September, 2008:

Philip is a scholar of religion and colleague of mine at Penn State. He is also a national (NY Times) bestseller. This morning he emailed me a copy of his latest article from The Christian Century and gave me permission to reproduce it here.

notes from the GLOBAL CHURCH
Philip Jenkins.
The Christian Century.
Chicago: Sep 9, 2008. Vol. 125, Iss. 18; pg. 60, 1 pgs

Not long ago I was taking a cab from O’Hare Airport to downtown Chicago, and my friendly driver proved to be a Nigerian from the Yoruba people. As the traffic gave us lots of time to talk, I soon found that this man was a pastor of a Nigerian-based congregation about which I had written at some length, one of the so-called
Aladura churches. Indeed, he was the nephew of the church’s founding prophet, and whenever the prophet visited the U.S. he normally stayed
in his nephew’s apartment. The image startled me: drawing from the Old Testament, I had always imagined prophets laying their weary heads in caves or under trees, and not in a comfortable Chicago apartment. Yet another biblical stereotype bit the dust.

This encounter stirred other thoughts about the presence of churches from the global South in North America and Europe. For decades now, ministers and missionaries from Africa, Asia and Latin America have been active in the global North, and such churches are easy enough to find in most major cities: just look at the Yellow Pages. But these bodies have not registered much in popular consciousness. When local news media discover their existence, as they do every couple of years, they normally report the story as a curiosity, an ironic reversal of the once-familiar pattern of missionaries heading from the U.S. to Africa or China. And when media report in those terms, they miss one of the most important stories in the modern history of Christianity, namely the prolific emergence of new independent an prophetic churches and, no less important, their projection onto a global stage. (more…)