My mother was a war bride who came to Canada from Holland right after the second world war and was married to my Dad, just after she got here early in 1947. She may not have been a war bride in official terms like others married overseas during the war, but our government had made special provision to facilitate soldiers' fiancees to come to Canada to be married right after the war ended. She left a country that in many respects was considered "Christian".During the war there were Christian services started at Fellowship Houses and many families in Holland opened up their homes also for fellowship meetings for the allied soldiers who were liberating the country from Nazi Germany. My grandparents had such a home and it's where my Dad, a Canadian soldier, met the family and went for worship times and fellowship after meeting my Mom earlier at one of the Fellowship Houses. There was a family history in the Christian Reformed Church and also in the "The Brethren", similar to the Plymouth Brethren in America.
In the country, there was a strong historical influence of the reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin and later theologians like Dr. Abraham Kuyper and then in the war years Christian heroes arose like Corrie Ten Boom and Anne Frank.
Since then the country and the culture has changed and I can't even say that of the relatives in my generation that are still there that to my knowledge any even claim to be Christian. Marriage isn't even what it was and in many cases isn't even practiced anymore. Today, the Netherlands, like much of Western Europe is spiritually just a cold, empty shell now, compared to what it was in previous generations.
I can say with some confidence that our family, that is now in North America, is still predominantly Christian. Things have been changing in our country though, in recent years. A case in point is, in the province of Quebec, which was solidly Roman Catholic and today, is pretty much agnostic. I talked to a church planter who went there with the Southern Baptist Convention and he told me that he pretty much has to start teaching the very basics about faith and Christianity like you would in pagan societies in the third world.
Justin Taylor from "Between Two Worlds" has recently posted an interview and a review of the latest book by Mark Noll, entitled, "The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith". Noll raised a lot of eyebrows when he went from Wheaton College to Notre Dame, and I certainly can't say I concur with all of his views but he is one of the most respected historians of evangelicalism today and brings out some interesting facts on the demographics of Christianity in the world.
This leaves me with a definite tension concerning our faith and the impact of the different cultures of the world. Some scholars often cite the passage from Galatians 3 and especially verse 28, "There is neither Jew nor Greek", and relate it to calling for exclusively "one people of God". I definitely believe that in that specific context concerning the "law" and faith and salvation that we are one in Christ. I also believe that there is a context where God works in countries and cultures in various and diverse ways to bring about his sovereign will and plan, both in the ages past, now and in the future. We are to be engaged in that too, carrying out the "great commission", striving to reach every tongue, tribe and nation!
I would like to share an observation that impressed us when my wife and I were in South Korea last summer. We noticed a real vibrancy, enthusiasm and growth of the church there and it is worth noting that the largest church in the world, is Yoido Full Gospel Church, a protestant church on Yeouido Island in Seoul, with about 830,000 members. Also, everywhere you look where people live and do business you see lighted crosses of different colours; on apartment buildings, on top of commercial buildings and on conventional church buildings. These all mark out Christian churches.
In a country where more than a third of the population is Christian, the South Korean churches send out almost as many missionaries as the US churches, to Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Latin America, Africa, Middle East and Oceania. We thank God for the early Presbyterian missionaries back in the mid to late 19th century that reached Korea with the gospel!
This is the review of Mark Noll's book by Justin Taylor:
The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith:
It is as if the globe had been turned upside down and sideways. A few short decades ago, Christian believers were concentrated in the global north and west, but now a rapidly swelling majority lives in the global south and east. As [a Christian] Rip Van Winkle wiped a half-century of sleep from his eyes [after awaking this past week] and tried to locate his fellow Christian believers, he would find them in surprising places, expressing their faith in surprising ways, under surprising conditions, with surprising relationships to culture and politics, and raising surprising theological questions that would not have seemed possible when he fell asleep. [pp. 19-20]
Noll observes that "the Christian church has experienced a larger geographical redistribution in the last fifty years than in any comparable period in its history, with the exception of the very earliest years of church history. . . . More than half of all Christian adherents in the whole history of the church have been alive in the last one hundred years. Close to half of Christian believers who have ever lived are alive right now" [p. 21]. To give some teeth to these "mind-blowing realities," here are a few of the examples Noll gives, showing the magnitude of these recent changes:
•This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called "Christian Europe." Yet in 1970 there were no legally functioning churches in all of China; only in 1971 did the communist regime allow for one Protestant and one Roman Catholic Church to hold public worship services, and this was mostly a concession to visiting Europeans and African students from Tanzania and Zambia.
•This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined--and the number of Anglicans in church in Nigeria was several times the number in those other African countries.
•This past Sunday more Presbyterians were at church in Ghana than in Scotland, and more were in congregations of the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa than in the United States.
•This past Sunday the churches with the largest attendance in England and France had mostly black congregations. About half of the churchgoers in London were African or African-Caribbean. Today, the largest Christian congregation in Europe is in Kiev, and it is pastored by a Nigerian of Pentecostal background.
•This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia. [pp. 20-21]
Also read the interview with Mark Noll HERE
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