The Future of Christianity

by Alister E. McGrath

Alister McGrath woke me from my globalized stupor in Starbucks in Singapore with the question “Will the twenty-first century be better for Christians than the disastrous twentieth century was?” In less than 175 pages the author explores this question with surprising clarity and astonishing breadth.

Blackwell Publishing, P.O. Box 30, Willison, VT 05495, 2002, 175 pages, $18.95.

—Reviewed by Todd M. Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Mass., and co-founder of the Christian Futures Network

Alister McGrath woke me from my globalized stupor in Starbucks in Singapore with the question “Will the twenty-first century be better for Christians than the disastrous twentieth century was?” In less than 175 pages the author explores this question with surprising clarity and astonishing breadth.

McGrath begins his book with the Armenian genocide and ends it with an appeal for “organic theologians”—true activists in the community of faith. In between, not surprisingly, he surveys the future of Christianity from the point of view of a Western Christian academic, looking to history for clues to the future. This approach turns out to be the main strength of the book since he is uniquely articulate in weaving together philosophy, theology and history. The reader is taken through the failures of the Enlightenment in the twentieth century, Christianity’s relationship to it, then on to a series of observations about the decline of Christianity in Western Europe and its unexpected growth in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Jenkins has more detail). He observes the rise of postdenominationalism but critiques the McDonaldization of Christianity while surveying various models of doing church. He moves on to issues such as the threat of fundamentalism, the relationship between Christians and Muslims, and the future of ecumenism. Returning to mainline Christianity he offers tentative encouragement about the future of Roman Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Finally, he asks whether the traditional separation of theology from church life will continue into the future. His survey is extremely well-written and engaging.

But McGrath’s strength is also a weakness. Is the future of Christianity best discerned through a Western lens? Since the demographic weight of Christianity is now in the Southern Hemisphere, then would not its leaders have more enlightened views of the future? These alternate visions emerge as theological questions very different from those answered in Western history or those asked in Asia and Africa (Hwa Yung). The missiologically-minded Christian will take careful note of this.

Nothing is more anticipated in twenty-first century Christianity than the forms it will take among the hundreds of cultures that have been recently exposed to the gospel and those thousands yet to be contacted. In a cultural sense, Christianity one hundred years from now could be completely unrecognizable to Western Christians. For missio-logists like Andrew Walls this is a better future where one can anticipate clearly seeing the face of Jesus only when all peoples and cultures are present at the Christian roundtable.

Nonetheless, the future of Christianity will be global with strong ties to the twentieth century. McGrath does a fine job in setting out the context in which we view the future and the major issues we can anticipate. The author’s short answer to the question at the beginning of this review is “it certainly could be.”

Check these titles:
Hwa, Yung. 1997. Mangoes or Bananas? The Quest for an Authentic Asian Christian Theology. Oxford, England: Regnum.

Jenkins, Philip. 2001. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Walls, Andrew. 2001. The Cross-Cultural Purposes in History. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis.

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