global church

Books

The First Thousand Years

A Global History of Christianity

By Robert Louis Wilken

Unfolding the map

Jan 24, 2013 by Philip Jenkins

Robert Wilken's historical survey of Christianity is impressive, accessible and lively. It also leaves out a lot.

Books

The World’s Christians

Who They Are, Where They Are,
and How They Got There

By Douglas Jacobsen

The World’s Christians, by Douglas Jacobsen

Jun 14, 2012 reviewed by William R. Burrows

The term world Christianity has been widely used since the publication of Philip Jenkins’s 2002 best seller The Next Christendom, but in popular usage it has tended to refer only to Christianity in the Global South. Though courses on world Christianity have proliferated, no one until Douglas Jacobsen has taken the care to delineate the contours of the entire global movement.

Features

A global identity

Can United Methodism restructure itself?

Mar 28, 2012 by Robert J. Harman

Is the United Methodist Church an American denomination with extensions overseas? Or is it a worldwide communion?

Books

Global Pentecostalism and Charismatic Healing

edited by Candy Gunther Brown

Constructing China’s Jerusalem

Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou

by Nanlai Cao

Word Made Global

Stories of African Christianity in New York City

by Mark R. Gornik

Clouds of Witnesses

Christian Voices from Africa and Asia

by Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom

Christianities in Asia

edited by Peter C. Phan

American Religion

Contemporary Trends

by Mark Chaves

Founding the Fathers

Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America

by Eliza­beth A. Clark

The Furnace of Affliction

Prisons and Religion in Ante­bellum America

by Jennifer Graber

Heaven in the American Imagination

by Gary Scott Smith

America’s Church

The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation’s Capital

by Thomas A. Tweed

World Christianity & American religion

Take & read

Oct 07, 2011 selected by Philip Jenkins and Grant Wacker

An annotated list of top new titles.

Books

Being Reformed

Jan 26, 2000 reviewed by Douglas Ottati

The Reformed Family Worldwide: A Survey of Reformed Churches, Theological Schools, and International Organizations, edited by Jean-Jacques Bauswein and Lukas Visher
Toward the Future of Reformed Theology: Tasks, Topics, and Traditions, edited by David Willis and Michael Welker

In the World

A globe-crossing consecration

Feb 03, 2011 by Steve Thorngate

I've said before that celebrating communion via Twitter (to make "a statement that we're prepared to embrace the technological revolution") seems like an especially poor use of technology. But Lisa Nichols Hickman brings up a techno-sacramental innovation that's at least somewhat more compelling.

Notes from the Global Church

Who’s counting China?

Phenomenal growth in the number of Christians

Aug 03, 2010 by Philip Jenkins

I was perilously close to becoming an agnostic—at least about certain statistics. Specifically, I really didn’t know the data on Christians in China, and for a while I was not sure if anyone did. Only now, perhaps, do we have the glimmerings of an answer to one of the most pressing questions in global religion: just how many Chinese Christians are there?

News

Reformed communion urged to leave Geneva

Christianity "has moved dramatically to the Global South"
Jul 27, 2010
A global Protestant body should move its headquarters out of Geneva to cuts costs and to follow the global shift of Christianity to the Southern Hemisphere, says a U.S. Reformed church leader.
Notes from the Global Church

Religion by the numbers

Demography drives change
Jul 13, 2010 by Philip Jenkins
Demography drives religious change. That bald comment is too obvious to be worth making, but it’s surprising how little attention demographic factors receive in most histories of religion, particularly of Christianity. That neglect means we miss a very large part of the story.
Notes from the Global Church

Born again again

When Christians and missionaries meet
Mar 23, 2010 by Philip Jenkins
In the 19th century, European and North American missionaries spanned the world, bringing the light of the gospel into what they thought were the dark corners of heathendom. In many regions, though, the natives did not react as the newcomers expected.