (e.g.
Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses) out of the analysis.

So how did Christianity look in the year 1900? In table that follows I have decided to take
the figures from a single source rather than from multiple sources where the basis of
calculation may vary. The Atlas of Global Christianity is up to date and includes figures on
Chinese Christianity absent from earlier statistical texts on the subject.

Table 1: demographic comparisons

 Population 1910 2010
World Population 1759 6960
Christian population of world1 612 (34.7%) 2292 (33.2%)
     
European population2 427 730
Christian population of Europe 403 (94.3%) 585 (80.1%)
     
Europe as % of world population 24.2 10.5
Figures taken from Todd M Johnson & Kenneth R Ross (2009), Atlas of Global Christianity, Edinburgh,
Edinburgh University Press

1
Marginal Christians included in these figures. They amount to 35m or 1.5% of the total Christian
population.
2
Europe changes its boundaries and definition in this period.
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There are four things I want to draw your attention from this table. First, the enormous
increase in the world population over the last century. It has gone up nearly four times.
Second, the Christian population of the world has also increased by almost a factor of four,
thus keeping pace with the world population. Third, although the population of Europe has
increased, this is partly because the definition of Europe has been adjusted so as to match
the expanded European Union. Even so what we see is a fall in the European population
relative to the world population. Having been nearly a quarter of the whole population in
1910, Europe comprises barely 10% of the world population in 2010. Fourth, we note that
the Christian population of Europe has declined markedly – by some 14%, which tells us that
the increase in the Christian population must have occurred elsewhere. We can
immediately come to a preliminary conclusion: namely, that European Christianity as
representative of global Christianity has diminished in importance.

What was Christianity like in 1910? Clearly it had a strong European component. The main
blocks were Roman Catholic (amounting to 47.6% of all Christians), Orthodox (amounting to
20.4%) and Protestant (amounting to 18.8%, or 24.2% if Anglicans are added in). Thus the
three main blocks comprise: one big group of Roman Catholics amounting to nearly half the
total and two others of roughly similar size, Orthodox and Protestant. 3

All of the three main groups of Christianity were likely to be liturgical. If you walked into a
Roman Catholic service in 1900, the mass would have been held in Latin and theoretically
would have been exactly the same wherever in the world you attended. The priests would
have been white, well-educated, and, if Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors was observed, resolutely
opposed to modernism. If you had walked into an Orthodox service you again would have
heard a sung liturgy (in Slavonic) and have seen icons and candles and priests with incense
but, in order to enter an Orthodox congregation, you would probably have had to have been
in Russia or one of the Balkan states or Constantinople (not named Istanbul till 1930). If you
had visited a Protestant service there would have been greater variety. Anglican services in
Britain would have been largely liturgical, though in Cranmer’s English prose and laced with
readings from the King James Bible, and some might have been very similar to those that
took place in a Catholic setting. Only in a narrow sector would there have been low church
meetings with minimal vestments and extensive biblical preaching - unless you had travelled
to the United States where the tradition of fervent preaching had been maintained since the
days of Methodism’s first expansion.

All the ministers would have been male and the vast majority of the population in Europe
would have ensured that their children were baptised, married in a church and buried by a
church.4 The connection between European monarchies and their churches would have
been strong in Scandinavian countries, in Germany, in Britain and everywhere apart from
republican France. In Protestant countries the monarch would in many cases have been the
temporal head of the national church.

Also you would have discovered Sunday was observed as a day of rest throughout Europe.
Shops would have closed, factory workers would have been at home and families would

3
Atlas, p 71.
4
For instance, 65% of live births were baptized in the Church of England in 1902, but this figure had
dropped to 27% by 1993. See S Bruce (1995), Religion in Modern Britain, Oxford, OUP, p 59.
 4

have been together. Without cars or public transport, the day would have been quiet and
the churches would have endorsed this.5

While nearly all kinds of service would have been conducted by ordained priests making use
of a prayer book, there would have been occasional extempore Christian meetings in the
Protestant tradition. The American revivalist, D L Moody and Ira Sankey, had preached in
public halls in Britain in 1872-5 and the Salvation Army, in its distinctive uniforms, would
regularly have taken Christianity out onto the streets. Moreover in their services there
would have been evidence of female preaching. Anyone who has read the novels of George
Eliot remembers Dinah Morris, the Methodist preacher in Adam Bede. In the Salvation Army
– which has Methodist roots - men and women were ordained together. William Booth
believed that the Bible itself justified female evangelists. On the first Easter morning Mary
Magdalene and her companions had taken the news of the risen Christ to the apostles and,
as far as Booth was concerned, women could be preachers thereafter.

Revival preaching was infrequent but, in 1904-05, revival broke out in Wales. The main
preacher associated with these events was the young Evan Roberts accompanied by two
women supporting him by prayer and singing. The revival began in west Wales, spread along
the south coast and then northwards along the north coast towards Bangor, following
Roberts's itinerary. It lasted approximately a year and during this time about 100,000 people
are said to have committed or recommitted their lives to Christ. There was a social impact in
that crime figures all over the Principality dropped. The meetings themselves were informal,
lengthy and spontaneous in that any member of the congregation, including women or
children, might suddenly lead the rest in prayer or start with the singing of a hymn. Roberts
himself convened the meetings and presided over them but did not function as a normal
ordained minister – in fact he wasn't ordained.

As has been shown by subsequent historians, the revival in Wales has a direct connection
with a revival that took place in 1906 in the city of Los Angeles on the west coast of the
United States. The Azusa Street revival was led by a black man whose parents have been
born into slavery and then freed. WJ Seymour had Methodist connections although the
congregation that he led in Los Angeles was only loosely affiliated to any formal religious
grouping. When the revival there broke out, it followed many features of the revival in
Wales. The meetings were free flowing: there was much prayer and extempore singing but
also the mixing of races within the gatherings. Given that a high degree of racism in early
20th century American society was normative, these meetings broke the social mould.
There was biblical preaching (much more than there had been in Wales) and this
emphasised the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in prophecy, speaking in tongues,
miracles and healings.

The revival in Los Angeles continued intermittently until about 1912. Its effects were spread
far and wide by the circulation of its newspaper, The Apostolic Faith, that was sent out free
and by the fact that many of the people who attended the revival were missionaries or
ministers who saw the events there as a biblically promised outpouring of the Holy Spirit for
the renewal of the church. St Peter quoted the prophet Joel on the original day of
Pentecost, the day sometimes called the birthday of the church:
5
Only after 1994 were shops in England and Wales allowed to trade almost without restriction.
 5

And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon
all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall
see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: And on my servants and on my
handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy

In Azusa Street they believed they were living in the last days when the spiritual outpouring
was being divinely reasserted. What had happened long ago and far away was being
brought near, and the pages of the Bible were coming true again. And so ministers
introduced Pentecostalism to their congregations and missionaries travelled abroad taking
the Azusa Street or Pentecostal message with them.

But in terms of the global church, the Azusa Street revival appeared to be a mere footnote.
The larger churches could write it off as a burst of emotional excess among the uneducated
urban poor who did not know any better. But, as we know, and as Pentecostals like to point
out, Christianity began in a stable in an obscure part of the Roman Empire.

The best insight into the mind of evangelical Protestants at the start of the 20th century is
given by the proceedings of the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910. 6 This
was an exceptionally well-organised event that brought together 1215 delegates from the
larger missionary societies. There were 491 from North America and 509 from Britain and a
number of Germans as well although, because proceedings were in English, Anglophone
representation was predominant. The conference had been meticulously prepared for by
assembling eight commissions which submitted papers before the proceedings began. The
commissions dealt with (I) carrying the gospel to the world (II) the native church and its
workers (III) education in relation to the Christianisation of national life (IV) the missionary
message in relation to non-Christian religions (V) the preparation of missionaries (VI) the
home base for missions (VII) relation of missions to governments (VIII) cooperation and
promotion of unity. The Archbishop of Canterbury opened the conference and the
contributors included bishops from Japan and India, and Chinese and Korean Christians.

Although the delegates recognised Christianity might appear different in the different
continents of the world, there was an underlying assumption that mission should proceed
from the Christian West to the non-Christian East. There was a belief among a number of
those present that Christianity should be seen as the fulfilment and completion of other
religious cultures (like Hinduism) and also a plea for the abandonment of denominational
rivalry between Christian groups. Cheng Jingyi called for a united Church in China because
‘denominationalism has never interested the Chinese mind’. Japanese speakers demanded
greater autonomy for their own churches and in this way Christianity was also seen as a
force by which nationalism, or putting a better gloss on the word, ‘national self-respect’,
might be enhanced. Moreover Christian mission went hand-in-hand with education since
indigenous church leaders required teaching and training. Schools were built, and many still
survive.

6
See Brian Stanley (2009), The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910, Grand Rapids, MI,
Eeerdmans.
 6

The intention of the conference was to plan strategically for the expansion of Protestant
Christianity across the world. It is therefore ironical that the conference reports, despite
their rationality and careful formulation, failed to foresee the most determinative events.
The conference failed to foresee the increasing flow of the Pentecostal movement and the
impact of the two world wars. What it did do, however, was to establish a Continuation
Committee that is directly connected with the formation of the World Council of Churches
which is the institutional expression of the Ecumenical Movement.

During this decade Catholic mission also received fresh impetus when, in 1919, Benedict XV
issued the apostolic letter, Maximum Illiud, and stimulated extensive educational and
humanitarian effort, especially in Africa.7

In the late summer of 1914, war began in central Europe. Nobody appears to have foreseen
the intensity, extent or duration of the conflict. Europe had been at peace since the Crimean
War of 1859 and before this since Waterloo in 1815. The giddy over-optimism of British
public opinion and the abysmal failure of the British military command to understand the
changing nature of war resulted in disastrous casualties. They did not foresee the impact of
machine guns, barbed wire entanglements, or the lack of any need for battalions of cavalry.
We know now only too well how young men in every town and village in Britain cheerfully
signed up for a war that would be ‘over by Christmas’. We know from the long lists of names
on the war memorials in every town and village how wrong they were.

In each European country the church fostered heroism and self-sacrifice. We may now find
sickening the pictures of clergy dressed in vestments sprinkling holy water over machine
guns. The Orthodox Church, from the Russian side, participated as enthusiastically as both
Protestants and Roman Catholics. The Kaiser was supreme bishop of the Prussian
Evangelical Church and gave his religious sanction to the slaughter that followed. 8 We could
argue that the churches supported a moral cause in the defence of Belgium or other small
countries caught up in the conflict but, equally, the clergy were culpable in functioning as
recruiting sergeants for events they did not understand.

The horrors of the war were such as to inflict psychological damage on those who saw their
friends mowed down. All the young men from whole villages or factories would join up
together and fight and side by side in the same regiments. For the purposes of this lecture
we can note that the war, which was a force external to Christianity, had five effects:

1. The moral authority of Christianity was enormously diminished by its nationalistic

support for the fighting and killing. This is seen in the literature of the post-war
period which is irreligious, cynical and sometimes hedonistic. We may think of T S
Eliot’s Wasteland, or P G Wodehouse’s fripperies or H G Wells and Virginia Woolf. It
is also seen in questions asked in Britain’s imperial possessions by incipient
politicians on behalf of those who had been caught up in fighting that was not of
their own making.

7
D MacCulloch (2009), A History of Christianity London, Allen Lane, p 933.
8
MacCullogh, p 916.
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2. The habit of churchgoing was disrupted by war. Although there were chaplains
and church parades most of the young soldiers who fought and survived did not go
to church for several years. When they came home, it was hard to resume
churchgoing that, in any case, seemed less meaningful in the cold light of the post
war era.

3. The political authority of Christianity was diminished. Germany of course was

defeated and became a republic and the position of its church near the centres of
power was removed. Yet, given that the protagonists on both sides of the war had
maintained what were said to be Christian regimes, we can note that by 1918 three
of them (Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian) had been removed from the map.

4. In defeat Germany lost its colonies and therefore its missionary work in Africa and
elsewhere.

5. Holy Mother Russia became Soviet Russia, the first state to be governed by
militant atheists. There was a brief phase in the 1920s when, in order to garner
international support, the communists appeared to allow religious freedom. Once
they felt secure, Stalin’s henchmen set about attacking all forms of religion and all
religious institutions. The Orthodox immediately felt the impact of this persecution
and others - Baptists, Pentecostals, eastern rite Catholics - were also imprisoned and
derided. As we shall see, Orthodoxy was the one big block of Christians that shrank
in real terms over the course of the 20th century.

When the guns fell silent a new landscape was revealed. In Europe the map of nation states
had been adjusted. The churches remained in place but the intellectual elites challenged
them. Communism in what became Soviet Russia sent ripples through left-wing agencies
elsewhere in Europe. Fascism, which emerged most fully after Hitler's electoral victory in
1933, also established itself in Italy and Spain. The church continued its liturgical services
and turned its attention to ameliorate the plight of the poor through mildly left-wing
solutions. Mission was now more difficult both because Western money has been devalued
– this was certainly the case with sterling – and because of stirrings of nationalism in what
had been traditionally colonial spheres.

There were attempts to modify the Anglican Prayer Book in Britain in the late 1920s but in
the light of the high numbers of unemployed in the 1930s, the threats of Oswald Mosley's
black shirts and the siren song of communistic fellow travellers, the Anglican church’s mind
seemed preoccupied with the wrong things. 9 Meanwhile, the revivalistic stream of
Christianity had become more widely dispersed and better established in the period after
the Welsh and Azusa street revivals. In Britain at least one of the Pentecostal groupings was
filled with men who had taken a pacifist stance in 1914-18. 10 Pentecostalism was
unconcerned with big social questions: its focus was upon evangelism and the preaching of
the gospel and the building up in local congregations. This was the period in Britain when
George Jeffreys conducted his revival and divine healing crusades and filled the Royal Albert

9
See Adrian Hastings (1986), A History of English Christianity: 1920-85, London, Collins, for an account of
Anglicanism in the 1930s.
10
British Assemblies of God.
 8

Hall on successive Easter Mondays. 11 Those who went abroad like William Burton, an
Englishman who had reached the Congo in 1915, was well on the way to founding many
hundred congregations in the south of the country while Douglas Scott, his compatriot, was
planting around 400 churches in France. Lawrence Livesey from Lancashire was active in
southern India.

They were by no means alone. The one time Baptist, Lewi Pethrus, built large a Pentecostal
congregation in Sweden. Karl Fix formed Pentecostal congregations in Germany while T B
Barratt continued preaching and pastoring in Oslo. 12 In Russia, by contrast, believers who
survived imprisonment in labour camps met secretly for fear of the KGB.

In the United States, separated by an ocean from the war zone, revivalistic Pentecostal
Christianity had emerged from a period of disorganised energy into denominational
structures that were able to benefit from America's growing economic fortunes. It is true
that the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the great depression affected the poor and in the
case of the preachers we will shortly consider, helped to mould their theology. While the
episcopal and mainstream churches just maintained their numbers, the Pentecostal and
charismatic groupings were able to grow in North America's thriving religious culture. And
mission followed. American missionaries travelled through Mexico and down to South
America. They also crossed to the Philippines and worked in Hong Kong and Singapore.
American immigrants from European countries now returned, as Pentecostal Christians, to
the lands of their forefathers. Some went back to Russia and others to Italy. Given their
belief about the end times, Pentecostal Christians had a theological explanation for the
catastrophes which had befallen European civilisation: these were the birth pangs of a new
age.

The 1939-45 war brought further suffering to Europe. From the perspective of this lecture,
we are interested again in the impact of the war upon the churches. Archbishop William
Temple acknowledged pacifism as a legitimate Christian witness. From the Vatican, Pope
Pius XII always considered communism to be a greater threat than fascism and tried to
resolve the threats to his flock by concordats with Hitler. Church attendance was again
disrupted though this time there were civilian deaths through bombing and the destruction
of property (43,000 civilians in England were killed by the Luftwaffe by 1941). In Belgium
and the Netherlands Nazi rule was imposed upon the population. In Soviet Russia the
situation was dire although, paradoxically, it eased for the Orthodox Church in 1943 when
Stalin sought to enlist the aid of his patriarch in the building of national morale. 13 While life
may have eased for the Orthodox, it got worse for every other religious group. In Britain and
elsewhere in Europe normal church activity was hampered. Sunday school was curtailed,
evening services were hit by the blackout and the kind of big meetings that Jeffreys had
been able to organise in the 1930s became impossible.

We can say that the global conflict had three effects upon the churches in Europe:

11
R Landau (1935), God is My Adventure, London, Ivor Nicholson and Watson Ltd.
12
B. Rö ckle and W. K Kay (2003), Born in difficult times: the founding of the Volksmission and the work of
Karl Fix, Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, 23, 72-101.
13
See Jeremy Morris (2007), The Church in the Modern Age, London, Tauris, for a good chapter on the 20th
century Orthodoxy.
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1. That was further damage to the rhythm of church life but, on the other side, the
enormous humanitarian work of the Vatican and other Christian groups during the war and
in the post-war period was respected and appreciated. Moreover when the stance taken by
the Confessing Church in Germany, which had resisted Hitler's attempt to pervert
Christianity, Barth’s neo-conservative theology was saluted. And when the Confessing
Church theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was seen to have paid for his resistance to the Nazis
with his life, he was recognised as a martyr.

2. The need for churches to work together fostered ecumenical relations so that it was no
coincidence that the first meeting of the World Council of Churches took place in
Amsterdam in 1948, a year after European and American Pentecostals had gathered in
Zurich.

3. In England in 1944 Education Act insisted on the teaching of Christianity within all
maintained schools as an antidote to fascist and Nazi values. There are certainly some who
saw Christianity as being aligned with democracy in the sense that both underscored human
equality: in the former case equality before God, and in the latter case equality before the
law. More pointedly, as Lord Teviot said in the House of Lords in August 1943,

Let us think what has happened in the world. The nations who have struck down
religion have become the curse of the world. They have brought great tragedy upon
us. (Hansard, volume 128, line 1054).

There was a slight resurgence of Christian life in Europe. Billy Graham first came over to the
UK in 1947 and returned regularly thereafter. Over 65,000 people filled the White City
Stadium (where the 1948 Olympics had been held) in 1954.

The 1950s were a period of stability and rebuilding. The churches had become more humble
but aware, like everyone, of the dangers of nuclear annihilation. I've heard a tape of George
Jeffreys preaching in the 1950s in the Royal Albert Hall and specifically drawing attention to
the possibility of nuclear catastrophe. The Campaign for Nuclear disarmament was led by an
Anglican clergyman, John Collins.14 Against this background church attendance and Sunday
school attendance began to build up again.

In the United States religious broadcasting began to innovate. Many of the Pentecostal
evangelists produce their own radio programmes and, in a revival of the old-time religion,
Oral Roberts, a gifted Pentecostal evangelist who grew up in poverty, began to take his huge
tent described as a ‘canvas cathedral’ around the wide open spaces of the United States and
preach to large crowds and pray for those who are ill. By the end of the decade he was able
to film his services and broadcast them on syndicated televised schedules. The fervour and
joy of divine healing meetings became visible in the living rooms of those who would never
otherwise have a crossed the threshold of Roberts’ tent. Moreover, in a subtle shift of
message he and others, like T L Osborn who had also grown up in poverty, adapted his
preaching to align with the American dream of wealth and success. God forgive your sins
and give you material prosperity: Christianity was not about the austerities of self-denial but
about the abundance of blessing.
14
Beginning in 1958.
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The 1960s are generally agreed to be the crucial decade for social change. 15 By 1963, all
those born in the post-war era knew that, unlike their fathers and grandfathers, they would
not have to put on uniform to go and fight. First the conformists Frank Sinatra and Elvis
Presley (both of whom served in the US Army) and then the non-conformist Beatles and
Rolling Stones began their meteoric tours across the world to rabid enthusiasm among the
young. The contraceptive pill was available by 1969 and recreational drugs began to
circulate at the same time. Young people had money in their pockets and a generation
which valued self-expression above duty and sacrifice made its voice heard. There were riots
against the Vietnam War in 1968 on the university campuses of Berkeley and Paris and
variously in Britain: Tariq Ali led a demo in Oxford while students occupied the campus of
Essex University. More insidiously, Christian ideals which, according to some analysts had
only been maintained by godly women, were now jettisoned. Church attendance figures
began to tumble and the moral stance of the churches was ignored.

In this decade of change when capital punishment was abolished in Britain and abortion was
legalised, the charismatic movement also began. This may be seen as having its roots in the
preparatory work of men like Oral Roberts but its most arresting manifestations occurred
when an Episcopal priest, Father Dennis Bennett, in a congregation on the West Coast
United States in 1960 began to speak in tongues and talk of a renewed experience of the
Holy Spirit within his congregation. This was rapidly followed by a similar outpouring of the
Spirit among Catholic lay academics at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania in 1967. The
movement dispersed across the denominational spectrum and around the world. It brought
about large inter-denominational gatherings as traditional labels were set aside in common
acts of worship. It renewed parishes and individuals; it led to new styles of worship and new
musical expressions. It led to new theological formulations that paid far greater attention to
the role of the Holy Spirit as the gift of Christ to the church. This was something that
happened within Christianity and was not, like the wars or social change, forced it from
outside.

Not surprisingly, and as another dimension of the charismatic movement, the Second
Vatican Council, with over 2,200 in attendance, began in 1962 with an invocation to the Holy
Spirit. But John XXIII, seen as a caretaker figure, and elected while an old man, decided to
call a formal council to reconsider the life and mission of the church. Much to the
annoyance of the highly conservative Curia he ensured that the hundreds bishops who
assembled in Rome should draw up the agenda for the Council. There was certainly one
Pentecostal observer present at the conference, David du Plessis who later became an
important voice in church unity, and the Council proceeded to issue two landmark
documents, Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes, which defined the nature of the church
and of its mission and also changed the liturgy into language of its peoples. Latin as the
standard was removed and, with this, ordinary people where for the first time able to speak
their mother tongue in the responses.

Thus the 1960s saw a breaking down of moral and intellectual barriers. The old deference
and the old hierarchies were abandoned and young people asserted themselves and made
15
H McLeod, The crisis of Christianity in the West: entering a post-Christian era, in H McLeod (ed) (2006),
Christianity: world Christianities, Cambridge, CUP. See also A Marwick (1998), The Sixties, Oxford, OUP.
 11

their demands and so set the tone and fashion for much of public life. Counterbalancing this
external effect was the unexpected diffusion of religious experience all over the world
bringing with it was a new joy and excitement in church life.

By the 1970s the charismatic movement was showing signs of change. The renewals within
parishes and congregations had continued but, as more thoughtful analysts realised,
renewal could only be received a finite number of times. After renewal, was there another
stage? Those who said ‘yes’ to this question looked for restoration, by which they meant a
structural change to the church and a reconfiguration of its organisational patterns. The
radical charismatics who had been in Baptist, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Brethren, Salvation
Army, Episcopal, Methodist and other churches began to consider it necessary to pull out of
their denominations onto what they saw as a large common ground. There was much
preaching about the kingdom of God and, when the dust settled, a series of new Christian
groupings had emerged. These were first called the ‘new churches’ and sometimes thought
of as neo-Pentecostal or neo-charismatic or ‘Third Wave’ though the designation that they
gave themselves was often ‘apostolic’.16

These churches saw themselves as being organised on quite different lines from historic
denominations. Instead of being clustered in parishes over which were bishops and
archbishops or, alternatively, in congregations over which were Presbyteries, they saw
themselves as under apostolic leaders. There was no intermediary between the leaders of
the congregation and their apostle, and their apostle was a mobile travelling figure who
might be anywhere in the world but whose ministerial gifting gave him (usually a man) an
insight into the needs of specific congregations in their own state of development.

There emerged apostolic leaders who, in secular terms, might be thought of as management
consultants, constructed networks of churches that were bound together by personal
relations both with each other and with their apostle. The networks were keen to stress that
they avoided constitutions and bylaws and that their decision-making processes had no
committees. Rather they saw themselves as being directed by the Holy Spirit through
charismatic gifts in combination with the oversight of a tried and tested apostle.

By the late 1970s a large number of networks had been set up. 17 Some of these involved
churches that retained their denominational identities so that congregations now had more
than one identity and some ministers belonged to more than one network. The network was
flexible, and could form and re-form into mega-networks or mini-networks as groups of
churches joined or left. The structure was appropriate to the age of the internet, and many
of these churches were made up of young people who communicated through electronic
media. In a sense the church adapted to the new social conditions of the 1990s. No longer
were they layered in the social strata that corresponded to the social strata of a particular
society. Instead they were less bounded and freer in their capacity to function and respond
to human need.

At the same time as the apostolic networks were being constructed, megachurches began to
appear on the scene. These churches comprising over 1,000 people in each congregation,
16
C Peter Wagner (1998), The New Apostolic Churches, Ventura, CA, Regal.
17
William K Kay (2007), Apostolic Networks in Britain, Carlisle, Paternoster.
 12

and sometimes many thousands of people, brought a completely new dynamic to

Christianity. The megachurches were vast concentrations of resource and life. For Christian
belonging to megachurch there was an entire set of social and spiritual activities available:
groups for children, young people, holiday groups, educational resources, broadcasting
possibilities, sporting teams, humanitarian and rehabilitation activities. All these could be
brought together under the single administrative structure of the mega-church pastor or
apostle. As far apart as Brazil and Singapore or South African and Sweden, the megachurch
came into existence complete with its website, multi-purpose building, specialist staff and,
often, broadcasting capability.

As megachurches and networks were emerging, Christianity became permeable to popular

culture. The old demands for holiness and withdrawal were replaced by new commands for
cultural mission. Churches ran highly sophisticated technical operations with musical
directors, worship teams and other support staff. The visitor to their services and might be
forgiven for thinking that the event resembled a pop or rock concert more than a
conventional service. This impression was reinforced by the fact that many of the
megachurches used theatre style architecture. Preachers could hold the attention of
congregations for an hour at a time and, in Asia especially, their communication techniques
were either copied from or influenced the business world. Seminars and conferences
contained motivational elements that might have been found in commercial settings. This is
not to say that the new churches ignore their Bibles. Far from it. Some form of expository
preaching was almost always to be found and, as a result, congregations could draw
parallels between events in their own lives and events in the lives of biblical characters. How
better to face adversity than to see how King David or the apostle Paul had faced the
challenges of their own days? How better to put one's own pains in proportion than to look
again at the suffering of Christ? How better to understand that dead-end situations might be
transformed than by looking at the miracles of Christ? So the biblical text with its multiple
narratives functioned as a common backdrop to the way people thought about their lives.
As Christians in the early Roman Empire saw Jesus rather than Caesar as King, so Christians
in hostile regimes could always look beyond the authority of their bullying governments to
the reign of Christ.

And this leads us, finally, to consider what Christianity looks like at the start of the 21st
century. Here we can point to the statistics for an overview.
 13

Table 2: demographic comparisons

 Population 1910 2010
World Population 1759 6960
Christian population of world18 612 (34.7%) 2292 (33.2%)
     
Roman Catholic (% of Christian pop) 291 (47.6%) 1155 (50.4%)
Orthodox (% of Christian pop) 124 (20.4%) 274 (12%)
 Protestant (% of Christian pop)  115 (18.8%)  419 (18.3%)

Renewalists (=Pent + charismatics) 1 (0.2%) 614 (26.8%)

Figures taken from Todd M Johnson & Kenneth R Ross (2009), Atlas of Global Christianity,
Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, p 71.

The figures show three things. First, it is evident that Roman Catholicism has held its own
both in the Christian world and against the growth of the world population. Second, the
Orthodox Church has declined, and this must at least be partly attributed to its long night
under Communist rule. Pentecostal and charismatic Christians might also argue that
Orthodoxy has been less willing than any other Christian group to adapt to the message of
renewal found in the Pentecostal and charismatic movements (except perhaps in Ethiopia
where Orthodox and Pentecostals shared the same prison cells during Mengistu’s rule). And
third, while Protestantism as a whole has also kept pace with the world population, the
really staggering figure represents Renewalists who are to be understood as those whose
churches and lives have been influenced by the renewed emphasis on the work of the Holy
Spirit. Renewalists might be members of Roman Catholic or Protestant churches or in
separate groups founded in either in the first phase of excitement after Azusa Street or in
the post-charismatic era from the 1970s onwards.

When we look at the geographical distributional of Christianity we discover that its centre
has shifted south and east. Europe has diminished importance and, when I go to Asia, I find
churches and seminaries as almost as good as anything we can offer in the West. Yes,
Christianity has been transformed and 20th century from being a white, liturgical and largely
cerebral faith into one that is Asian or African and which rejoices in human emotion and
religious experience.

Thus we see that, though external circumstances have changed Christianity across the
globe, there are also internal experiential forces, like the experience of the Spirit, which
have been yet more radical.

18
Marginal Christians included in these figures. They amount to 35m or 1.5% of the total Christian
population.