Global Christianity and the Modern University

And migration is what is happening on the ground: Africans and Asians and Latin Americans are coming to North America. I live in an urban area, which is where most immigrant communities are located. However, we are hearing about immigrant communities resettling to non-metropolitan areas, so immigrant communities in small towns around the country will continue to grow. Similarly, people who live out in rural areas may not often have direct interactions with people who live in immigrant communities, but for them, the world is at their fingertips. Folks who live in small-town Idaho with hardly any immigrants in their neighborhood will be interacting with global audiences through the internet. Hence a Christian in North America should be aware of developments in majority-world Christianity. The issue forces itself upon us, given the way the internet and immigration have been shaping our world. We will be engaged with, and have to navigate, the various expressions of Christianity across the globe that are flourishing in our time.

Mairin: As Christianity is shifting from the Global North to Global South, what effect will this have on the relationship between Christians in the Global North to the Global South?

Amos: The direction of missionaries sending/going is an important point. People immigrate for lots of different reasons. The reality, however, is that for those that are migrating as Christians, a perhaps small but not insignificant number of them are motivated by the call to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. As Americans, we often think about the Great Commission from the context of our own location, this North American site. But what if you live in Southern Africa? What if you live in South Asia? What if you live in the southern half of the American hemisphere? Then the ends of the Earth are Minneapolis or the Upper Midwest, etc. If you are immigrating to Minneapolis and are a believer, part of your purpose in moving to Minneapolis is to bring the gospel to every creature out there (or here)! We call these people “reverse missionaries,” a missiological name given to those who derive from the so-called global South and move first and foremost to bring the gospel to the ends of the Earth, wherever it is that God leads them, across Europe and North America. They are coming to do ministry, to proclaim the gospel, to bear witness to Jesus Christ. Oftentimes they hope to engage with the broad multicultural reality that is North America.

Most of the time, when these “reverse missionaries” arrive, they find it to be more initially plausible for them to interface with their own immigrant communities first and then grow those communities by planting churches. Sometimes, these emerge over a decade or two to become multicultural. There’s anticipation that these reverse missionaries coming from the majority world will be conduits to revitalize Christianity across North America, even among the majority culture (people of Caucasian descent–”white folks”). And yet when they come they find a multicultural North America with significant churches already among the majority culture. And so it will be an ongoing development of relationships between immigrant culture churches and multicultural churches to facilitate interethnic and cross-cultural conversations and relationships.

There are significant ways in which the direction of missionaries will continue to shape the Christian communities of North America, because these missionaries are coming from a real variety of immigrant church communities and immigrant church cultures. These immigrant communities will have connections to their home countries, which will deepen relational links ecclesially, ethnically, communally, and linguistically, between what’s happening here in North America and what’s happening in their home countries. This will continue to multiply and complexify American Christianity–that is, American Christianity will continue to be informed by multidirectional relationships. So you know 20–30 years ago we might have done mission trips to Mexico to get intercultural experience and participate in a missionary effort. Well, what if there’s a Honduran immigrant church down the street? What if there’s a Somalian immigrant church in the next town? How do we reach out to them in a genuine brother and sister relationship, to gain from the benefits and gifts that God has given to each part of the body? These gifts might be cultural, they might be linguistic, or it may be other gifts, perhaps the kinds of gifts described by the charisms in 1 Corinthians. As we continue to become aware of, interact with, and fellowship with these churches, it may even lead to real mutual witness together.

In that respect, I think there are many ways for American Christians to interact with each other. We talk about this as if American churches are only white or caucasian, but many of them are multicultural. So if we’re going to be open to real relationships and conversations, I think there are all kinds of opportunities for us to develop new understandings of how to participate in God’s mission and how to bear witness together. Just one far-off example, with the realities of war in our world: what if we have a Russian-immigrant church and a Ukrainian-immigrant church in the same neighborhood or city? What if we have a Palestinian-immigrant congregation and a Messianic Jewish synagogue down the street from each other? Can we hear the deeper pains and hopes in those communities? How would spending time with each other in these contexts transform us, and allow for new forms of solidarity and missional engagement? These could become political acts together, but they don’t necessarily need to. The point is, we don’t have to just take whatever we hear from the internet, we can actually just reach out to our brothers and sisters from around the world down the street and hear what they have to say for themselves. And of course, two different Palestinian Christians in America might have two different views about what needs to be done in Palestine. We need to hear from them and be in prayer with them and see how the Holy Spirit leads us to engage in new forms of witness-bearing.

Mairin: What do majority world academics have to offer secular universities in the West?

Amos: I will respond at a couple of different levels. On the one hand, the vast majority of tertiary educational systems and academic training has had primarily Western roots that go back 1,000 years. And yet, within the last 50–60 years, universities from outside the West have also been developing in ways that have engaged their local cultural histories and literatures, in ways that have begun to create tertiary educational systems that are increasingly both global and local. In other words, Western norms and literatures that were just presumed to be globally normative are now being gradually complemented by non-Western voices, perspectives, literatures, canons, values, assumptions, and so on. The point is that in universities in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, local voices are increasingly much less marginal, and the Western voices which used to be globally at the center are increasingly being adjusted and challenged. So, younger academics that come from other parts of the world, but are coming to work in North America, now have mastered the Western canon and their own local canon, and they are able to bring those perspectives into the classroom, both in terms of content and in terms of pedagogy. In this sense, Christian academics coming from outside the West into Western contexts are enriching the learning experience for students in our universities.

The second way in which majority world academics are contributing to western universities, beyond pedagogy and the form of teaching, is by bringing in global voices–Asian, Latin American, and African voices and perspectives–into the classroom. These voices will shape any classroom conversation, whether it is in-person or online. Different perspectives are not just for the sake of difference: the more perspectives we are exposed to the more we are invited to think of the immense possibilities for how to ask questions, the more we are invited to use different experiences as conversation partners for rethinking afresh the challenges of today. A generation ago, the humanities would only refer to ancient Greek philosophers in order to frame critical thinking. I hope we continue to read Plato and Aristotle long into the future. But today we shouldn’t just be reading Plato and Aristotle, but also Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangxi, and many other ancient perspectives. We should also be reading other non-Western cultural voices that have shaped other cultural self-understandings for millennia, and so be introduced to the possibility of inhabiting those kinds of worlds.

This will also allow us to better navigate the challenging conversations about pressing issues today. For example, I think that adept Christian academics are going to find ways to retrieve their cultures in order to address the injustices of how colonial efforts have imposed the Western canon on other contexts, particularly in ways that are suppressive to other cultural heritages. There is a justice element to these endeavors. Oftentimes we don’t like being on the receiving end of repair. We prefer to see ourselves as those that bring justice to the world. But some of us in the West, surely historically if not also more recently and presently, have perpetrated what I would call “epistemic injustices,” where we have rejected or minimized the epistemologies, the ways of knowing, of other traditions. Christian academics from other parts of the world can reintroduce, not just the content, but the ways of knowing and thinking that invites our (Western) repentance and transformation. I think that at the end of the day, education is not for the sake of abstract knowledge. Education should form us to live rightly with one another. And that is the justice element: that we will need everybody involved to link arms and minds together.

Dr. Amos Yong is Professor of Theology and Mission, Fuller Theological Seminary

Global Christianity and the Modern University

By Amos Yong
AMPERSAND
December 4, 2024

Mairin: With so many strong churches and good theological work being done in America and the West, why do we need to listen to theological voices from the majority world?

Amos Yong: On the one hand, there certainly are lots of strong churches in the US, but on the other hand we also realize that overall Christianity in the west has been declining for the last few decades. The numbers are only staying stable because of migration from the majority world (Africa, Asia, Latin America). A lot of immigrants come as Christians, or become Christians after they arrive here, which will continue to buoy the North American church. Looking at the next few decades, folks really anticipate that Africa will become the most densely Christian continent. African Christianity might become the strongest form of Christianity around the world. That strength will obviously demand North American churches to foster a greater ability to interact, support, and benefit from African insights into Christianity.