Archive: Who Will Evangelize the World in 2000 A.D.?

Church Historian Gerald H. Anderson says the effects of mainline’s decline will be more far-reaching than we realize.

The following is a condensation of an address given by Dr. Gerald H. Anderson at the 1990 Convocation on World Mission and Evangelism in Louisville, Kentucky.

We are in the twilight of the 20th century, on a countdown toward the year 2000. As Christians who are concerned about world mission we need to think and pray about some of the factors and forces, opportunities and obstacles, that face us in the Christian mission as we move toward the millennium.

The scope of missionary concern is the whole church with the whole Gospel for the whole person in the whole world. From the latest statistics available on the status of global mission (prepared by David B. Barrett for the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, January 1990), we learn that the percentage of Christians in the world population has actually decreased slightly, from 34 percent in 1900 to 33 percent in 1990. At the same time the percentage of world population that has been evangelized (meaning those who have heard the Gospel and had an opportunity to respond) has increased from 51 percent in 1900 to 77 percent in 1990. Barrett reports that the total of Christians in the world has grown from 558 million in 1900 to 1.7 billion in 1990.

Yet there are far more non-Christians in the world today than on the day when Jesus was crucified. In Jesus’ time the total population of the world was approximately 170 million (including 33 million in the Roman empire). So we can say there were about one-sixth billion non-Christians at that time. Today, in a total world population of 5.2 billion, two out of three persons—or 3.5 billion—are non-Christian.[1]

That is 20 times as many non-Christians as when Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount—and all this despite the heroic missionary effort of the church for nearly 2,000 years. These numbers have to raise our concern and renew our commitment to the unfinished task of world evangelization as we look to AD. 2000.

The Church’s Shift to The Third World

Another important factor in world mission today is that the center of ecclesiastical gravity in the world is shifting from the northern to the southern hemisphere. The noted Swiss Catholic missiologist, Walbert Bühlmann, in his book The Coming of the Third Church, points out that whereas at the beginning of this century 85 percent of all Christians lived in the West, there has been a shift in the church’s center of gravity so that by the year 2000 about 58 percent of all Christians and about 70 percent of all Catholics will be living in the Third World.

It is estimated that by A.D. 2000 the majority of Protestant missionaries in the world will be Third-World persons sent by Third-World mission agencies.[2]

This may be the single most important development or trend in the missionary enterprise at the turn-of-the-century. It symbolizes the vitality of the churches in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. This does not mean, of course, that there is no longer a need or opportunity for Western missionaries to serve overseas.

In fact there are more Protestant missionaries from the United States serving overseas today than ever before in history—approximately 40,000 (not including 30,700 short-termers). Of this number only nine percent come from all the churches in the National Council of Churches (including 416 from the United Methodist Church[3]—down from 1,580 in 1960 when the Methodist board was the largest mission agency in the United States). What this means is that while the unfinished task of world evangelization is larger than ever before, the mainline denominations, such as United Methodists, are no longer able or willing to provide the resources proportionately for this task as they did in earlier times. The primary responsibility for world evangelization today is being undertaken by Roman Catholics and evangelicals in the West, together with churches in the Third World. It is no mere coincidence that these also happen to be the churches that are growing both in the West and overseas.

Mainline’s Decline

The decline of American mainline denominations is well-known and well documented. The mainline churches have become a minority religious movement on the American religious scene and are now more aptly described as oldline, sideline, or end-of-the-line churches.

The United Methodist Church has lost two million members since 1968. That is an average of 90,000 members per year or 245 members every day. Someone has calculated that if the decline continues at the current rate, by the year 2045 there will be only two Methodists left in the United States—one will be a bishop and the other will be the general secretary of the only official mission sending agency. All this in a country with 100 million unchurched people.

How do we account for what has happened? Many factors have contributed to the decline, but at the root of it all is a theological problem. Time magazine, in an article on the decline of the mainline churches, said, “Not only are the traditional denominations failing to get their message across; they are increasingly unsure just what that message is.”[4]  James H. Burtness, an American Lutheran theologian, has observed that “the single most striking fact in the life of mainline U.S. churches over the last 20 years is the rapid erosion of concern about whether people believe in Jesus. The point,” he said, “is not that people no longer believe in Jesus. It is rather that those who do believe seem to care much less than they did 20 years ago about whether those who do not believe come to the place where they do. And this lack of care is no simple thoughtlessness. It is an energetic rejection of such care.”[5]

Another Lutheran theologian, Carl E. Braaten, has pointed to the theological problem in the seminaries: “Probably the major divinity schools are already into the abyss. They have gone over the line. They are probably irretrievable. Maybe that is too much of a generalization. But it is definitely true at the University of Chicago. There is a divinity school there, but it does not teach theology. It teaches about theology, but it does not teach theology. It teaches about everybody else’s theology, about systematic theology, about historical theology, but it does not teach theology. It is not a professing theology. The ‘Here I Stand,’ the apologetic statement of the truth, in which the professor is so involved that his own theology is on the line in class after class, is absent. … So we have to take responsibility for the truth of theology. Theology really has to find a different kind of model than the academic model.”[6]

Drifting Toward Radical Relativism

Let me turn now to the most serious source of our problem. It is the drift toward radical relativism in our theology of religions. This will be the theological issue in mission as we move toward A.D. 2000.

Voices of radical relativism abound today. One example is The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, a volume of essays edited by John Hick and Paul Knitter (Orbis Books, 1987). The authors of The Myth volume propose a shift in Christian belief of such magnitude that they describe it as “the crossing of a theological Rubicon.” Basically, they are proposing that Christians should abandon any beliefs or claims about the uniqueness of Christ and Christianity, or about having any definitive revelation, and accept instead that there is a plurality of revelations and a parity of religions, wherein Christianity is just one among many religions through which people may be saved.

Commenting on this in an editorial in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, we stated that “the Christian world mission cannot afford to cross the theological Rubicon proposed by the authors of The Myth volume. Rather, we need to affirm a gain that unique ‘Rubicon-crossing’ event of 20 centuries ago: the redemptive entering of the Creator into human history in the Person of Jesus Christ. Without the uniqueness of that person and that event, there is no Gospel and no mission.”[7] The fundamental theological point is that either all people need Jesus Christ or none do! Otherwise, we have only a tribal deity.

In the two most recent official United Methodist statements on mission theology, we see the drift toward relativism. These statements are the 1986 statement from the General Board of Global Ministries titled “Partnership in God’s Mission: A Theology of Mission Statement,” and the 1988 statement of the General Conference titled “Grace Upon Grace: God’s Mission and Ours.” Nowhere in either of these statements does it suggest that everyone needs Jesus Christ for salvation. Both statements claim to be based on the biblical witness and our Wesleyan tradition, but neither statement mentions that “there is salvation in no one else” (Acts 4:12) or Jesus’ statement, “No one comes to the Father but through me” (John 14:6).

These statements stand in sharp contrast to earlier statements, such as the Council of Bishops’ statement in 1960, “Christ and Our Mission,” that said, “The world mission of the Church is … to claim God as Father of the world and Jesus Christ as the universal Savior. … We must come again to him … whose kingdom is to grow more and more until every knee shall bend and every tongue confess that he is Lord.”

In ecumenical scholarship it is generally recognized that Christ is present and active among non-Christians, but the crucial question is whether Christ is present in non-Christian religions as such, and whether they may thereby be considered ways of salvation. It is one thing to recognize that Christ is present in other faiths; it is quite something else to say that this provides salvific efficacy to other faiths and that people of other faiths may be saved in their religions, or even through their religions, without knowledge of or faith in Jesus Christ.

I believe there is a direct correlation between the spread of radical relativism in the theology of religions during the period 1970-1990, and the increase in those who have rejected the gospel they have heard. After all, if we do not believe that people need the Gospel for salvation, we should not be surprised if they believe us!

Here we have to issue a challenge to evangelicals. It must be acknowledged that, with few exceptions, evangelical scholars in recent years have not made significant contributions in the theology of religions.[8] The field is filled with theological landmines, so evangelicals have tended to rely on views from the past. “It is indisputable,” says Grant Wacker, “that evangelicals have not yet proved that they are able to hold their hand against the hot flame of sustained, disciplined study of world religions—and keep their evangelical convictions.”[9]

How Renewal Can Come

We are engaged today in nothing less than a struggle for the soul and survival of the United Methodist Church. It is essentially a struggle about the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the mission of the church. We are living off the spiritual reserves of past generations without adding to them. We are using up our spiritual capital inherited from the faith of our mothers and fathers. Our reserves are dwindling and unless the process is reversed, we are headed toward spiritual bankruptcy and ecclesial suicide.

This is what one (non-Methodist) mission scholar has described as “the Protestant predicament,” namely, the institutional process of a “church’s upward mobility and consequent loss of vitality,” from “charismatic community to fully structured institution.” The signs of such institutionalism, he says, “are self-sufficiency, authoritarianism, narcissism, self-justification, and dogmatism.” The results are “unbalanced priorities, community entropy, institutional defensiveness, and congenital paternalism.”[10] This same scholar suggests that, if our churches are to find renewal, “it is of the utmost urgency that we look back to our ecclesial roots, seeking to understand the dynamics of the grassroots movements whence many of our churches came.”

There is a problem, however. As a student of church history, I find that rarely, if ever, does renewal come from the ecclesial centers—the centers of power and authority in the church. Renewal comes from the ecclesial fringes—from small, peripheral, dissident, despised, innovative, untidy groups and movements in the church. Think about it. Where in church history can you find a movement for spiritual renewal that began in the center of the church’s power and authority structure? I can think of only one—Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. But even in the case of Pope John, he did not initiate the renewal; he simply allowed it or facilitated it with Vatican Council II.

The renewal was already “bubbling up” from the underside of the church—the worker priests in France, lay movements, individual scholars calling for renewed biblical studies, etc. So John XXIII did not cause the renewal, but he did not suppress it and instead allowed it to happen. And while the renewal set in motion by Vatican II has been embraced and affirmed at the roots and fringes of the church, it is increasingly being curtailed and controlled by the central authorities of the church.[11] The reason for this is that church authorities and bureaucrats—all rhetoric to the contrary—do not really welcome renewal, because renewal requires change. Therefore, renewal movements are seen as threatening by the institutional church and they are resisted.

This is why the decision of General Conference in 1984 to double the membership of the denomination to 20 million by 1992 was ludicrous, and also when the Council of Bishops resolved to show a net membership gain for the denomination in the United States of 50,000 in 1987 and 100,000 in 1988 (the actual net loss in those two years was about 160,000). These were resolutions for renewal without change; wanting growth while maintaining the status quo. Believe me, it will not happen this way.

Where will renewal come from—if it comes—in the United Methodist Church? From church history we know that renewal will not come from the centers of power and authority in the church. It will not come from the Council of Bishops or the General Conference or the general boards and agencies of the church. Renewal will come—if it is allowed to happen—from small, peripheral, dissident, despised, innovative, untidy groups and movements in the church. But if church authorities seek to curtail, control, and suppress these movements, renewal will not happen. Remember that the General Conference in 1984 which resolved to increase membership in the denomination by 10 million by 1992, is the same General Conference that took action to suppress the newly organized unofficial Mission Society for United Methodists. And note that membership in the denomination has not increased by one person since General Conference in 1984 (in fact, to tell the whole truth, membership in the denomination has not increased by one person since 1964).

The tragedy of this is that it should not be happening, and it need not happen. But the demise of Methodism will continue if there is no change that will allow renewal to happen. The attempted suppression of the unofficial Mission Society for United Methodists by the hierarchy of the church will go down in the history of American Methodism as the single greatest blunder of the church in the last half of the 20th century. It has all the signs of institutional “self-sufficiency, authoritarianism, narcissism, self-justification, and dogmatism,” that were discussed earlier.

It is said that United Methodism can have only one official mission sending agency because to have more than one would cause confusion and competition and would dissipate our resources and effort in mission. There is no evidence to support this view. In fact, all evidence is to the contrary. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States today has 376 approved mission-sending organizations and is a growing church.[12]

Furthermore, the Mission Society never asked to be recognized as an official agency of the church, but the bishops have nevertheless made every effort to suppress it as a voluntary agency. This is the sad state in which we find ourselves; we are organizational fundamentalists—more concerned with defending the organization than in getting on with the mission.

There are some signs of hope, however. Bishop Emerson Colaw, in his Denman Lecture at the 1990 Congress on Evangelism in Pittsburgh, stated that—in his judgment— “one example of misplaced energy in our denomination has been the furor over the Mission Society. The Council of Bishops and the Board of Global Ministries have exhibited all sorts of paranoia. In the North Central Jurisdiction, we were asked as a College of Bishops to make a commitment that we would not appoint anyone to the Mission Society. And I asked how we could make such a promise in advance, when all appointments are to be evaluated in light of the particular requirements and opportunities? My feeling was and is that if somebody wants to send missionaries and they want to go, and there are responsible churches or groups ready to receive them, then why not?”

Why not, indeed? Bishop Emerson Colaw has articulated what missiologists have recognized as the organizational key in the history of mission, namely, that “the voluntary principle is essential to world mission.”[13] The problem, as described by R. Pierce Beaver, is that “mission has become a plant root-bound in the ecclesiastical pots to which it is now confined—denominational and ecumenical structures. These organizations frown upon spontaneous action and establishment of direct relationships which they do not initiate or administer.”[14]

In the final analysis, the greatest challenge and threat to the Christian mission today and tomorrow, as it has always been, is not from any external force or power, ideology or authoritarian government. Rather, it is internal; the danger of diluted faith and faltering faithfulness, of dubious disciples and timid prophets. The world is in the midst of a revolution. We cannot take up our cross and relax. This is no time for a token-mission or a mini-mission. The church is called to mission, not sub-mission. We are the church of the Great Commission, not the great omission. There is no greater commission than the Great Commission.

Gerald H. Anderson, former Methodist missionary in the Philippines and president of Scarritt College, is editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research and director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center, New Haven, Connecticut. He was president of the American Society of Missiology (1973-75) and president of the International Association for Mission Stud

FOOTNOTES

[1] Statistics compiled from information in David B. Barrett, ed., World Christian Encyclopedia (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), Global Table 29, p. 796; Barrett, Cosmos, Chaos, and Gospel: A Chronology of World Evangelization from Creation to New Creation (Birmingham, Alabama: New Hope, 1987), Appendix 1, p. 96; Barrett, “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 1990,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 14, no. 1 (January 1990): 27.

[2] Statistics compiled from information in David B. Barrett, ed., World Christian Encyclopedia (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), Global Table 29, p. 796; Barrett, Cosmos, Chaos, and Gospel: A Chronology of World Evangelization from Creation to New Creation (Birmingham, Alabama: New Hope, 1987), Appendix 1, p. 96; Barrett, “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 1990,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 14, no. 1 (January 1990): 27.

[3] W. Dayton Roberts and John A. Siewert, eds., Mission Handbook: Canada/USA Protestant Ministries Overseas, 14th ed. (Monrovia, Calif.: MARC/World Vision International, 1989), p. 232. The 1989 General Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the United Methodist Church lists 473 persons (not including associates and interns) as “Missionaries of the United Methodist Church assigned by the World Division of the Board of Global Ministries,” pp. 1139-1141.

[4] Time, May 22, 1989, p. 94.

[5] “Does Anyone Out There Care Anymore Whether People Believe in Jesus?” Dialogue, Summer 1982.

[6] Reported by Paul T. Stallsworth, “The Story of an Encounter,” in American Apostasy: The Triumph of “Other” Gospels, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), p. 134.

[7] International Bulletin of Missionary Research 13, no. 2 (April 1989): 49.

[8] Some exceptions from evangelical scholars who are writing in this field are Clark H. Pinnock, “The Finality of Christ in a World of Religions,” in Christian Faith and Practice in the Modern World, eds. Mark A. Noll and David F. Wells (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1988), pp. 152-68; Colin Chapman, “The Challenge of Other Religions, ” in Proclaim Christ Until He Comes: Calling the Whole Church to Take the Whole Gospel to the Whole World, ed. J. D. Douglas (Minneapolis, Minn: World Wide Publications, 1989), pp. 179-83; Michael Nazir-Ali, Islam: A Christian Perspective (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983); Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden, eds., Sharing Jesus in the Two-Thirds World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983); and Phil Parshall, The Cross and the Crescent: Understanding the Muslim Mind and Heart (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1989).

[9] Grant Wacker, “Second Thoughts on the Great Commission: Liberal Protestants and Foreign Missions, 1890-1940,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880-1980, eds. Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990), p. 300.

[10] Guillermo Cook, “The Protestant Predicament: From Base Ecclesial Community to Established Church-A Brazilian Case Study,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 8, no. 3 (July 1984): 98.

[11] Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who heads the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has said that the era of Vatican II must be judged as a period “that was definitely unfavorable to the Catholic Church,” Newsweek, December 31, 1984, p. 63.

[12] This does not include 94 U.S. dioceses that send priests directly to overseas mission assignments, nor does it include Catholic Relief Services which has 900 Americans working overseas. Cf. Mission Handbook 1989-90 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Catholic Mission Association, 1989).

[13] R. Pierce Beaver, American Protestant Women in World Mission, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), p, 205.

[14] Ibid.