Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion, professing that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and is the Son of God, whose coming as the Messiah was prophesied in the Hebrew Bible and chronicled in the New Testament. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with over 2.4 billion followers, comprising around 31.2% of the world population. Its adherents, known as Christians, are estimated to make up a majority of the population in 157 countries and territories.
The history of Christianity is part of the history of a great many civilizations. Christianity's influence has been both vast and inextricably intertwined with the histories of the many cultures it has inhabited. It has been a source of social services. It has introduced and furthered literacy and education, created and managed hospitals and hospices, invented and spread technologies and spurred economic development. Christian history includes instances of intolerance and violence that were part of the development of European cultural identity, politics, law, human rights, ideas on separation of church and state, and practices of tolerance and intolerance, activism and emancipation. Christianity has impacted the status of women, children and the poor, race and gender, and issues of justice and injustice. Art and architecture, music and philosophy, family life, marriage, and even views on sex have been affected by it.
Missiology is the academic study of the Christian mission history and methodology. It began to be developed as an academic discipline in the 19th century.
Indigenous churches are churches suited to local culture and led by local Christians. There have been two main Protestant strategies proposed for the creation of indigenous churches:
- Indigenization: Foreign missionaries create well-organized churches and then hand them over to local converts. The foreign mission is generally seen as a scaffolding which must be removed once the fellowship of believers is functioning properly. Missionaries provide teaching, pastoral care, sacraments, buildings, finance and authority, and train local converts to take over these responsibilities. Thus the church becomes indigenous. It becomes self-supporting, self-propagating and self-governing.
- Indigeneity: Foreign missionaries do not create churches, but simply help local converts develop their own spiritual gifts and leadership abilities and gradually develop their own churches. Missionaries provide teaching and pastoral care alone. The church is thus indigenous from the start. It has always been self-supporting, self-propagating and self-governing.
James Hal Cone was an American Methodist minister and theologian. He is best known for his advocacy of black theology and black liberation theology. His 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power provided a new way to comprehensively define the distinctiveness of theology in the black church. His message was that Black Power, defined as black people asserting the humanity that white supremacy denied, was the gospel in America. Jesus came to liberate the oppressed, advocating the same thing as Black Power. He argued that white American churches preached a gospel based on white supremacy, antithetical to the gospel of Jesus.
Black theology, or black liberation theology, refers to a theological perspective which originated among African-American seminarians and scholars, and in some black churches in the United States and later in other parts of the world. It contextualizes Christianity in an attempt to help those of African descent overcome oppression. It especially focuses on the injustices committed against African Americans and black South Africans during American segregation and apartheid, respectively.
Kenneth Scott Latourette was an American Baptist minister and historian, specialized in Chinese studies, Japanese studies, and the history of Christianity. His formative experiences as a Christian missionary and educator in early 20th-century Imperial China shaped his life's work. Although he did not learn the Chinese language, he became known for his study of the history of China, the history of Japan, his magisterial scholarly surveys on world Christianity, and of American relations with East Asia.
Monotheism—the belief that there is only one deity—is the focus of the Abrahamic religions, which like-mindedly conceive God as the all-powerful and all-knowing deity from whom Abraham received a divine revelation, according to their respective narratives. The most prominent Abrahamic religions are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They, alongside Samaritanism, Druzism, the Baháʼí Faith, and Rastafari, all share a common core foundation in the form of worshipping Abraham's God, who is identified as Yahweh in Hebrew and called Allah in Arabic. Likewise, the Abrahamic religions share similar features distinguishing them from other categories of religions:
Christianity in Africa arrived in Africa in the 1st century AD, and in the 21st century the majority of Africans are Christians. Several African Christians influenced the early development of Christianity and shaped its doctrines, including Tertullian, Perpetua, Felicity, Clement of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, Cyprian, Athanasius and Augustine of Hippo. In the 4th century, the Aksumite empire in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea became one of the first regions in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion, followed by the Nubian kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia and several Christian Berber kingdoms.
Church renewal is a term widely used by church leaders to express hope for revitalization of the Church in light of the decline of Christianity in many western countries. The idea of a post-Christian era has made church renewal a popular topic of study among many commentators.
The phrase false god is a derogatory term used in Abrahamic religions to indicate cult images or deities of non-Abrahamic Pagan religions, as well as other competing entities or objects to which particular importance is attributed. Conversely, followers of animistic and polytheistic religions may regard the gods of various monotheistic religions as "false gods", because they do not believe that any real deity possesses the properties ascribed by monotheists to their sole deity. Atheists, who do not believe in any deities, do not usually use the term false god even though that would encompass all deities from the atheist viewpoint. Usage of this term is generally limited to theists, who choose to worship some deity or deities, but not others.
Postchristianity is the situation in which Christianity is no longer the dominant civil religion of a society but has gradually assumed values, culture, and worldviews that are not necessarily Christian. Post-Christian tends to refer to the loss of Christianity's monopoly in historically Christian societies to atheism or secularism. It does not include formerly Christian-majority societies such as present-day region of Turkey and parts of the Balkans that now follow other religions such as Islam.
Lamin Sanneh was the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School and Professor of History at Yale University.
Christianity and colonialism are associated with each other by some due to the service of Christianity, in its various sects, as the state religion of the historical European colonial powers, in which Christians likewise made up the majority. Through a variety of methods, Christian missionaries acted as the "religious arms" of the imperialist powers of Europe. According to Edward E. Andrews, Associate Professor of Providence College Christian missionaries were initially portrayed as "visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery". However, by the time the colonial era drew to a close in the later half of the 20th century, missionaries were viewed as "ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them", colonialism's "agent, scribe and moral alibi".
Andrew Finlay Walls was a British historian of missions, best known for his pioneering studies of the history of the African church and a pioneer in the academic field of World Christianity.
The Centre for the Study of World Christianity (CSWC) is a research centre based in New College, the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. It was founded in the University of Aberdeen by Andrew F. Walls as the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World in 1982, but later moved by Walls to the University of Edinburgh in 1986. Its current name was adopted in 2009. The centre is currently directed by Alexander Chow and Emma Wild-Wood.
Harold A. Netland, is a missionary educator turned academic. He is the author or editor of nine books and many journal articles on the topic of religion and philosophy.
Dana Lee Robert is an American historian of Christianity and a missiologist. She is a professor at Boston University, where she has worked since 1984. She was the co-founder of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission in 2001, one of the first university-based Centers on World Christianity in North America. For years, Robert held the School of Theology's Truman Collins Professorship in World Christianity and History of Mission, but in 2022 she was installed in the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorship, the highest distinction bestowed upon senior faculty members who remain actively involved in research, scholarship, teaching, and the University’s civic life.
TheYale-Edinburgh Group on World Christianityand the History of Mission, founded in 1992, is an annual conference about world Christianity, which is held alternatively at Yale Divinity School or New College, University of Edinburgh.
Christian doctrines, ideologies and beliefs have influenced the manner in which human interactions with land, soil, and plants are manifested, both as a historical interplay between Christianity and land, and more contemporary movements where diverse sets of biblical readings, theological interpretations and Christian ethics are manifested in Christian approaches to food production.
