The world church today

From Edinburgh, south and east

In June 1910 delegates of the Protestant missionary societies met at Edinburgh in Scotland to consider how to work together for world mission, and from that conference the ecumenical movement grew Report of the World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh. The conference saw the world as divided between the West, where the gospel had taken root, and the non-Christian world to which it must be carried. Among the few delegates from Asia, Azariah (1874–1945), a young Anglican leader from India, thanked the missionaries for their sacrifice and pleaded that what the Indian church wanted from them was love and friendship. Two years later he became the first Indian bishop of the Anglican Communion. The movement for unity that grew from Edinburgh is in the Theology course's The ecumenical movement and the Second Vatican Council.

In the century that followed, the map changed greatly. The churches of Africa, Latin America and Asia grew, while in Europe more and more people left the church. The historian Philip Jenkins argued in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (2002) that the centre of world Christianity was already moving from Europe and North America to those three continents. In Africa churches founded by Africans themselves grew; in China, after the missionaries left in the years after 1949 and the church passed through long suffering, many researchers say believers increased greatly from the 1980s. Much of this growth came in the Pentecostal and charismatic churches of Latin America, Africa and Asia (see The Pentecostal and charismatic movements).

The persecuted church

Today, in many places, Christians are still imprisoned and killed for their faith. So it is for Christians in North Korea, and in Iraq and Syria ancient churches that go back to the apostles' days have dwindled through war and persecution. In February 2015 Egyptian and Ghanaian workers were beheaded in Libya for their faith; the Coptic Orthodox Church honours them as martyrs, and in 2023 the Catholic Church entered their names in the Roman Martyrology.

Remember those in prison as if you were bound with them, and those who are mistreated as if you were suffering with them.

Hebrews 13:3

Wesley says how we are to remember them: "In your prayers, and by your help" Wesley. And the reason, he adds, is that we are members one of another.

From every tribe and tongue

In the last century divided churches learned to meet one another. The World Council of Churches held its tenth assembly at Busan in 2013, and evangelicals gathered for the Third Lausanne Congress at Cape Town, South Africa, in October 2010. In The Cape Town Commitment the congress wove a confession of faith and a call to action into one strand of love, calling a church that loves God to love the world he made and its neighbours and to carry the whole gospel to the ends of the earth. In 2024 the Fourth Lausanne Congress met at Incheon.

The largest Christian family in the world is the Catholic Church, and beside it stand the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, the many Protestant churches and the Pentecostals. In Korea, too, there are the Catholic Church, the Anglicans who came from England in 1890, an Orthodox church begun by a Russian mission in 1900, and many Protestant churches. Today in Seoul migrant workers and students worship in their own languages, in London and Los Angeles there are churches of people from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and among them are the Korean churches founded by Koreans scattered across the world. John saw the church of the last day like this:

After this I looked and saw a multitude too large to count, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

Revelation 7:9-10

On their song Matthew Henry writes: "We see what is the work of heaven, and we ought to begin it now" Matthew Henry.

With the cloud of witnesses

This course began with the "great cloud of witnesses" of Hebrews (Hebrews 12:1). Since then we have gone from the first church in Jerusalem to today and met martyrs, monks, missionaries and reformers; we have also seen the church's sins against God and its neighbours, from the crusades and the stake to the slave ships and the bow before the shrines. The church's history has not gone on because the church did well. Jesus said, "on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18), and whenever the church seemed about to fall, he kept that promise by raising up people who repented.

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Hebrews 12:2

Wesley explains the author and perfecter of our faith as the one "Who begins it in us, carries it on, and perfects it" Wesley. Where those before us fell, we learn repentance; where they stood firm, we take courage. The Lord promised, "surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20), and Chrysostom says of this promise: "not with them only does He say that He will be, but with all who shall believe after them" Chrysostom. Now the race set out for us is ours to run. To walk the course again from the beginning, return to The first generation: from Jerusalem to Rome.

Practice