Transformations (June 2023)

Dear Friends

An interesting change overtook the world recently. I gather that it happened, if you want to put a date to it, sometime around the end of April this year. It is a change that rewrites the history books and reshapes how the world looks from now on. It certainly undoes the story I have known throughout my life.

The change is all about people and where they are. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, using all sorts of data, has predicted that China has just ceased to be the world’s largest population. The new nation in first place is India. This is the first time since the UN began collecting population data in 1950 that China has not had the biggest population in the world. China’s population peaked at around 1,425,887,337 in 2022 and has been falling ever since. In April of 2023, India’s population is estimated to be 1,425,774,850 and is expected to keep growing for several decades.

India’s population is young; the median age (the half-way point of all ages) is just 28. In the UK the median is 41. India’s population is also finding it hard to find work; half of those of working age are unemployed. But India’s economy is growing rapidly and, according to the International Monetary Fund, it overtook the UK as the world’s fifth largest economy towards the end of 2022 (behind the USA, China, Japan and Germany).

Why write about such things for our church newsletters? I guess, in part, it betrays my background as a geographer before I trained for ministry. I love maps and I love trying to understand how the world looks. But there might be deeper and more theological reasons for attending to all of these facts and figures.

These transformations are a reminder that the world and its people are never static. Change is happening all of the time. It occurs through the forces and processes of nature, even down to the creation of new land as the tectonic plates move across the Earth’s surface (sorry, geography again!). And changes happen due to the impacts of humanity. We shape and reshape the face of our planet. That can be for good as, for example, when we respond to the urgent pleas to protect and restore habitats and even let our gardens go a little wilder through No-Mow-May. And, we confess, it can be for ill as we continue to pump raw sewage into rivers, drop plastics into oceans and hurl carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.

For a significant part of more recent human history, the western world dominated how the planet worked. Whether it be the economics that determined what was made and traded (including enslaved people) and where the profits went, or the ideas that were most persuasive and most published that shaped understanding and drove policy. This recent news about India is but another reminder that things are tilting continuously southwards. The flow of ideas, people, trade, innovation and more is not one-way.

That shift has been very true for Christianity. As the son of missionaries, I am always aware that the story my family is part of is a changing story. Once upon a time it made perfect sense for people to leave the churches of the UK and western world to bring the gospel to communities in the south. That story has plenty of ambiguity of course, given how much evangelism, economics and imperial power intermingled, but it remains one of the most significant evolutions of the Church; a deep commitment for many involved in obedience to Chris’s commission to spread the gospel to all the world (Matthew 28: 16-20). That call took my mum and dad to the South Pacific islands.

But the locus of the Church is very firmly in the southern hemisphere now. According to the Pew Research Center, the global Church comprised around 2.18 billion Christians in 2010 (nearly one third of humanity). In 1910, about two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in western Europe. In 2010, 26% lived in western Europe, 37% lived in the Americas (especially USA, Brazil and Mexico), 24% lived in sub-Saharan Africa and 13% lived in Asia and the Pacific. The speed and scale of these shifts is stunning. In 1910, 9% of the total population of sub-Saharan Africa was estimated to be Christian. That figure rose to 63% in 2010. Of course, statistics like these can be questioned in many ways, but I suspect the general picture is pretty accurate. The Church is a truly global body now.

We see all sorts of impacts from such changes. Our sisters and brothers in Christ around the world are always inviting us to receive of their thinking and experience, their agonies and delights, every bit as much as we have offered ours to them. One little example for me is that my deep love of the gospel of John has been more recently informed by a book given to me by an academic who spent a sabbatical at Westminster College. Asish Thomas Koshy is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Union Biblical Seminary in Pune, India. He concludes, Christian faith emerges in John’s gospel amidst, “… a context of struggle and a search for identity.” He brings his Indian perspective to the familiar texts. I, for one, rejoice that it can be so. We are all, always, needing to learn.

Yours in Christ,

Neil