Church History Series • Lesson 33 • Supplementary • Series Finale

The Global South & Modern Evangelicalism

How the center of gravity of global Christianity shifted from Europe to Africa, Asia, and Latin America • 1900–2026

By PS-Church • Primary-source study

Where this fits: Lesson 33 of the Pleasant Springs Church History series — the final lesson. Everything the series has traced (from the Apostles to Vatican II) has brought us here: to a global Christianity that in our lifetimes is being remade by African, Asian, and Latin American believers. See the full Series Timeline.

WHY THIS LESSON MATTERS

In 1900, the Christian church was overwhelmingly a Western institution. Europe was 95% nominally Christian. North America was 95% Christian. Latin America had been Catholic for four centuries. But sub-Saharan Africa was still mostly traditional religion with an Islamic belt across the north; Asia was 1% Christian outside the Philippines and parts of India; and the modern Protestant missionary movement, only a century old, had barely begun to bear fruit outside the colonial enclaves where missionaries were stationed.

In 1900, perhaps 18% of the world’s Christians lived in what we today call the Global South — Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By 2025, that figure is roughly 67%. Christianity has moved in our lifetimes. What looked in 1900 like a European religion that had spread to a few outposts became, in the century since, a global faith whose demographic and spiritual center of gravity has shifted decisively to the Southern Hemisphere. The average Christian alive in 2025 is a 35-year-old woman in sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, not a 65-year-old European or North American.

This shift is arguably the most important development in Christian history since Vatican II. It was largely invisible to Western eyes until Philip Jenkins’s 2002 book The Next Christendom forced the Western church to look up and see what was happening. This final lesson tells the story.

Greek NT (Rev 7:9): μετὰ ταῦτα εἶδον, καὶ ἰδοὺ ὄχλος πολύς, ὃν ἀριθμῆσαι αὐτὸν οὐδεὶς ἐδύνατο, ἐκ παντὸς ἔθνους καὶ φυλῶν καὶ λαῶν καὶ γλωσσῶν, ἑστῶτες ἐνώπιον τοῦ θρόνου. Revelation 7:9 (ESV): “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne.”

PART 1 — THE NUMBERS (1900 → 2025)

The demographic story is best told in numbers. These figures are drawn from Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo’s World Christian Database at Gordon-Conwell’s Center for the Study of Global Christianity.

Christian Population by Region, 1900 → 2025 (approximate)

Europe: 380 million (1900, ~67% of world Christians) → 560 million (2025, ~22% of world Christians)

North America: 79 million (1900, ~14%) → 275 million (2025, ~11%)

Latin America: 60 million (1900, ~11%) → 610 million (2025, ~24%)

Sub-Saharan Africa: 8 million (1900, ~1.4%) → 725 million (2025, ~28%)

Asia (excl. Russia): 20 million (1900, ~3.5%) → 380 million (2025, ~15%)

Totals: ~558 million in 1900, ~2.55 billion in 2025.

The headline: In 1900, 82% of all Christians lived in Europe or North America. In 2025, only 33% do. The other 67% live in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America. In raw numbers, sub-Saharan Africa alone now has more Christians than Europe.

+91×

Growth of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, 1900 to 2025 (8 million → 725 million).

+19×

Growth of Christianity in Asia, 1900 to 2025 (20 million → 380 million).

1.5%

Estimated annual growth rate of Christianity in the Global South today; 0.4% in the Global North.

~12,500

Unreached people groups today, down from ~17,000 in 1974 when the term was coined by Ralph Winter at Lausanne.

PART 2 — AFRICA — THE CENTRAL STORY OF 20TH-CENTURY CHRISTIANITY

Sub-Saharan Africa’s growth from 8 million to 725 million Christians in 125 years is the greatest numerical growth of any religion in any region of human history. It came in three overlapping waves.

Wave 1: Mission-era foundations (1800s–1960s). European and American missions — Livingstone and Moffat in southern Africa, the Church Missionary Society in Nigeria and Uganda, American missions in Liberia, the Dutch Reformed in South Africa — planted indigenous churches across the continent. By 1960 these churches had produced the first generation of African bishops, theologians, and evangelists who would take over as European colonial administrations ended.

Wave 2: The African Initiated Churches (1900s–1970s). Alongside (and sometimes in tension with) mission churches, African prophets founded thousands of indigenous Christian denominations that combined biblical preaching with African cultural forms. The most famous founders: William Wadé Harris (Liberia, c. 1865–1929; preached across West Africa 1913–1915 and reportedly baptized 120,000 people in 18 months), Simon Kimbangu (Belgian Congo, 1887–1951, founded the Kimbanguist Church), Isaiah Shembe (South Africa, 1870–1935, founded the Nazareth Baptist Church), Samuel Kivengere (Uganda), and dozens more. By 2025 the African Initiated Churches account for roughly 100 million African Christians.

Wave 3: The East African Revival (1930s–ongoing). Beginning in Rwanda among Church of Uganda missionaries in 1929–1933, the Balokole (“saved ones”) revival spread across Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and eastern DR Congo. Its marks were daily confession of sin, open testimony, and a simple gospel focused on the cross. The revival continues today and is a direct spiritual ancestor of contemporary East African Anglicanism. Remarkably, during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, many Balokole Christians refused to participate in the ethnic killings, at the cost of their own lives.

Janani Luwum (1922–1977) — Archbishop and martyr

Born Mucwini, northern Uganda • Anglican priest 1956 • Archbishop of Uganda 1974–1977 • Murdered on orders of Idi Amin, 17 February 1977

BalokoleUgandan Martyr

Luwum was an Acholi tribesman who converted in the East African Revival in 1948, was ordained Anglican in 1956, and in 1974 was elected Archbishop of the Church of Uganda. In February 1977 he led the Ugandan bishops in publicly protesting Idi Amin’s human rights abuses. On 16 February 1977 he was arrested at his residence, accused of treason, and on 17 February his body was found in a staged car accident. Forensic evidence showed he had been shot at close range, almost certainly by Amin personally. Luwum is now a martyr of the Anglican Communion, commemorated 17 February, and a statue of him stands among the twentieth-century martyrs above the west door of Westminster Abbey.

Africa today. Nigeria has more than 110 million Christians — more than any European country. The Church of Nigeria (Anglican) alone has about 22 million members — roughly twice the combined membership of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church (USA), and the Anglican Church of Canada. The Democratic Republic of Congo has roughly 80 million Christians. Ethiopia’s ancient Tewahedo Orthodox Church has 55 million members — older than nearly any church in Europe (see our earlier coverage of the Oriental Orthodox). Kenya and Tanzania are both more than 80% Christian. African Christianity is also young: the median age of an African Christian is about 22. European Christianity is older than the European average.

PART 3 — LATIN AMERICA — THE PENTECOSTAL EXPLOSION

Latin America was Catholic at 99% in 1900. In 2025 it is about 64% Catholic and 22% Protestant — and that 22% is overwhelmingly Pentecostal, Charismatic, or Evangelical. In 125 years Latin America has gone from being the most homogeneously Catholic region in the world to hosting the largest Pentecostal movement on earth. The story is told in more detail in Lesson 24, but the broader Latin American picture deserves its own sketch.

Brazil. Home to the largest Catholic population in the world (123 million) and the largest Pentecostal population in the world (65 million). The Assembleias de Deus do Brasil is roughly 20 million members strong, the largest single Pentecostal denomination on earth. The Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God), founded by Edir Macedo in 1977, is controversial for its prosperity teaching but has planted congregations in more than 100 countries.

Guatemala. The first Latin American country to become majority non-Catholic (roughly 50% Protestant by 2020). Rural indigenous Mayan populations have converted in extraordinary numbers to evangelical Protestantism over the past three decades.

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Beginning in 1967 at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and spreading rapidly across Latin America from the 1970s onward, the Charismatic Renewal has produced roughly 120 million Catholic charismatics. This movement — Catholic by conviction, Pentecostal in worship style — is the largest renewal movement within contemporary Catholicism.

Liberation theology. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, and óscar Romero (see Lesson 29, Part 7) shaped a distinctively Latin American Catholic theology of the poor. The movement was contested, partly disciplined by Rome, and partly absorbed into the mainstream of Latin American Catholic social teaching.

Pope Francis (2013–). Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Argentine Jesuit, became the first Latin American pope on 13 March 2013, taking the name Francis after Francis of Assisi. His pontificate has emphasized the Church’s preferential option for the poor, mercy over doctrinal rigorism, care for creation (Laudato Si’, 2015), and reform of the curia. He is the first Jesuit pope and the first pope from the Americas — a symbolic recognition of the demographic reality that more than half of the world’s Catholics now live in the Global South.

PART 4 — ASIA — KOREA, CHINA, THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT

Asia contains roughly 60% of humanity and only about 8% of Asian people are Christian — but 8% of Asia is 380 million people, more than the entire population of the United States. Three stories stand out.

South Korea. In 1900 Korea had perhaps 1% Christians. In 2025 South Korea is roughly 30% Christian, the only East Asian country besides the Philippines where Christianity is a major religion. The trajectory was shaped by the Pyongyang Revival of 1907, when prolonged confession and prayer meetings at Jangdaehyun Church produced a sustained renewal that continues to shape Korean Christianity. South Korea now has the largest Presbyterian churches in the world — Yoido Full Gospel Church (Pentecostal, founded by Yonggi Cho in 1958) has roughly 480,000 members, Myungsung Presbyterian has about 100,000, and several others are in that range. South Korea also sends out more cross-cultural missionaries per capita than any other country in the world — by some estimates, second only to the United States in absolute numbers.

China. When the Communist Party closed all foreign mission work in 1949, China had perhaps 1 million Protestants. By 2025 the estimate is 80–100 million Chinese Christians (official Three-Self Patriotic Movement churches, underground house churches, and unregistered Catholic churches combined). House churches have survived waves of repression (Cultural Revolution 1966–1976, the 2018 revised Regulations on Religious Affairs). Notable figures include Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng, 1903–1972, founder of the Local Church movement, died in prison), Wang Mingdao (1900–1991, imprisoned 1955–1979), and Samuel Lamb (Lin Xiangao, 1924–2013, pastored the Damazhan house church in Guangzhou and spent 21 years in prison).

India. The oldest continuous Christian community in Asia is the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala (Syriac Orthodox and related bodies), who trace their origin to the Apostle Thomas’s mission to Kerala in AD 52. About 28 million Indian Christians today (roughly 2.3% of India’s 1.4 billion population). Christianity grew rapidly among Dalit (“untouchable”) and tribal communities in the 20th century, and the contemporary Indian evangelical movement is substantial — the IVCF of India (Indian Inter-Varsity), Friends Missionary Prayer Band, and dozens of indigenous mission agencies have sent thousands of Indian missionaries to North India and across South Asia.

Nepal. Christianity was illegal in Nepal until 1990. When the constitution was revised that year to allow religious freedom (though not proselytism), there were perhaps 50,000 Christians in Nepal. By 2025 there are an estimated 1.3–1.5 million — an astonishing thirty-fold growth in a single generation.

Iran. The Iranian revolution of 1979 expelled foreign missionaries and closed many churches. Iranian Christianity has grown anyway: Persian-language Christian satellite broadcasts, underground house churches, and conversions among the post-revolutionary generation who are disillusioned with political Islam. Estimates range from 300,000 to over a million Iranian Christian converts today, one of the fastest-growing Christian communities in the Muslim world.

The Filipino diaspora. The Philippines is 90% Christian (80% Catholic, 10% Protestant/Independent). Filipino domestic workers, nurses, seafarers, and professionals have carried their Catholic and evangelical faith to the Gulf states, Southeast Asia, and the West, forming one of the most consequential Christian migrant movements in history.

PART 5 — LAUSANNE AND GLOBAL EVANGELICAL COOPERATION

Alongside the demographic shift came a parallel institutional shift. The 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference (see Lesson 27) had been almost entirely Western. The mid-20th-century ecumenical movement (WCC, founded 1948) had been Western-led. Evangelical Protestantism needed its own global forum.

Lausanne 1974 — the International Congress on World Evangelization. Convened at Lausanne, Switzerland, 16–25 July 1974, under the honorary chairmanship of Billy Graham. 2,700 participants from 150 countries. For the first time, the Global South was well represented — perhaps half the participants came from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Two voices reshaped the evangelical conversation: the Peruvian Samuel Escobar and the Ecuadorian René Padilla, both of whom argued that the gospel must be proclaimed and embodied — social action and evangelism are not alternatives but aspects of a single obedience. The Lausanne Covenant, drafted by John Stott, incorporated their emphasis, becoming one of the most significant evangelical documents of the twentieth century.

Ralph Winter and the unreached peoples movement. At Lausanne 1974, Fuller Seminary missiologist Ralph Winter (1924–2009) delivered the plenary that coined the term “unreached people group” — an ethnic-linguistic group with so few Christians that the gospel cannot be readily spread by ordinary evangelism from within. He argued that there were still 17,000 such groups (reduced to about 12,500 today) and that frontier mission to these peoples was the unfinished missiological task. The U.S. Center for World Mission (now Frontier Ventures) was his response. Winter’s framework shapes roughly every evangelical missions agency operating today.

Lausanne II (Manila 1989) and Lausanne III (Cape Town 2010). Successive congresses continued the work. Cape Town 2010, convened on the centennial of Edinburgh 1910, assembled 4,200 participants from 198 countries. Its Cape Town Commitment, written by Christopher J. H. Wright, is the most substantial global evangelical theological document of the early 21st century.

PART 6 — VOICES FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH

A sampling of the theological voices who have shaped — and are shaping — the Christianity of the Global South.

John Mbiti (1931–2019) — Kenya

Kenyan Anglican theologian • Cambridge PhD 1963 • First Black African to head a WCC institution

African TheologyIndigenous Roots

Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (1969) and Concepts of God in Africa (1970) argued that traditional African religion had always contained genuine knowledge of the one God, providing a theological preparation for the gospel rather than a tabula rasa. The mission of the church was to fulfill, not to destroy, African religious heritage. Mbiti’s work reshaped African theological education and remains foundational.

René Padilla (1932–2021) — Ecuador / Argentina

Ecuadorian-Argentine theologian • Wheaton BA, Manchester PhD • Co-founder of Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana (1970) • General Secretary of the FTL

Misíon IntegralLausanne

Padilla’s phrase misión integral (“integral mission” — the gospel addresses the whole person and the whole society) has become standard vocabulary in global evangelical missiology. Against a reductive gospel of “just get saved” and against a liberation theology that swallowed the gospel in politics, Padilla insisted the Bible calls the church to preach the gospel of the kingdom and live it in social embodiment. His Lausanne 1974 address was one of the most influential evangelical sermons of the century.

Samuel Escobar (b. 1934) — Peru

Peruvian IVCF/IFES leader • Later professor at Palmer Seminary, Philadelphia

Misíon IntegralLatin American Theology

A long-time leader in IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students), Escobar was Padilla’s closest colleague and co-architect of Latin American evangelical theology. His writings, especially The New Global Mission (IVP 2003), trace the emergence of Global South missions and offer a distinctively Latin American evangelical perspective.

Kwame Bediako (1945–2008) — Ghana

Ghanaian evangelical theologian • Bordeaux and Aberdeen PhDs • Founder of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute, Akropong, Ghana

African ChristianityTranslation Theology

Bediako’s Theology and Identity (1992) and Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (1995) argued that Christianity has been, from its earliest centuries, an essentially translated religion — a faith whose DNA is to move across cultural and linguistic boundaries and take root in vernacular forms. The African Christianity of the twentieth century is therefore not a deviation from Christian history but a recovery of the pattern of the book of Acts. Bediako’s Akrofi-Christaller Institute continues his work.

Lamin Sanneh (1942–2019) — Gambia / Yale

Born Mandinka Muslim, The Gambia • Converted to Christianity in his teens • Harvard PhD • Professor of World Christianity, Yale Divinity School, 1989–2019

World ChristianityTranslation

Sanneh’s Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (1989) and Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (2003) argued, with immense erudition, that Bible translation into vernacular languages had been the great dignifying gift of Christian missions — affirming the worth of indigenous languages, standardizing them, and giving non-Western Christians a Bible in their own tongue from day one. Contrary to the post-colonial critique, Sanneh argued that translation had empowered indigenous Christian agency, not suppressed it.

Christopher J. H. Wright (b. 1947) — Northern Ireland

OT scholar, director of Langham Partnership • Honorary drafter of Cape Town Commitment 2010

Global EvangelicalMission of God

Christopher Wright is a British scholar but has spent his career resourcing Global South pastors through the Langham Partnership (founded by John Stott). His The Mission of God (2006) argues that mission is not an add-on to Christianity but the central thread of the biblical narrative from Genesis to Revelation. Wright drafted the Cape Town Commitment (2010), probably the most significant evangelical theological document of this century so far.

PART 7 — WHAT THE GLOBAL SOUTH CHRISTIANITY BRINGS

Philip Jenkins, in The Next Christendom (2002), characterized the Christianity of the Global South as having five marked features when compared to post-Enlightenment Western Christianity:

1. A supernatural worldview. Global South Christians take angels, demons, miracles, and spiritual warfare with a seriousness that embarrasses many Western readers. The Bible’s narrative world — where God acts and spirits move — reads as realism, not mythology.

2. A high view of Scripture. The Bible is read as authoritative, inerrant, directly applicable. Higher criticism, liberal hermeneutics, and demythologizing have had almost no traction in Global South churches.

3. Moral and sexual conservatism. On marriage, sexuality, and the family, Global South Christianity is generally conservative — a fact that has produced bitter conflict in global Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian bodies as their Western provinces have liberalized.

4. Martyrdom as present experience. In Nigeria, Pakistan, India, China, Iran, and elsewhere, Christians are murdered, imprisoned, and socially marginalized for their faith. Open Doors’ annual World Watch List documents ongoing persecution in roughly 50 countries. Martyrs are not history; they are one’s neighbors.

5. An expectation that the gospel will spread. Many Global South churches have no model of a “post-Christian” society because Christianity in their context is growing, not declining. Their default assumption is that the gospel is advancing and that more people will be saved.

None of this makes Global South Christianity perfect. Prosperity theology has done significant damage, especially in Africa and Latin America. Ethnic and tribal divisions sometimes override gospel unity. Rapid numerical growth has often outpaced the pastoral and theological training to match it. But the Global South now holds the numerical majority of all Christians, and Western Christians who imagine themselves the main characters of Christian history have simply misread the map.

PART 8 — WHAT THIS MEANS FOR PLEASANT SPRINGS CHURCH

A small congregation in West Tennessee is part of something immeasurably larger than itself. Five implications.

1. Our prayer list must reach beyond our county. When we pray “your kingdom come,” we pray with Christians in Nigeria, Brazil, Korea, and Iran. The advance of the gospel in their lands is as much our business as the health of our own members.

2. Our missions giving is leverage, not charity. The most strategic use of American Christian wealth today is usually not to send American missionaries but to resource national Christians already at work — through agencies like Langham Partnership, Overseas Council, TEDS/Langham scholarships, and Global South theological seminaries.

3. The persecuted church is our family. We stand with Nigerian believers under Fulani raids, with Chinese pastors fined and imprisoned, with Iranian converts on trial. “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body” (Heb 13:3).

4. Global Christians are our teachers, not our students. On biblical authority, on the supernatural, on joyful worship, on the courage to suffer, many Global South Christians have more to teach us than we have to teach them. The Langham-style posture of humble partnership is the fitting one.

5. The gospel is doing fine. However discouraging American cultural trends may be, the Christianity of Jesus Christ is not in decline. It is growing faster today than at any point in its history. We do not fight from fear; we work from the confidence that the risen Christ is at work in every nation, and we join him there.

Greek NT (Matt 16:18): σὺ εἶ Πέτρος, καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτῃ τῇ πέτρᾳ οἰκοδομήσω μου τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, καὶ πύλαι ᾅδου οὐ κατισχύσουσιν αὐτῆς. Matthew 16:18 (ESV): “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

PRAYER — SERIES FINALE

Lord of the nations, who from the day of Pentecost has been gathering a people for your own Name from every tribe and language and people, we thank you. We thank you for the Apostles and the Fathers, for Athanasius at Nicaea and Augustine at Hippo, for Benedict and Bernard and Bonaventure, for Waldo, Wycliffe, and Hus, for Luther at Wittenberg and Calvin at Geneva, for the Moravians at Herrnhut and the Wesleys at Aldersgate, for Edwards and Whitefield and Finney and Moody, for Carey and Taylor and Livingstone and Azariah, for Boice and Sproul and Packer, for John XXIII and Rahner and Ratzinger, and for the great host of Global South saints living and dying today for your Name — Janani Luwum, Simon Kimbangu, Watchman Nee, Oscar Romero, and the thousand thousand unnamed faithful in Nigeria, China, Iran, Korea, India, and beyond. We stand at the end of a long line of witnesses, and we confess that the line is not ours to end. Grow your church in this generation as you have grown it in every generation since Pentecost. Make us, in our own small place on the earth, faithful to pass on what we have received. To the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be glory, now and forever, world without end. Amen.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. The center of gravity of global Christianity has moved from Europe to the Global South in the last century. What should this change, if anything, about how an American congregation thinks about itself, its giving, and its prayer?

2. Philip Jenkins argues that Global South Christianity tends to read the Bible more supernaturally than Western Christianity does. Read Ephesians 6:10–20 and Acts 19:11–20. Which reading of Scripture — the supernatural or the demythologized — is closer to the text?

3. Prosperity theology has caused real damage in parts of Africa and Latin America. Is that a reason to avoid partnerships with Global South churches, or a reason to invest more deeply in theological education partnerships like Langham?

4. René Padilla’s phrase misión integral — gospel proclamation plus social embodiment — was a corrective to both a reductive evangelicalism and a gospel-less social activism. How do we live in a way that preserves both sides?

5. Looking across this whole Church History series — from the Apostles to today — what has most deepened, challenged, or corrected your own understanding of the church? Where do you see Pleasant Springs Church’s own place in the story?