“Christianity … is translatable, and therefore missionary and expansionist.”
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life – Faith and Conflict: The Global Rise of Christianity – March 2, 2005
Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, Church of England; Member, House of Lords
I … want to begin with a historical perspective, … I want to begin with the early church. Very often one of the problems with Western academia is that they trace the movement of Christianity from Jerusalem to Rome via Athens, and the reason of course that they do this is that they are mainly equipped in the classical languages of Latin and Greek, and so that is what they can do.
But in fact, if you look at the spread of early Christianity, it spread from the earliest times in every direction. You only have to look at the stories about what happened to the apostles, for instance, to get a sense of that. … just as the faith was spreading in the Roman Empire, it was also spreading equally strongly in the other great superpower of that time … the Persian Empire. And the martyrologies that we have from that period in the Persian Empire of Christians who were martyred there are nearly as long as the martyrologies that we have from Rome.
Which was the first Christian nation – the first nation to call itself Christian? The Armenians, of course and then the Ethiopians. … Both Armenia and Ethiopia define their Christian understanding of themselves in terms of the early translations of the scriptures and of Christian writings into their languages: Gregory the Illuminator for the Armenians, and St. Mesrob, and the Syrian monks, who arrived in Ethiopia and translated basic Christian writing into Ge’ez–still the liturgical language of the Ethiopians.
The Church of the East – the so-called Nestorian church – was very strongly missionary in India and in China. And I was very saddened to read in David Aikman’s book, Jesus in Beijing, about a Chinese pastor saying – obviously he has observed Western orthodoxy in this respect – saying how St. Paul had taken the faith to Europe and now, 2000 years later, it had come to China.
Well, I am actually reading a history of two Chinese Christian monks who, in the thirteenth Century, came to the West – by which they mean the Middle East, of course. I mean, when Chinese Christians spoke of the West, they usually meant the Middle East. Rabban and Sauma – one of them became the Nestorian patriarch and the other was sent by him to visit Christians in Europe, and it was a wonderful encounter for this Chinese Nestorian to meet with European Christianity.
So the point is that the translatability of the gospel, … is not something just discovered in the nineteenth century or the twentieth. It has always been the case. And of course, because it is intrinsically translatable, that is why it has become translatable today, whether into African or Asian or Latin American contexts.
Now I would actually just like to refer very briefly to what happened in between the early period and the nineteenth century – or the eighteenth and nineteenth century – … the Jesuits had become the largest chapter in the world now in India, and that’s true. There are over 3,000 Jesuits in India.
The fact is that the Jesuits were very innovative missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And particularly in India and in China, they experimented precisely with this question of translatability. De’ Nobili, in India, began what was called the Indian rite, which was really to render Christianity into a form that the Brahmins, the high-caste Hindus, could recognize and observe. This was quite separate from the ancient Indian-Christian communities that have always existed along the southwestern coast of India.
His efforts were suppressed by Rome eventually – that’s another story – but again, Matteo Ricci in China did exactly the same thing. So this, the present situation in China…, is Christianity’s at least fourth visit in the course of Christian history: the Nestorians, Ricci, the nineteenth century protestant missionaries from Britain and the United States. And now the emergence of an indigenous church through indigenous missionary work after all the missionaries had been expelled from China.
Coming then to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – … while missionaries from America and Europe get all the glory , in fact much of the work was done by local people. If you look at the history of Christianity in East Africa, the missionaries stuck to the coasts in the initial period, and the people they converted then took Christianity into the interior. Very largely these were people movements of Kikuyu, of the Lao and of other tribes in East Africa.
Similarly, my CV will tell you that I was the general secretary of the Church Mission Society. Well, the Church Mission Society has tons – literally tons – of records of its native agents, as they were called, reporting back on what they were doing, and it is quite clear that most of the work done by CMS in the nineteenth century was done by these native agents.
I’ve been for long interested in one of them: a man called Abdul Masih, who was ordained deacon in 1823 and priest in 1824, who was a native agent in northern India. And it is very interesting to see how he describes his work of going to remote villages, how he gets there, how he gets back, the hardships he has to endure, and so on.
Apolo Kivebulaya took the gospel from Uganda to the Congo – to what is now the Congo. Bernard Mizeki, who came from Mozambique originally, took the Christian faith to what is now Zimbabwe. And it is very instructive to read about his missionary methods, his affirmation of the spirituality of the Mashona people, his translation of basic Christian material into their language in a way that was sensitive to culture, and all of those things.
So then we come to the situation today, and there are three things to be said. First of all, the growth in the mainline churches – Mark has referred to that already. The Anglican Churches in Nigeria are saying that in the next ten years they will double their numbers. They’ve already doubled their numbers in the previous 15 years from about 8 million to about 17 million. They’re now saying there will be over 30 million. …
Singapore, similarly. There has been growth in all the mainline churches basically because the mainline churches have adopted some of the methods of the Pentecostals, certainly in Singapore and East Asia. So there is that growth.
Then there is the huge Pentecostal growth, which has been documented very ably by the famous sociologist, David Martin – particularly in Latin America and Africa but also in East Asia. Mark referred to the situation in Korea, but in Brazil you are now approaching a country which has a population of about 30 percent declared Pentecostals. And Pentecostalism is now, in some ways, a new establishment with its own institutions and members of parliament, and so on.
David Martin claims that Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism are the two great currents engaged in the expansion of Christianity at this time, and I think he may well be right.
But there is a third element of this, which is not often talked about because it is quite fragmented, and that is independency. …. David Barrett, the editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia, began his work by studying independency in Africa. And even 20 years ago, he was able to identify 6,000 independent African churches – and maybe many more now of course. So there is a huge engine of growth, which is neither Pentecostal nor mainline but a third force if you like.
Why is the growth taking place at this rate in certain places? Well, the precariousness of life has been mentioned, the spiritual vacuum that certainly exists in some Asian societies has been mentioned, but it also has to do with what happens to people. …
In Latin America, it appears that the reason is that Pentecostals encourage a higher profile for the household. They are family friendly. They are hostile to male machismo culture, which is out in the streets and on the soccer fields and engages in, you know, weekend binge drinking and all those sorts of things. So it is the building up of the family.
It is also work friendly. People are encouraged in habits of work – of, well, punctuality, honesty, and so on, and that is naturally desirable for employers. And it is political quietistic, generally speaking.
Now, this is true not only of Latin America, but also of Africa, and it is one of these ambivalent aspects of the rapid expansion of Christianity. In Latin America, quietistic Pentecostalism has replaced the base communities that were politically very active. Why has it done so? Well, some leaders of the base communities themselves have worked on this, and they have said that while they were concentrating on social, economic and political issues, they were missing out on the spiritual dimension. And so, this is one of the reasons for the spread of Pentecostalism.
It is quietistic. It is sometimes persecuted, particularly in Asia. The case of China has been mentioned, but many other countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Iran and Egypt can also be mentioned. And there is an enormous capacity among these Pentecostal Christians to take persecution.
I have personally been acquainted with many Pentecostals in Iran who have been imprisoned, some have been killed – a very close friend of mine was killed. And they continue to thrive, even in a very unpromising situation.
But that alerts us immediately then to the possibility of conflict. Mark said that in many parts of the world, growing Christian churches and growing Muslim communities are now cheek by jowl – in Central and Northern Nigeria, for example. And from time to time, this has resulted in open conflict. And the dangers elsewhere of further conflict exist already.
This raises questions about another field in which I am very interested, which is the dialogue between Christians and Muslims, and how Christianity and Islam have a particular responsibility, as the two great missionary religions of today, to be accountable not only to one another, but also at the bar of world opinion. And I am personally engaged in a number of dialogues where this is happening to some extent – though you may say perhaps not sufficiently.
I think that’s the kind of angle I would like to give on the intrinsic nature of Christianity – as one that is translatable, and therefore missionary and expansionist. In every age, this has happened differently and so that the most recent missionary history of Christianity is just that: the most recent.
