Studies in World Christianity

Introduction from ‘Expect Great Things, Attempt Great Things’

World Christianity, the shift of the center of gravity of Christianity to the Two-Thirds World in the last half century, is a phenomenon that is increasingly coming to the attention and awareness of North Americans and Europeans. Christians in the West are surprisingly belated to realize this fact, and the secular media are even slower to grasp this reality. Nevertheless, in the last decade the scholarship on World Christianity has been steadily increasing. Despite this, there are still few scholars in this field beyond the usually-cited names of Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Dana Robert, Brian Stanley, Philip Jenkins, and a handful of others.

This volume attempts to redress several of the lacks cited above. The American Academy of Religion (AAR) started a World Christianity study group in 2006 at their annual meeting, which was held in Washington, DC, that year. The Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) did not have such a group, so the coeditors of this book, along with the others on the steering committee, took the initiative and started a World Christianity consultation at the ETS annual meeting in 2008, which was held in Atlanta that year, so as to raise the awareness of World Christianity among evangelical scholars.