If you thought that last week’s item, “Is Christianity Failing? If so, Why?,” was aimed at the whole world, please forgive. The researcher who submitted the item is himself South Asia and he still resides there today. We believe the ultimate aim of his request, “Is Christianity Failing,” was to discover why it’s possible that Christianity seems to be declining in parts of the Western world. His goal in researching this question was to do whatever possible to avert any similar failure in the Global South, where Christianity is indeed growing quite rapidly. Christianity might not be the fastest growing world religion worldwide, (that honor goes to Islam, because of biological growth, primarily), but it is likely the fastest growing world religion when considering solely conversion growth (and ignoring biological growth). These statistics are available broadly and have appeared in Perspectives courses now (Lesson 9) for two decades or more. So we applaud this gentleman’s search for truth and we look forward to any additional substantive theories about the decline of Christianity in the West. See the original item and the multiple accompanying comments at…
https://brigada.org/2017/09/10_21185
So, to summarize, the original submitter of the request was anything but ethnocentric or prideful about the West. He doesn’t even live there. He’s just trying to learn from the past — so he can help us all avoid repeating it. If that helps spur on additional comments, please add to the thread at the original location. Thanks.
Thanks for the clarification, though I’m not sure it was an issue of all the commenters misunderstanding the original post. For my part anyway I got that the original researcher was not from the west and that this was specifically considering the decline of western Christianity (for instance I stated “it’s perfectly reasonable to have concern over the state of Christianity in the west and to take into consideration the sobering decline in the U.S. and Europe.” My critique was not to say that I thought the post or the original researcher didn’t know or understand the reality of worldwide Christian growth, but that to present the question and the information in this way only played into the dangerous mindset so prevalent in the western church. I’m sure you all are aware of the global statistics, but many others may not be. Words matter and if we continue to have discussions about Christianity (without clarifying it with phrases such as “western Christianity”) and then refer only to the west (making the assumption that we all know what we’re talking about), eventually we or at least many onlookers may forget the original distinction and evolve to the point of understanding them to be one and the same. So to not clarify in the first paragraph or even in the title that we are asking the question of “Is Western Christianity Failing?” but rather to say as it was written “Christians around the world have made a huge contribution for good. So why is it that their numbers seem to be decreasing?” may only confirm or further a faulty perspective among casual readers. I got what was actually being said and I assumed, despite wording used, the originators knew what they were saying, however others, for example another commenter advocating that we “build that wall”, may have heard it a different way.
Furthermore, I think several of the comments were actually very relevant in that they addressed, at least in part, the “Why?” part of the question. The issue of a superiority complex in the western church may indeed be a contributor to it’s decline and part of the solution may very well be to quite looking at ourselves so much and open our eyes to the growing church around the world. Like I said “They are growing while we are shrinking so it might reason that we’d have something to learn from them” and another commenter mentioned “When we get jealous of what God is doing in the Third World, perhaps we will humble ourselves and leave our self-confidence behind.”
All that to say, I don’t know that the original post was “largely misunderstood” but maybe some of our comments were. So I guess I might have some work to do in the area of clarity as well :)
Thanks Joshua. I am the one who raised that question and one of the main reason I discovered is EVIL forces virtually taken over the western churches and that is why they sold out many of main line Cathedrals and Churches. Even though main line churches declined there were many new Independent churches are growing slowly in the Western countries. Now I just want to think about of our Lord YESHUVA and church history that, when our LORD can sustain so many churches & building new churches other parts of the world as you and others told, can’t our God provide funds for these western churches and is our GOD IS POOR. I will inform you in detail after completing my work. Thanks also for planing to do something on this area.