Rah Next Evangelicalism

Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity
1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8308-7803-1
Verlag: InterVarsity Press LLC
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 228 Seiten

- 2010 Golden Canon Leadership Book Award winner The future is now. Philip Jenkins has chronicled how the next Christendom has shifted away from the Western church toward the global South and East. Likewise, changing demographics mean that North American society will accelerate its diversity in terms of race, ethnicity and culture. But evangelicalism has long been held captive by its predominantly white cultural identity and history.In this book professor and pastor Soong-Chan Rah calls the North American church to escape its captivity to Western cultural trappings and to embrace a new evangelicalism that is diverse and multiethnic. Rah brings keen analysis to the limitations of American Christianity and shows how captivity to Western individualism and materialism has played itself out in megachurches and emergent churches alike. Many white churches are in crisis and ill-equipped to minister to new cultural realities, but immigrant, ethnic and multiethnic churches are succeeding and flourishing.This prophetic report casts a vision for a dynamic evangelicalism that fully embodies the cultural realities of the twenty-first century. Spiritual renewal is happening within the North American church, from corners and margins not always noticed by those in the center. Come, discover the vitality of the next evangelicalism.

Soong-Chan Rah (ThD, Duke Divinity School) is Milton B. Engebretson Professor of Church Growth and Evangelism at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois. He and his family live in Chicago. His books include The Next Evangelicalism and Prophetic Lament.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rah, Soong-Chan

Leseproben

Introduction

At the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street in Boston sits an awe-inspiring building. The gray stone front and ornate stained glass are reminiscent of the glory years of a bygone era of the American church. It is the type of church building associated with the rich tradition of a church in New England. The first time I walked up to that corner, I couldn’t help but be intimidated by what must be an impressive history for that church building. But when I turned the corner, I realized that the church building is literally a façade. Two of the outer walls of the church remain, but the actual church building behind the walls has been demolished and a luxury high-rise condo now inhabits the former sanctuary space. There is the external appearance of an historical church, but in reality that church is long since dead.

Throughout many cities in North America, there are numerous church structures that may have an impressive history but now host a very small group of worshipers on a Sunday morning. In Cambridge, there is a massive church building that dominates a central, busy intersection. In recent years, on a typical winter Sunday, that church will meet in a back room rather than in the main sanctuary. The church cannot afford the heat to meet in the thousand-plus person sanctuary. Nor would it be appropriate for a dozen or so elderly white women to meet in a thousand-plus person sanctuary. Within a half-mile radius of that church, there are close to fifty churches (most of them immigrant, ethnic minority or multiethnic churches) that are crammed into much smaller spaces. Right down the street from that large empty sanctuary are over five hundred worshipers from five different congregations meeting in a small, cramped space—the host congregation of about forty worshipers, a multiethnic congregation (with the largest group being Asian American college students), a Haitian congregation, a Cape Verdean congregation and a Friday-night gathering of Chinese international students. The contrast between the large near-empty church building at the busy intersection and the crowded smaller church building down the street illustrates the reality of twenty-first-century American Christianity—the white churches are in decline while the immigrant, ethnic and multiethnic churches are flourishing. As Dave Olson points out in The American Church in Crisis, “The church in America is not booming. It is in crisis. . . . As the American population continues to grow, the church falls further and further behind. . . . Almost all of the data indicates that the church is fated to decline in influence every year in the near future.”[1]

As many lament the decline of Christianity in the United States in the early stages of the twenty-first century, very few have recognized that American Christianity may actually be growing, but in unexpected and surprising ways.[2] The American church needs to face the inevitable and prepare for the next stage of her history—we are looking at a nonwhite majority, multiethnic American Christianity in the immediate future. Unfortunately, despite these drastic demographic changes, American evangelicalism remains enamored with an ecclesiology and a value system that reflect a dated and increasingly irrelevant cultural captivity and are disconnected from both a global and a local reality.

A Booming Global Christianity

One of the most significant developments in the new millennium is the dramatic shift away from a northern and western hemisphere-centered Christianity to a southern and eastern hemisphere-centered Christianity. As Philip Jenkins asserts in The Next Christendom: “Over the past century [the twentieth century] . . . the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. . . . Christianity should enjoy a worldwide boom in the new century, but the vast majority of believers will be neither white nor European, nor Euro-American.”[3]

Parallel to the undeniable reality of the changing demographics of global Christianity is the reality of Western Christianity’s inability to grasp the implication of such dramatic changes. As Jenkins reveals, “Perhaps the most remarkable point about these potential conflicts is that the trends pointing toward them have registered so little on the consciousness of even well-informed Northern observers. What, after all, do most Americans know about the distribution of Christians worldwide? I suspect that most see Christianity very much as it was a century ago—a predominantly European and North American faith.”[4]

Fifty years ago, if you were asked to describe a typical Christian in the world, you could confidently assert that person to be an upper middle-class, white male, living in an affluent and comfortable Midwest suburb. If you were to ask the same question today, that answer would more likely be a young Nigerian mother on the outskirts of Lagos, a university student in Seoul, South Korea, or a teenage boy in Mexico City. European and North American Christianity continue to decline, while African, Asian and Latin-American Christianity continue to increase dramatically. In the year 1900, Europe and North America comprised 82 percent of the world’s Christian population. In 2005, Europe and North America comprised 39 percent of the world’s Christian population with African, Asian and Latin American Christians making up 60 percent of the world’s Christian population. By 2050, African, Asian and Latin American Christians will constitute 71 percent of the world’s Christian population.[5] These numbers do not account for the fact that a majority of Christians in North America will be nonwhite. Global Christianity is clearly nonwhite. Thankfully, there is a growing recognition and an increasing awareness of these global changes. More literature is now available exploring global Christianity and its impact on missiology and theology.[6] But understanding the dramatic changes in Africa, Asia and Latin America is only a part of the equation.

These changes are not only occurring globally, they are also occurring locally. Many sociologists predict that by the year 2050, the majority of U.S. residents will be nonwhite.[7] A U.S. Census Report in 2008 revealed that “minorities, now roughly one-third of the U.S. population, are expected to become the majority in 2042, with the nation projected to be 54 percent minority in 2050. By 2023, minorities will comprise more than half of all children.”[8] The election of Barack Obama as the United States’ first ethnic-minority president reveals the changing face of America. The public face of America is no longer a white male. Meanwhile, the trend of a nonwhite majority America will hit the churches faster than it will hit the general population. This trend is due in large part to the sustaining of American Christianity by newly arrived immigrants who bring their Christian faith with them. As sociologist R. Stephen Warner points out, “What many people have not heard . . . and need to hear is that the great majority of the newcomers are Christians. . . . This means that the new immigrants represent not the de-Christianization of American society but the de-Europeanization of American Christianity.”[9] Contrary to popular opinion, the church is not dying in America; it is alive and well, but it is alive and well among the immigrant and ethnic minority communities and not among the majority white churches in the United States.

Shaped by Evangelicalism

My own story in coming to write this book is a result of my ongoing journey as a fellow pilgrim with other North American evangelicals. I was born in Seoul, South Korea—a nation bursting with spiritual renewal and church growth. It is a nation rapidly emerging as one of the epicenters for global evangelicalism. My family immigrated to the United States when I was six years old and encountered numerous difficulties as an immigrant family. There was the drop in social status and the economic struggles that almost all immigrant families face. I remember the shame of being on food stamps and the indignity of being laughed at by classmates because I was on the free school lunch program. For a significant portion of my childhood, we lived in a rough inner-city neighborhood in Baltimore. The neighborhood comprised poor whites, poor blacks and recent Korean immigrants. Racial misunderstanding and incidents were commonplace.

Coupled with (and maybe as a result of) the trauma of immigration were the numerous struggles and tensions within my family. The main source of stress came from my father’s abandonment of our family when I was in elementary school. Now saddled with the responsibility of caring for four children in a foreign land, my mom’s limited English curtailed her employment options. She ended up working two different jobs at the same time: a cook in an inner-city carryout during the day and a night shift nurse’s aide in a senior citizens’ home. She would work twenty hours a day, six days a week. My father’s departure from our family meant that I lost both father and mother in one shot. In the midst of all these difficulties, it was an authentic Christian community that provided support and served as a lifesaver to our family. It was the church that gave our family stability and direction. It was an evangelical faith that transformed me from bitterness and defeat to an unwavering hope. I shudder to think who I would be without my evangelical faith.

I am a product of American...