The phrase “World Christianity differs from traditional Western Christianity” bothers me a bit. Why is “Western Christianity” an individual unit, while the rest of the world gets boxed into “World Christianity”? Living in east Africa, I can tell you that Christianity here is different in some regards from how it is in west Africa and southern Africa. Having also done work in Christian circles in central America and east Asia, I can also say that Christianity is not uniform in those circles as well.
I’m not a fan of the clumping inherent in the word “world Christianity”. It works as a stand in, I guess, but it doesn’t grasp the complexity of the situation. The Christianity outside of western circles is not this monolithic entity that “world Christianity” seems to imply. Yes, I know this is obvious, but I still think it needs to be said aloud.

Having read much of this book, I would say that Noll agrees with you. Gathering up all the areas of the world into the word “World” doesn’t imply that it is all the same.
That specific quote is about how modernistic Western Christianity has almost no place for “spirits,” while much of the rest of the world does.

Western Christianity used to have more room for spirits. We need to understand why that room has largely disappeared and ask if the same forces are having a similar effect elsewhere. Does Noll address this?

I probably won’t have time to follow the discussion today, so this will be my only contribution…it’s gonna be long though.
From my perspective there are two major churches in China. The TSPM (Three-Self Patriotic Movement) Church and the house church movement.
The TSPM has been heavily influenced by the Western church. While living in China I would weekly attend a TSPM Thursday night “youth” service (that meant 20-40 year olds). Anywhere from 2-3k would attend each week. There were projectors with words for songs, many of which were Western songs translated into Chinese. There was a choir which would sometimes wear robes and there was a dance team. The messages were usually led by a robed, seminary-educated preacher who was strong in speaking skills, short on passion and very intellectual in content. The congregants were usually reserved in their worship and mostly silent during the sermons. There was still a very strong sense of community between the believers and people would arrive long before and stay long after just to chat and discuss things with each other.
This TSPM church did differ from Western churches in a few ways. A good friend of mine, who was a philosophy professor at a local university, became a Christian while we lived in China. She was so excited, and I assumed the TSPM church would baptize her quickly and allow her to take communion with the rest of us. I was wrong. She was admitted into the next catechism class, and only after completing a 3-month training course (which I believe was tri-weekly) was she allowed to be baptized (in a local river) and take communion. It may be more reflective of culture, but the communal aspects of salvation were more frequently addressed in preaching, and it was not uncommon for families to be baptized as a whole (with usually one or two dissenting members). Though, when my professor friend was finally baptized, her family as a whole chose not to support the decision, and only my family and her atheist sister (who later became a Christian) attended the service to “support” her. Due to the demographics of this particular service, I would say that the vast majority (80%+) were college educated, business types…and almost everyone was Han Chinese.
The house church movement was radically different. Through a friend who leads an underground seminary, I was able to be connected with a house church pastor for Chinese language instruction. For the first year of our friendship he was very reluctant to even discuss church with me. Once he began to open up, the discussions were very vague. As he later told me, the house church gets caught when it associates with foreigners, because the government can follow us (where I lived we had to register in each town that we lived and traveled to, and if we didn’t, we usually got a visit from the police to check on us) much more easily than following an underground movement of some 150 million Chinese.
My first experience of actually seeing a house church came one Sunday morning. We were worshipping at our Westerner friend’s home and noticed singing coming from the apartment next door. It was obvious that it was a large crowd. One of the couples who had been living in our city for about 10 years new the song, and shared its meaning with us. As we left, I peaked in the cracked door to their service (people usually come and leave in small groups so as not to alert apartment guards, etc.). The apartment appeared to be used only for this purpose. The ornamentation was simple…nothing but a cross made out of ‘two by fours’ on the wall. The people were crammed inside and a lady was preaching very passionately. The congregation would often hum or say a word or two in response to the key points of the message (sort of like saying “Amen” after a good point in a sermon in America). Not wanting to disturb, I left quickly.
About a year or so after living in China, I asked my pastor friend if I could attend a service with him. He agreed and I went to a “training time” with his church. He said that I had to stay in the back and keep quiet so as not to distract the others. I agreed, although people were frequently coming up and talking with me, seemingly excited that I was there. The worship was much more charismatic than anything I’m used to (I’m Baptist and the TSPM church was only slightly charismatic). Many would wail, shout, dance and be very expressive in worship. Still, this didn’t have the feeling of the typical American AoG or Pentecostal service. The songs were totally Chinese in origin, mostly coming from the hymns written during the “closed” years back in the 60s and 70s. The major theme of the songs was Exodus. The church was passionate that God had delivered the Chinese church, just as he delivered Israel, and that they must take the gospel back to Jerusalem via the Silk Road (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi, etc.). The message was also very passionate. There was a strong sense of conviction with the words of the pastor. The congregation also seemed very intent to hear his words. Salvation is seen communally. It’s almost expected that if God has called you into His Kingdom, that he has called your entire family (parents, cousins, siblings, grandparents). The congregation was much more diverse…as is the case in all of China…they were still urban, and mainly Han Chinese. I knew one leader to be a medical doctor from a local hospital that I had been to on occasion, but knew that many others were not rich. That didn’t seem to be an issue for anyone involved, and they gave money to support those in need in the room, as well as to go toward their “Back to Jerusalem” vision.
Theologically, both churches are very orthodox. Unfortunately, despite the drive for missions in both settings, neither are focused on interior missions in China. Sure, they will share with their friends and families, but some 5-8% of China are minorities and usually very poor, and outside of the LiSu Zu and some more Thai people groups, the gospel has not reached the minorities. It’s also not moved from the cities. In China, Christianity is seen as the faith of the urban and educated. If you want to pray, ask that God will open the hearts of the (atheist and Mahayana Buddhist) villagers, who are usually more poor and uneducated. They usually simply submit to the authoritarian leadership of the local political leader (who is required by law to be atheist), so do not understand that people can have personal beliefs against the rest of the village…in fact, it may require a massive act of God in the villages as a whole to see change due to this communal perspective.

What a great post by Kyle
“How are your areas developing-adjusting,shifting,
rejecting, absorbing…?” As American house churchers
for many years, we cannot be seen as urban and
educated, although the liberal tag of being the
opposite is ludicrous. There are different strains
of American “house church”, which has been
well documented for those who search a little. And
it has been absorbing from “world Christianity”, in
our case because we have traveled extensively.
Do you know that to me it feels very much like
New Testament Christianity, although the term
Organic Church is currently in vogue.

I grew up as a missionary kid with parents working for Wycliffe Bible Translators. Looking back, I am SO proud of the way the translation of the Bible enabled the people of the island to take ownership of their faith instead of just waiting for Westerners to come and teach them more.
Sounds like Wycliffe should start distributing Noll’s book to help raise funds!

“We’re interested in voices from outside the USA: What impacts — good and bad — do you see from the USA when it comes to the Church, and how do you see that influence changing?”
Great questions – hard to be concise in an answer. On USA influences – this is my take, I’m sure others see it differently, and I don’t mean to offend. I live in the Republic of Ireland (very different history to Northern Ireland)- up til recently an intensely Catholic country with old Catholic-Protestant polarities, but now rapidly shifting to full post-Christendom mode. In this mix the church has suddenly also become multi-ethnic, with a strong African pentecostal flavour.
American Christians have had a big influence within the small but growing evangelical community, both through American missionaries and, more pervasively, thru the global reach of publishing and the internet. Hybels, Piper, Carson, Warren, Driscoll, Bell, McLaren etc are all very well known here (and I’m telling everyone about that fella McKnight ..)
Bad stuff first:
- It’s a reality that one of the most damaging things for mission here is to be associated with Bush, right wing politics and American money.
- ‘we know the answers’ and here’s how to do things that work’. More than a few have come and gone, big plans in ashes.
- naivety that all English speaking cultures are basically American with funny accents, when in fact speaking the same (well OK, related) language actually masks huge cultural differences.
- importing American doctrinal disputes. More than a whiff of fundamentalism around and a strong strand of creationism, often associated with US influence. Insistence on premill eschatology is another. I may be wrong, please correct me – but I get the sense that the US church is even more fractious than we are. Large self-sustaining communities don’t need each other. For example in the UK and Ireland there is a strong tradition of pan-evangelical training that I’m not sure exists in the US?
- Irish Christians in a challenging missional context all too often looking to the US for a ‘magic bullet’ model of church (whether Willow Creek or emerging or whatever) that will ‘work’. The sheer ‘successful’ scale of church culture in the US all to often means that others look to it and assume this is the right way to do things. I’ve visited quite a few churches in the US and, especially in a mega church, feel like Spock, ‘this is life Jim, but not as we know it’
- consumer Christianity – personally I’m a bit weary of the ‘latest’ pre-packaged brand coming from the US and generally ignore them. Oh and I wish the God channel could be uninvented ..
Good Stuff:
- so many generous, self-giving, humble and Christ-like Americans have helped build the church here. I count it a blessing and privilege to know quite a few.
- the riches for the global church of the wealth of great biblical, theological and missional resources produced by American Christians.
- those who have been slow to speak and quick to listen. Those who have become ‘as Irish as the Irish themselves’ – there is no short cut to effective mission and church planting.
- US churches who have a heart for global mission. I’ve been humbled more than once by the sincere and generous spirit of American churches to pray and give sacrificially beyond their own needs & interests.
PS
Noll’s book covering similar territory to Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom: the coming of global Christianity? Can I recommend his BRILLIANT follow up book The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. Scot, you might like what he says about James in an interview:
“Oh by the way, I give you a golden rule for trying to understand the Christianity of Africa or Asia. Look at what Martin Luther thought, back 500 years ago, about the good and the bad bits of the Bible. Any book that Martin Luther wanted to throw out of the Bible is at the core of African Christianity. If Luther didn’t like it, it goes down great in Africa. It’s a simple rule for you.” (Philip Jenkins)
He says this because James speaks of the fragile transitory nature of life, a perspective most Westerners know little about. And it is the definitive text for the poor – the condition of the majority of Christians globally.

Thanks much to those who took the time to share their experiences. This was all very interesting to read.

Scott, you keep “making” me buy more new books to add to my stack of unread ones, by summarizing books that then become “must reads” for me. Thanks… I think!