The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life held a forum for journalists entitled: Global Schism: Is the Anglican Communion Rift the First Stage in a Wider Christian Split?
Philip Jenkins, a history professor from Penn State, and maybe the most in tuned scholar on Global Christiain, was the featured presenter. it is a fascinating discussion about the schism that is taking place in the Anglican communion. It is a kin to the kind of division that is happening in Presbyterianism. So, far, in my presbytery, Western North Carolina, two churches, Montreat and Murphy, have petitioned the presbytery to leave. Negotiations continue. A third church, Marion First, has filed suit and been given an injunction to keep the church from stepping foot on church property. It is a real mess, and is totally ignorant of the kind of global developments that Jenkins' discusses.
From Jenkins opening remarks:
Christianity is going south very rapidly in terms of numbers. I've give you a quick overview, and I'm going to talk about Africa a lot. Simple reason: back in 1900, Africa had 10 million Christians representing 10 percent of the population; by 2000, that was up 360 million, to 46 percent of the population. That is the largest quantitative change that has ever occurred in the history of religion. A rising tide lifts all boats, and all denominations have been booming. The Anglicans have done very well, and the Anglican Church is going to be overwhelmingly an African body in the near future.
There is much to digest in this discussion, and is worth sharing with some members of the congregation.
A couple reactions.
1. Jenkins writes about the difference between Global North and Global South in regards their understanding of biblical authority. Here's what he says.
The more fundamental division is about the authority of the Bible, and there are a lot of reasons for this. If you have ever read Akinola's statements, he makes clear throughout: "I know all this biblical criticism stuff; I know all these arguments made about homosexuality." But there's a more basic thing: if you're in a new church in Africa or Asia, the Bible speaks to you as a more immediately relevant, more direct text, than it does for many Global North people for whom the Bible is basically part of the wallpaper.
One big reason for that is the biblical world makes sense [if you're in the Global South]; the Bible reads like it is describing the world you know immediately. But for most Americans and Europeans, if somebody cites the prohibitions on homosexuality in Leviticus, the immediate answer is: "Leviticus also says you can own slaves from neighboring countries; why can't you own Canadians?" It's a good question. If you're reading a text like Leviticus in the Global South, the bigger problem is this: you have to be warned constantly not to take the Old Testament as more important than the New.
You're dealing with people who live in, in many ways, an Old Testament world. Many Africans may not know themselves a world that practices nomadism and polygamy and blood sacrifice, but their parents did. You don't have to go far down the road to see people who are still doing these things.
Just one example out of a great many: I was once talking to some West Africans about the bits of the Bible that made sense to them in ways that could not make sense to Westerners. They said, "We live in agricultural societies, so things like the Parable of the Sower made great sense." Just talking about it, they started getting teary eyed. Then they mentioned Psalm 126. Psalm 126 is a psalm that is widely quoted, and it goes like this: "The man who goes forth into the fields in tears weeping to sow the seed will bring the sheaves again in joy." You understand perfectly well why a farmer would bring the sheaves again in joy; he's celebrating harvest time.
But why do you weep while you're sowing? "It's obvious," they said to me. "Whoever wrote this psalm was writing at a time of famine, like we had a couple of years ago. You've got the corn that's left, and you can do one of two things with it. You can feed your family with it, but if you do that, you're not a farmer anymore [because you have no seeds left] and you have to migrate to the city and become a beggar, and what's going to happen to your children and so on. Or you can take the corn literally out of the hands of your hungry children and use it as seed corn and sow it. That's why a farmer weeps while sowing the corn. It's obvious."
He talks about how the Bible is direct and immediate. This quite different than in the West where the bible is more on a symbolic intellectual construct. We can relate to the stories, but the stories not born from our culture. This is true for both liberal and conservative Western Christians.
The directness of the Bible in a rural, tribal culture was made clear to me 26 years ago when serving a refugee internship in Pakistan during the Afghan-Soviet war, we shared a recording of the Prodigal Son with the matriarch of a village. After listening to the Gospel story, she was in tears. It was clear to me that the Gospel is universal, and based on what Jenkins is saying, may be more suited to the culture of Africa.
2. Throughout my adult life the Presbyterian Church has been in schism. The great attempt at reunion never really reached its fulfillment. We are sit seeing schism because as Jenkins says,
Schisms are like revolutions: they're easier to start than to stop, and once schisms start rolling, they do tend to split further.
This certainly true in our denomination. Now here's another fascinating comment he makes about the Episcopal church that relates to our situation.
You're getting some of these splits within the Presbyterian Church. They're looking at what's happening in the Anglican world partly to see what kind of precedent is being set but also to watch for very specific legal issues. The only reason why the Episcopal Church is surviving at the moment is the Episcopal Church has a set-up, which they erected in the late 1970s after a lot of splits over women's ordination, whereby the dioceses own the property, so that if, for example, a particular church wants to secede and place itself under the archbishop of Uganda, you're very welcome to do it, but you can't take any of the property with you.
In the split in our presbytery, property is an issue. But the deeper issue is that the two sides don't understand the other side, and the bad blood runs so deep, that it is virtually impossible to see a genuine reconciliation happening any time soon.
Concluding thoughts: What does Jenkins' perspective mean for the average church?
First, that our future as a church is South. It is not a matter of emulating the Global South's churches, but rather establishing relationships whether as a congregation or through a Presbytery, with churches. Let their unique life as a church impact your local church. And if you are too small for that to happen, make it happen through your Presbytery.
Second, learn what it means for the Scripture to be direct and immediate for your congregation. It is about how the Scripture speaks to the daily experience of people. It isn't the Bible as either a set of symbols that determine whose in and whose out, or an intellectual frame of reference that is used as some cultural filter to provide a perspective from which to speak. No, it is more about how the Bible through its stories and lessons, points to the immediacy of God's activity in the lives of people and churches. It is this experience that lies at the heart of the African churches dramatic growth.
Third, read Jenkins two books, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity and The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. Then allow this perspective to influence how you read everything else that comes across your desk. Especially, the developments that will take place over the next few years related to church's leaving our denomination.
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