Christian Education in the Context of World Christianity
It is a singular honor to speak to this, the 6th annual conference of the International Alliance for Christian Education. My theme is Christian education in the context of World Christianity. Everyone in this room, including your children and your grandchildren all live or will live on the seam of a major fault line in the history of human civilization. If history is divided into major epochs like ancient, medieval and modern, then it is, indeed, exceedingly rare to live on such a major fault line. The ancient world lasted from 3,000 B.C. to 290 A.D. when Europe entered what was known as the “Imperial Crisis” or the “Crisis of the Third century.” The Roman Empire became unstable due to massive migration, foreign invasions and civil war. The eventual Fall of Rome in 476 is generally the date which is used to mark the end of the ancient world. But, we should not forget that it was a messy and turbulent 186-year tumultuous transition from the ancient world to what became known as the medieval world. The Medieval world starts with the Fall of Rome in 476 and continues to the end of the Black Plague in the 14th century. But, something would start unfolding in Florence, known eventually as the Renaissance, which would, over time, give birth to the modern world. Huge epic events such as the Reformation and the upheaval of the ensuing religious wars which left between 11-20 million people dead represents this painful period of instability between the medieval and modern world, finally giving birth to the Enlightenment which has shaped so much of how we understand education, including Christian education and all the plausibility structures around our institutions which we mostly accept as unquestioned givens. We have now passed onto the fault line and are in transition to some new, as yet unnamed, period which we clumsily call post-modernity.
Some scholars date the beginning of post-modernity with the publication by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 article entitled, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.[1] In the article, he coined the word “post-modern” in the way that it is used in today’s discourse. He stated that the fundamental shift of our time is a growing crisis of truth,[2] the collapse of what he called the “grand narratives” which provided order, stability and meaning to a society, and a fracturing of the Enlightenment project signaled by the loss of belief in the power of reason and the growing pessimism about the perfectibility of humanity. The 1979 article by Lyotard went largely unnoticed by the wider society, until a popular book by John Naisbitt entitled, Megatrends was published in 1982. This book sold more than 9 million copies and was a number one New York Times bestseller for two straight years. I was one of those readers back in 1982 and I remember how surreal the book felt. It felt so futuristic and impossible, like a Jetsons cartoon. Let me read you a few of the mega-trends from the Table of Contents of Megatrends from 1982, because today these have all become settled realities: From industrial society to information society; from forced technology to high touch technology; National economy to world economy; centralization to decentralization; hierarchies to networking; north to south, either/or to multiple options. You get the point. Now, over 40 years later, books like Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat or his Thank you for Being Late, or Neil Howe’s recent New York Times best seller, The Fourth Turning is Here have each made a compelling case that the entire world, not just the west, has entered a major fault-line of human civilization beyond modernity. One way this has been reflected in our language is the dramatic rise of the pre-fix “post”, with phrases like post-enlightenment, post-western, post-communist, post-denominational, post-colonial, post-industrial, post-modern, and on and on it goes. But the pre-fix “post” doesn’t really say anything, except that we are beyond what we once knew, but we are still in the dark about where this is all headed. I guess if we lived during the Imperial Crisis of the 3rd century, we could have coined the term “post-ancient” or, perhaps, during the Reformation we could released a best-selling book entitled, Life in a Post-Medieval World. The point is, we must recognize that we are living on a seam of history and whatever challenges we are facing in higher education, and Christian education in particular, must be understood within the larger context of what it means to live on a major fault line in the history of civilization. These transitions are inherently marked by instability and even chaos.
This is the necessary backdrop for my highlighting two of the biggest mega-trends facing Christian educators today. It is important to understand that these two are just two of many trends facing various sectors of society, all of which have an impact on us and, regardless, of what we do in the decades ahead, we will be living out these decisions in the context of instability. But, as with both of the major transitions from ancient to medieval and medieval to modern, the church dramatically flourished during the worst days of the instability, precisely because the church has transcultural anchors which become highlighted, like beacons in a storm during these tumultuous times. When the Roman Empire was crumbling, marking the end of the ancient world, the Christians were determined to convert the invaders, the so-called “barbarians” and, in the end, they made better Christians than the Romans ever did. A thousand years later, in the wake of the instability of the breakdown of the Medieval world, the Reformation happened. So, it is not in despair, but with great hope that I highlight these two trends, which are particularly important for what I want to say to Christian educators today. The first trend is the simultaneous rise of a post-Christian West and a post-Western Christianity.
This means that we are experiencing two simultaneous seismic shifts regarding the location of Christians in the world. The West since 1970 has averaged between 3,400 and 6,500 people leaving the church every single day. The western world has witnessed the collapse of Christendom, whether legal/constitutional as in Europe and Latin America or the milder form of civil religion as in the U.S.. Today, Christian education in the western world is taking place within the larger context of a post-Christian west. This has all happened within the lifetimes of most of us present in this room. But the story is not just one of the recession or withering away of the Christian gospel. This has happened many times in our history, including northern Africa, the Middle East and Constantinople. But, what is unique, is that we are simultaneously experiencing the greatest surge of Christian faith in history, and it is happening in a polycentric way. So, for example, while the U.S. and Canada will lose approximately 4,000 Christians each day this year, sub Saharan Africa will average around 10,000 new Christians every day this year.[3] The 16th century Reformation has now come to Latin America. Pentecostalism and Independent Christianity in Latin America is changing the face of Christianity in Latin America, including Roman Catholics with their own version of a counter-reformation. No single country can match the pace of the growth of the church in China which in a single century has gone from one million to 100 million Christians. India now has 40 million Christians, with many of the most robust church planting movements taking place in the traditional Hindu north. I could go on. But the point is that growth is multi-continental and is not centered in any one place. We are experiencing what John Mbiti called “multiple centers of universality.” In missiology, this is known as polycentric Christianity. So, these two seismic shifts are happening simultaneously.
On the one side, everywhere in the world where Europeans or European peoples in diaspora (as in North America, South Africa, etc.) the church is in decline (post-Christian West). Yet, on the other side, there is this remarkable vibrancy unfolding around the world where Christianity is being rediscovered apart from the west (post-western Christianity). What is fascinating is that despite this dramatic shift in the center of Christian gravity, the center of Christian education remains in the western world. The largest faculties, the largest schools, the highest offered degrees in theological education all remain in the western world. Never before in history have the richest theological resources (books, libraries, endowments, developed theological faculties) found themselves situated squarely inside an emerging mission field. Furthermore, we have to go back to the work of sixteenth century Reformers in Europe and the expansion of the church through the work of Jesuits in Latin America to find a time when the church was growing so rapidly in a context where access to theological training was under such strain. The number of ACTEA accredited schools in Africa, for example, that offer graduate level theological degrees can be counted on your fingers. Access to doctoral level theological degrees in India can also be counted on one hand. A similar situation is true for China and even then, only if you count Hong Kong and Taiwan. In contrast, as you know, the ATS has 278 member schools, all of which offer graduate degrees. The vast majority of those in this room are full time Christian educators, whereas of the 48,000 Christian educators in institutions and training centers around the world, only 6.4% are full-time. The center of theological education is, quite oddly, now centered in the middle of an emerging mission field.
The second major trend is that we are in the middle of the largest human migration in history. We often cite the Great Atlantic Migration between 1840-1913 as the greatest migration wave in history. During that period 17 million immigrants entered the United States in various waves, Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Irish etc.. It was unprecedented, surpassing the Aryan migrations into northern India in the ancient world, or the invasions of Germanic tribes into Europe (Ostrogoths, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Burgundians etc..) which ushed in the Medieval period. But none of that compares with what is unfolding in our time. To give you some perspective. When I was born, it is estimated that 17 million people throughout the entire world lived in a country other than their birth country. Today, it is estimated that 281 million people live outside the country of their birth. In 1949 there were 26,000 international students studying in the USA. Today, there are over 1 million students on F-1 VISAs in the USA. The Chinese, South Korean, Indian, and students from Anglophone Africa have been showing up in your classrooms and that is only going to increase.
Everyone in this room is at least broadly aware of these developments and they have been matters of conversation for some time. In 1986, for example, the Association of Theological Schools at their thirty-fifth biennial meeting declared the 1990’s to be the “Decade of Globalization.” The 1986 meeting was held under the theme “Global Challenges and Perspectives in Theological Education.” The keynote address was given by the Kenyan Cardinal Arinze, followed by a number of distinguished leaders in theological education.[4] Cardinal Arinze’s keynote address pointed out six specific challenges we face in the globalization of our seminaries. Arinze’s address was followed by three responses from across the theological spectrum. Later, in the Spring edition of the ATS journal Theological Education, thirteen case studies were published which highlighted examples of how various seminaries/divinity schools were responding to globalization. If you re-read those case studies today, as I have done, you really get the sense that in 1986 the ATS was in the first inning of a baseball game, or the opening minutes of a soccer match. Seminaries were just beginning to warm up to the real challenges which we now face in full force. Looking back from this perspective, much of what was done was more symbolic, window-dressing, than fundamental change to reflect the emerging face of actual Christianity, of which we are now on the periphery, not the center. But it was a start. We now stand, symbolically, at half-time, and we can see the state of play better than 40 years ago.
Since the 1980’s thirty-seven editions of Theological Education were dedicated to various aspects of this conversation, not to mention significant investments from the Pew Foundation and the Lilly Endowment to explore what was called globalization. This term has been eclipsed by the better language of global south, Majority World Christianity and so forth. The questions are, “how are we doing?” “What have we missed?” “Where do we go from here?”
I will make a few observations about our overall response to these seismic shifts which we have experienced. First, there is no doubt that many of our schools have become more ethnically diverse than they were 40 years ago. We are beyond the practice of token hires to substantial shifts in the search and hiring processes of our institutions. Our faculties do look different. But the diversity of the faculty has not always translated into deep changes in how we teach and grapple with the new questions which the majority world is posing to Scripture. We have been quite successful in hiring diverse candidates, only to assimilate them into our existing plausibility structures. We remain resistant to the real changes which present themselves when we are no longer the center but at the periphery of the world Christian movement.
Second, it has been widely observed that, on the whole, the global church is more committed to historic orthodoxy than many of their sister schools in the west. But what has been less reported is that the curriculum and, more importantly, the theological vision for education and ministerial preparation in the Majority world is significantly more integrated than their western counterparts. Our protected silos known as “disciplines” have been resistant to the kind of integration across disciplines which has been more normative in schools with fewer faculty and less influenced by either the Enlightenment or Scholasticism. It is actually our majority world friends who will show us the way to break free from what David Tracy famously called the “three great separations of modern Western culture,” all of which, he lamented, have served to separate the task of theological education from actual ministry contexts. According to Tracy, these three “fatal” separations are the “separation of feeling and thought, the separation of form and content and the separation of theory and practice.”[5] This is the nut we haven’t been able to crack because we ourselves have lived inside the Enlightenment shell. But, now that we are moving to a post-Enlightenment phase, with all of its challenges, we may finally be able to allow our brothers and sisters from the majority world to lead us into the very integration we have espoused, but which has so doggedly eluded us. This will involve a significant dismantling of how we have heretofore understood the proper organization of our educational systems and disciplines.
Third, in the ensuing years it also became clear that the age-old dichotomy between “local” (i.e. what we do here) and “global” (what they do there) just doesn’t make sense. Today, all local is global and all global is increasingly local. We often cite this as a legacy of technology and being globally connected through the web. But, it is also the result of migration in general and immigration to the U.S. in particular which has brought the world to us. For example, let’s take the two most populous countries in the world, India and China. (India passed China in April 2023, China now has 1.42 billion people, India has 1.44 billion people). There are nearly 6 million Chinese descent people in the United States and nearly 6 million people from Indian descent in our midst.
In light of all of this, where do we go from here? I would like to suggest four directions. First, we must have a serious re-tooling of our faculties so that they become better acquainted with scholarship emerging from the Majority World. It is not enough to simply sprinkle onto our faculties scholars recruited from around the world. All of our faculties must become global conversant scholars. In my own research on global theology which I published in my Theology in the Context of World Christianity, I discovered rich theological themes being written about by Majority World Scholars which moves global Christianity from being a hyphenated theology (such as Dalit-theology, Ming-Jung theology, Liberation theology, or some other specialized version of indigenous reflection) to a rich, textured contribution to theology in its own right. The multiethnic commentary, The New Testament in Color and the Africa Bible Commentary are texts which highlight these new voices.[6] John Mbiti, considered one of the pioneers of African Christian theology, once lamented how Africans had dutifully traveled to the eminent Europe and North America theological institutions for higher studies without finding any corresponding interest in their own theological reflections. Mbiti said, “We have eaten theology with you; we have drunk theology with you; we have dreamed theology with you. But it has all been one-sided; it has all been, in a sense, your theology. We know you theologically. The question is, ‘Do you know us theologically? Would you like to know us theologically?’”[7] The answer up to now is that we really haven’t wanted to know much about the theological reflections of Majority World Christians. Mbiti went on to point out that “it is utterly scandalous” for students of Western theology to know more about the theology of heretics long dead than they do about the living theology of hundreds of millions of living Africans today.[8] Clearly, the borders of theological discourse can no longer afford to stay within the familiar perimeter of Western discourse.
Second, we must engage in a new level of partnership which is fully bi-directional, multi-vocal and co-equal. In the past “partnerships” were driven by the West and dominated by economic and educational disparities which created significant power differentials, and eroded the real nature of a true partnership. Today, now that the Majority World has both the students and the pedagogical and integrative expertise which has eluded us, we can now finally meet on the global stage as true partners. Today, we must have greater bi-lateral exchanges based on relationships and shared vision. When I was President of Asbury Seminary, we opened up training sites in collaboration with indigenous schools which has allowed them to offer full degrees in Bangalore, India, and Columbia. It is one way of moving to a new platform of engagement with global theological education which moves us beyond the kind of competitive posture we have inhabited with one another in recent decades.
Third, our own seminaries and divinity schools must regain our missional footing. In the past, seminaries in the West have focused on two primary outcomes: training pastors and teachers. That is a Christendom paradigm which assumes a credentialling requirement for a new professional status known as “ordination” as well as the assumption that churches are eager to receive and hire our graduates. However, every denomination that requires the MDiv is in decline, and the newer churches are not particularly concerned if a pastor is ordained, and are opting for either less theological education or sometimes in-house contextual training with no degree at all. We, of course, must find fresh ways to serve these contexts, but the deeper point is that we can no longer only train for two of the fivefold ministries outlined in Ephesians 4:11, namely, pastors and teachers. We must also train evangelists and church planters, who will plant the very churches who will someday need the pastors we are training. This means we must adopt new degree goals and delivery systems which can carry out this new mandate within the new context of a post-Christian West and a post-western Christianity.
Fourth, we must move to a new economic viability model. Most of us do not currently serve institutions with a sustainable economic model. We are driven by the market and by tuition revenue. We have engaged in “red ocean” strategy which implies increasing competition for an ever diminishing pool of students, rather than a “blue ocean” strategy which identifies vast groups of people all over the world who need a theological education. In my experience, it is far easier to raise a dollar of scholarship money for an international student, than to collect a tuition dollar from an ever decreasing pool of students. It is always fascinating to Majority World Scholars when they attend global gatherings of western leaders, that when western leaders are together, within five minutes the conversation turns to the lack of resources. But, the Majority World has learned to reverse engineer so many things which they learned in the West, but adapted them to accomplish the same outcomes for a fraction of the cost as the West. Furthermore, the notion that a student can come to Seminary and pack his or her bags in two or three years for a lifelong journey is no longer viable. We need new life-long learning models which equip people in discreet degree and certificate program, including micocoertification as part of an emerging field for ongoing training and re-tooling in the midst of ministry.
In conclusion, this is a kairos moment in the history of Western theological education. We don’t have the time or luxury to get caught in the narratives of despair. Rather, we must remember afresh that the church has done surprisingly well in times of cultural instability. In fact, that has been when we flourished the most. Indeed, if the cross teaches us anything, it reminds us that sometimes God does his greatest work under a cloak of failure. Brothers and sisters, if we capture a whole new vision of new models of education and faculty deployment, then we can move joyfully from the Ichabod of despair to the Emmanuel of hope. There are many new faces in the Christian church around the world who demand nothing less of us.
[1] Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
[2] This trend and the implications of it for the contemporary church has been expounded brilliantly by David F. Wells. See, especially, his No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Eerdmans, 1993), and Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2005).
[3] For the latest statistics on world Christianity, see, Chan, Simon, Finny Philip, E. D. Burns, eds., “State of the Great Commission Report” (September 2024), Lausanne Movement Publications: 1-516. See also, Gina A. Zurlo and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Database, https://worldchristiandatabase.org/.
[4] See Theological Education, 22.2 (Spring 1986) and Theological Education, 23.1 (Autumn 1986).
[5] David Tracy, “Traditions of Spiritual Practice and the Practice of Theology,” Theology Today 55.2 (1998): 235.
[6] Esau McCaullley, Janette Ok, Osvaldo Padilla, Amy Peeler, eds., The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: IVP, 2024); Adeyemo Tokunboh, ed. Africa Bible Commentary: A One Volume Commentary Written by 70 African Scholars (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010).
[7] John Mbiti, “Theological Impotence and the Universality of the Church,” in Mission Trends No. 3: Third World Theologies, eds. Gerald H. Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky (New York: Paulist Press and Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 16-17.
[8] Ibid., 17.
TIMOTHY TENNENT
Professor of Divinity | Methodist Chair of Divinity
Beeson Divinity School | Samford University