#197 | What Does the Future of Christianity Look Like? Pt. 1 | Gina Zurlo

What is the role of the United States in a world Christianity where Western Christianity is no longer the majority, but the USA is still the country with the most Christians, and the USA is the country that sends the most missionaries overseas, and the USA is home to most of the Christian wealth. Okay, so the USA clearly has a role in the formation of world Christianity in some way, but it can't be what it was.

It cannot be the exportation of American culture combined with mission. It cannot be the exportation of American theological trends along with theological education.

And so that's what Christians of the global south are really critiquing and pushing back against. They're like, we don't want to be American Christians in Brazil. Want to be Brazilian Christians in Brazil. We don't want it.

We don't want American theology in the Congo. We want Congolese theology in the Congo.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host. And today on our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

What is your church like? When was the last time you looked around to see who was there? I don't mean your friends or, oh, look, there's someone new.

I mean, what kind of people are there? What things are familiar to you? What's normal? Now here's a harder question, and maybe I should say a bigger question.

How does your church fit into your area or your denomination or your tribe? How does it fit into the landscape of the global church?

I mean, have you ever considered how a Christian in Nigeria or Mongolia thinks about you and your church? Most of our audience is like us, Western.

But the place and role of the Western church within the broader global church has undergone a radical shift in the last 120 years.

It's no secret that I love talking about the global church, that here at Apollos Watered, we are committed to understanding it, learning from it, and helping it wherever we can. We've talked to scholars, missionaries and practitioners from around the world. Today I'm starting a different kind of conversation.

It's not about theological or social issues like honor and shame or the formative aspects of technology in our lives. It's not about stories of missionaries or people working on the ground.

No, today's conversation is a 33,000 foot view of Christianity around the world. How do we know what's going on? How has the Landscape changed.

The book is not a typical sit down and read chapter by chapter kind of book. It's a reference book giving an overview of Christianity in 234 countries around the world.

It's the kind of book that cuts through the clutter and the misinformation to give a good overview of what is going on on the ground everywhere in the world.

It's very accessible and it's a great resource for anyone who wants to know more about the church around the world without having to wade through a ton of academic jargon. The research behind this book can open our eyes to what brothers and sisters around the world face, need, and can teach us.

And for us who live in the west who are believers in Jesus, it also points us to some questions we need to ask about our place in the global church. It's because of my experience in my first church in Chicago that I started looking into global Christianity.

I grew up in a small town of about 2,000 people with everyone who looked and sounded like me. But within a couple of years after graduating, I found myself in the inner city of Chicago interacting with people from all over the world.

And I was blown away by their stories of faith and how God had brought them to America. It's led me on a journey that actually began with Henry Blackaby's Experiencing God.

He said that you were to find out where God was working and then join him in that. Seeing how God was bringing the nations to us made me want to join in what God was and is doing.

It made my vision of God increase and it can do the same for you. Since then, my desire has only increased as I've seen our country increase in diversity. I want to see God glorified. And I know you do too.

I want to see you join God in what he is doing around the world, which is why we are having this conversation. If we're to join God in what he is doing in accomplishing his mission, we need to have the eyes to see and the ears to hear it.

And when we do, we will soon discover that God is working in each of our communities already. He's working in mine, and he's working in yours. He has brought or is bringing the nations there already.

And I'm not talking about big urban centers, but small towns as well. You can join in what God is doing. Your vision of God can increase. Your own personal walk with Jesus can be renewed, and so can your church.

And in doing so, you're going to find your faith watered, and then you're going to be watering your world. And from that, you'll see that you are unlocking your mission in the process. So without further ado, let's get to my conversation with Dr. Gina Zurlo.

Happy listening.

Gina Zurlo, welcome to Apollo's Watered. Hi.

It's great to be here.

You say that on all the podcasts, don't you?

I absolutely do, but it's absolutely true. Every time.

Is there ever one, you're like, what happened? Why did I do this? What was wrong? I had no idea what this would be like.

No. Sometimes I say it after the podcast is over, but normally in the beginning, I feel great.

Okay. All right. Well, we're gonna start off with the fast five. Are you ready for the fast five?

I guess I'm scared, but I'm ready.

Okay, this isn't to be scared about, just reading a bit about. In the introduction of your book, you mentioned being a mother to two young girls. So two daughters, right? So here's my question.

What is the one video, if they're allowed to watch videos that you would be happy if it were over today and they never watched it again?

Okay, this is a very hard question to answer because my kids have a large age gap between them. So I have a 6 year old and a 13 year old and they're not watching the same stuff.

Okay, let's go with the six year old. Let's go with the six year old.

I would be happy to leave everything Barbie behind. I don't want to hear any more Barbie. Barbie was great when it was just dolls. When Barbie got on tv. So annoying.

I am necessary to stick with the dolls and the new dolls that are all like, you know, racially diverse and body size positive. All good. But man, Barbie on video. So annoying.

Every parent has that video their kids are listening to. You're like, I could just. For me there was the Wiggles because my kids are a little older, so I just remember singing G'day Squirrels.

We're like visiting Central Park, New York, and I wanted to get rid of that song. So bad. Anyway, all right, how about this? Number two, to relax. I love to blank. What?

TikTok. Seriously, I love TikTok. That is the thing I do. Yes, I'm on TikTok. I've never posted a single video, but I'm scrolling. Wait.

Okay. Okay, Just as an aside, here. You just told me that you've been appointed to what position right now? That. In Harvard. Tell me that I'll be a Yang.

Visiting Scholar in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. And I love TikTok.

I love it. Let's do it again. That's our world today. I cannot do TikTok. But I'm. I don't know. I'm just too old, I guess. I can't even do anything.

It's fun. It's fun. Very interesting.

No, I'm good. I'm happy for you. I'm so happy for you, though. Okay. Because you're a scholar.

I mean, you are a scholar, and you have written the book on all these stats. You were a scholar in world Christianity, respected the world over. My question is, you've traveled to different parts of the world.

I mean, we're Facebook friends, so I've seen some of the posts you've had at different places you've eaten. So what is the craziest food you have eaten?

Yeah, I do tend to post a lot of food when I travel. I probably post more about food than I do anything else when I'm overseas with Christians all around the world, People love food.

It brings everyone together.

It does.

I'll give you two examples not to offend any of our guests from any of these places. I had some pizza in Brazil that was very confusing to me.

There were toppings on this pizza that I did not think should be on pizza, like tuna and corn and things that we generally do not put on pizza. So that was a little bit strange. But even stranger than that was when I was offered horse in Mongolia.

Horse?

Yeah. That was a little. That was a little tough for me. Horse. And like, the. The organs of the horse. Different pieces of the horse, really.

Of respect for me, the guest in a particular place.

Did you eat it?

No, I couldn't do it. I felt so bad, but I just couldn't. I couldn't do it. I was very apologetic. It was just. It was too much for me. Couldn't do it.

You know, when I was a student in undergraduate, we had a class in biculturalism. And the final exam, the professor's like, you don't need to study. You just need to show up. Everybody's like, what?

And he comes in, and it's balut, the Filipino duck egg that's been fertilized. And that was your final exam. You had to eat it.

I would have failed.

We didn't fail it. I think you got to see if you didn't eat it. But because they talk about, eat whatever is set before you, but I can't.

There are certain times I'm just like, I don't know if I can do it. Lord, give me strength to eat this.

Well, also, in Mongolia, they offered me a certain kind of milk and said, about half of the world's population has the enzyme to digest this milk. And about half dozen. Would you like some? And I said, I don't love those odds, so I'm gonna pass. And they were like, that's fair.

Most white people can't digest it. Okay, this is not a culturally insensitive thing at all. So everyone's good.

So Scott Moreau was on Missiologist, and he actually mentioned Mongolia. So what's the crazy. I asked him this similar question, and he said, craziest thing I've ever eaten was fermented mare's milk.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was it. And he goes. He goes. That's when the party started. That's what he said. Because they got a little crazy. It just got a little crazy.

I mean, again, missions, you always are encountering different cultures. You just never know. You never, never know. But you're right. Food brings people together, and that's what I love about it.

Now, because you've traveled, I want you to think of a place you haven't gone. If you could go to one place around the world right now, it would be where and why I would love.

To go to West Africa. I've not been.

And there's so much interesting religious culture happening in West Africa, and Nigeria is a huge player in the current world Christianity and the future of world Christianity.

So I'd love to Nigeria, in particular, I'd love to go there and meet with people and talk to people and get that on the ground experience of what life is like there.

I've not been to Nigeria. I've been to Liberia. But I always love the different cultural parts of Africa that have all the different, like, styles and fashions in Nigeria.

For those of my Congolese listeners, I mean, I have a lot of friends, but they have the coolest clothes in Nigeria. I mean, they're the coolest collars. Every. Like, I. When I travel to Africa, I. I can see. I'm like he's from Nigeria because he just looks good.

Yeah.

I mean, crazy.

The women, they're just astoundingly beautiful. And the color, so much color, what they wear. I could never pull it off. Too pale. Amazing women in the patterns and the colors. I love it.

I mean, I mean, me too. I had a guy, I mean, he wasn't African. He was, you know, dark skinned. He's. He's African American.

And he was at church when I was a youth pastor years ago. He comes in, it's like fluorescent orange. And I was like, I was like.

You can pull that off.

I would look like a big giant creamsicle. I would look so bad. But you look so good with it. I mean, just the bold colors.

I just love how they, the cultures, different cultures that have those different colors. I just love it. It's just beautiful. I wish I could pull it off. Wish I could pull it off. Okay, last question.

If I were to be any city in the world, not the United States, it would be what and why not visit? You would be this city.

Be it.

Be this city.

What kind of question is that?

That's a great question, Gina. It's a great question.

How do you be a city?

Okay, well, I mean, you could be a store, a car. It's just, this is the part of the fun. It's the fun part, Gina. It's the fun part.

I'm a quantitative sociologist. I don't know.

You don't think like this.

Facts and figures and data. Okay, so let's say, oh, I don't know. Okay, let's say, oh, it has to be outside the United States. Let's say Edinburgh, Scotland.

Edinburgh, Scotland is like a fairy tale city. And I just love that it's got all these combos of old and new kind of juxtaposed together. It's a very complex place.

So if I were Edinburgh, Scotland, I guess I'd be drinking whiskey, wearing tartan and kind of taking a view the bagpipes.

And eating haggis.

Yeah. Have you ever had haggis? Don't knock.

No, I want to, though. I do. I really want to. You know, I had, I had the historian Carl Truman on the show and I asked him like, what's his non academic hobby?

And he's like, well, I gave my wife a choice. He goes, it was blues guitar or the bagpipes. She chose blues guitar. But I would love to play the bagpipes.

Yeah, they're amazing.

I would love to play the bagpipes. It's my favorite accent to Imitate. I love to imitate Scott's people.

Hold my hand in the dark light we're fighters we won't surrender now we know hard times come easy we're feeding us with hope. Let's get further into this. Let's hear a bit about your bio. I want to know who you are and how you get into. You even said quantitative.

Did you say quantitative? Not qualitative. Quantitative analysis. Being a scholar in world Christianity, how in the world did you get that? How did you come to faith?

I mean, and what led you to that? So let's hear that.

Yes. I will say most little girls growing up do not say, I want to be a quantitative sociologist when I grow up.

So it wasn't like I had this lifelong dream to end up where I am today. But there were lots of different things along the way that kind of led me in this direction. So I am 4th generation Italian American from New York.

All my great grandparents came from Italy. Grew up with a very strong scent, Italian American culture. But we were also Protestants, so Protestant Italian Americans.

My grandfather got saved watching a Billy Graham crusade on tv. Now down his knees in front of the TV and gave his life to Christ. And that kind of had rippling effects throughout my family.

But when I got to Gordon Conwell to do my master's degree, I really was questioning a lot of the Christianity that I was raised with. Kind of a more fundamentalist, narrow road kind of Christianity is what I was raised in and what I'd been exposed to.

But when I got to Gordon Conwell, I bumped into, by accident, the center for the Study of Global Christianity.

And learning about Global Christianity just blew open the doors for me, not just professionally, but personally, because even though I had always kind of been curious about other places around the world, even when I was young, I was curious about other religions I loved. Remember the Animaniacs, that show in the 90s? And Yakko had that song about the countries in the world. I loved that song.

I just listened to it over and over and over again because there were all these places in the world that I had never heard of or I knew nothing about. And I thought, this is awesome. So I love maps and all kinds of stuff.

And so when I got to Gordon Conwell, I started to learn kind of the religious side of that and all the different expressions of Christianity all around the world was so interesting to me personally that you can be a Christian in all these different ways. You don't have to be a Christian in the very specific way that you were raised.

Christianity is so diverse ethnically and linguistically and theologically and culturally.

You can find your own way in world Christianity based on how you were created, your personal experiences, how you interpret the scripture, all these kinds of things. And so it really helped bolster my faith to consider myself part of this global Christian family.

Okay, that is awesome. Especially the global part, because I have a very similar story. But because you are an Italian, I didn't know this. My wife is Sicilian. I mean, she's.

Well, not from Sicily. Like, her family came over, you know, third generation. I have to ask this question. I would have put it in the fast five had I known this.

How do you do your sauce?

And do you call it gravy?

My grandfather called it gravy, but we now call it sauce.

Okay.

And it has to be. I mean, I'm not like crushing tomatoes with my feet the way I get crazy ideas.

What do you put in your sauce, though? What do you put in your sauce?

Crushed potatoes or puree and then paste and all the different spices.

But you don't do like.

See, my wife does eat in the sauce.

My wife does hard boiled eggs.

That's because she's from Sicily. It's okay. It's okay.

Oh, so her grandmother put in, like, pulled chicken, Italian sausage, meatballs.

Sausage and meatballs. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, it's just. Otherwise it just tastes acidic. Once you put the meat in there, that's what really gives it all of its flavor.

And you let it sit all day, the sun. I let it sit all day. That's the key.

Okay, that's. Sorry I had to take that. I had to take on that journey because I always want to know how people.

I'm like.

Because I married into this, so my, you know, my wife's side is Italian, so I'm always like, okay, is. Is this really the Italian experience of every Italian? I mean, how do they differ between people? But that helps me out a little bit.

All right, so let's get to a little bit of this. Global Christianity, a guide to the world's largest religion. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. This is filled with information, incredible information.

What led you to write this book? I mean, you've written other books that are much more dense, much more expensive, and much more big.

This seems more of a guide to regular non academics. Would that be the right term or am I missing.

Absolutely, yes. That is absolutely the audience for this book.

And that was the motivation for this book was to get high quality, researched, reliable information on Christianity around the world into the hands of normal People, because normal people are not going to read my thousand page hardback encyclopedia of World Christianity. No one's going to read that. And that's totally fine and I don't mind.

So I created a baby version, a paperback, interesting maps, charts, graphs and stuff written in a way that's meant to be accessible for regular people to say, hey, my church is doing a missions trip to Kenya. What is Kenya? What's going on in Kenya?

You can open the book, go to Kenya, and you get a brief overview of, oh, here's the kinds of Christianity that are there. Here's a little bit of the history of Christianity in Kenya. Here are some of the things I should think about if I'm going to go to Kenya.

It's made with that idea in mind.

Okay. And it's relatively. I mean, it's just came out. It's not been out that long.

That's right. And you can buy it on Amazon for only like 25 bucks. So the goal is to really get it into hands of people who need good information.

There's a lot of bad information on the Internet. Like you want to Google Christianity in Kenya, you're going to get all kinds of stuff, some of it good, some of it bad.

And you might not know how to sift through what's right or wrong or what's well researched, what's not. And so I've kind of collated all that for you and simmered it down to what I think are the most important things you should know about a place today.

So you're telling me that I can't believe everything that I read on the Internet?

Please do not believe everything that you read on the Internet, please.

I heard that quote too. I think Abraham Lincoln said that.

Yes, I read it on the Internet.

I'm like, I remember seeing that. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet, Abraham Lincoln. I'm like, that's, that's so true. Because it is, right?

There is so much bogus stuff out there today. I mean, the Internet is a great blessing, but it's also, it's exhausting to have to sift through what's real and what's not.

And this is why I wanted to highlight your work, because I know the amount of research, the study, the immensity of scholarship, and how it's not just people armchair guessing. This is serious, serious data that people out there can look at and anybody can really get into. But let's start off, let's break it down here.

Let's start off with the categories of religion. This is the part, even in the beginning, you really lay out your terms, you give it an immersion into it.

I don't even think people are often think about this, but you simplified it. So how many categories of religion are there?

So we track 18 categories of religion. So that's Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, so on and so forth. So we have 18 categories, including atheists and agnostics.

There's just no good category to include them both, even though they're technically non religion. So there's 18 categories of religion. That's the top level of our taxonomy. And then it goes down from there.

Okay, so we have the 18 categories of religion and even that.

I mean, you're talking about all these major world religions and they're, they're found all over the world, or just some of them are in different parts of the world. I mean, is that, how do you, how do you even quantify that? That's just crazy to me.

Yeah, so we have a massive data collection mechanism that we have a whole team of research assistants who are constantly scouring all the best information. So there's three major sources of quantitative data on religion. The first is government censuses.

So people check a box on a census, whether you're Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist or whatever.

And then there is social scientific surveys and polls which are happening all over the place all the time, asking people what religion they are, how often they pray, how often they go to church, things like that. And then what we're doing is collecting data from religious communities themselves.

So Christians who have membership roles, who give data to their denominational heads, things like that.

And then we're taking all this information in and weighing how good or bad each of the sources are to come up with our own best estimates for the size of every religion in every country of the world.

So with this information that you have, who is using, I mean, give us some, some groups that are using your material. I mean, yes, we know denominations and things like that, but what about, like news agencies? Are they tapping into what you're using too?

Yes.

Anytime anything religion related happens on the global scale, we're getting a call from the New York Times, from the BBC, from the Washington Post, from Christianity Today, from all different kinds of news outlets, both secular and religious, saying, hey, what's the context that this is happening in?

So, for example, when the Pope resigned, my phone was ringing off the hook when the Pope resigned, because everyone's like, what's going on in global Catholicism? And who do you think the next Pope is going to be, where is he going to come from?

So all these global events that religion is involved in some way, we're there to provide kind of that long term analysis of, hey, here's how that religion has changed over time in that country, or here are the projections for what it might look like in the future.

So let me ask you this because you've got your finger on the pulse of global Christianity. The thing that I really want to know about. Yes, you have all these research assistants, but not everyone's writing in English.

How many of these different. I mean, how do you find out what people are writing in different languages? I mean, just that, just that is exhausting.

Yes.

So how do you do all that? How do you find out where these, what they're publishing in their different languages?

Yeah, so we do research in other languages as much as we possibly can. So part of that is bringing on native speakers to our team who speak key languages like Spanish and Chinese and things like that.

Also, frankly, the tools have gotten a lot more sophisticated. Google Translate is a lot better than it used to be. And you can translate pretty much every website into English.

Google Lens, you can use your phone to put it up against different languages and it'll instantly translate it for you. But also the thing that we do is we travel. And that's why I travel so much.

It's because you go to a place to find what those resources are that aren't available online or aren't available in the English speaking world. So travel is a huge part of what we do.

Not just because we love it and we love the culture and the food and all that, but it's critical to the method itself.

I know it's happening in Mongolian Christianity because I've spent time with Mongolian Christians who have given me information that is not widespread outside of Mongolia.

What do you do with people that don't have the language that's written? I mean, that's just. Or it's orality based.

Yeah. We do our best to provide estimates for those kind of tough situations. And that's why working with missions and missionaries is really important too.

Who are Christians working among groups that are orality based? It's missionaries.

And often missionaries, they know what's happening on the ground, often more than a government or a survey or a census could ever know what's happening on the ground. They have that nuanced perspective.

So we get a lot of information from on the ground missionaries and then we are always sure, especially with sensitive context data, to present it in a way that no one would ever be identified or put into danger in any way.

Young man, not much younger than I.

Don't you know that you got your.

Whole life to be worried about all the things that are bringing you down? You mentioned early in the onset, what. You studied this because you saw how Christianity was expressed in different parts of it.

How many different Christian traditions? And I feel like I have to brace myself for this, because there's going to be a huge answer. How many Christian traditions are there?

How many did you include, and what made you include them as a tradition?

So it's actually a small number, depending on how you think it is.

Okay.

So we identify what we call four major Christian traditions, which are Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and independents. It's only four, but within those four major Christian traditions, we estimate there are 45,000 denominations in the world. So that's the big number.

But also, keep in mind, there's 2.5 billion Christians in the world. So there's a lot of Christians in the world, but there are a lot of denominations. And part of the reason is kind of the two sides of a coin.

So one is when missionaries went and planted churches all around the world, a lot of those churches disinherited indigenous Christians. So the indigenous Christians weren't allowed to have leadership positions or all these different kinds of things.

So indigenous Christians, such as in Africa, sub Saharan Africa, they broke away from the mission, founded churches to start their own denominations, and they did it because they wanted to be Christian in a way that made sense for them culturally. So that makes sense. So that splintering has happened quite a lot. And in doing so, we have all these.

All these denominations that make cultural and linguistic sense in that context, and that's a good thing. But the other side of the 45,000 denominations coin is theological disagreement.

It's just Christians who can't get along on all different kinds of things, some quite serious, like the role of women in your denomination or the role of LGBTQ people in your denomination. And some of it is rather trivial, like the color of the carpet or what time the church service is going to be or something frivolous like that.

So we have lots of reasons why there are so many different denominations in the world. So some, in my opinion, more legitimate.

Reasons than others, understandably, with that 45,000. I mean, you compiled this out on this. I'll wait. Can you name all of them? Just go ahead. You can start.

How much time do we have? I can start with the letter A.

45,000. Okay. So all those traditions, which is the biggest one Catholics.

How many?

About a billion. About half of the world's Christians are Catholics.

And so then the second largest would be roughly Protestants. Okay.

And then independence, and then Orthodox.

So Orthodox are the smallest. How many Orthodox flavors are there?

Well, there's two major branches, so there's Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox. So the Orthodox Church is just structurally different because it's more aligned with ethnicity and history and culture.

So within the Eastern Orthodox, you have all the different flavors. Russian Orthodox, Ukrainian Orthodox, Belarusian, Romanian, Greek.

And then within Oriental Orthodox, you have, say, the Ethiopian Orthodox, the Eritrean Orthodox, so on and so forth. So it kind of matches the ethnic community.

Wow. I spent a year going through the Orthodox study Bible just wanting to learn more, to understand how.

How did we get our canon, how, you know, theirs and their shape. Because I do want to understand Christianity around the world to see how it's different incarnations and what it looks like.

But when you get into the different Christian traditions, you even have another subgroup, and forgive me if I'm not classifying this right, but you have different Christian movements within that. Would that be right? What are these Christian movements?

Yes. So within the four major traditions are two movements. One is the Evangelical movement, and the second is the Pentecostal Charismatic movement.

And the reason we call them movements is because they're found within the major Christian traditions.

So you can be, for example, a Catholic Charismatic, or a Protestant Evangelical, or an Independent Charismatic, or Independent Evangelical Charismatic. So there's overlap between the movements and the traditions.

And that's where some of the complexity comes out in World Christianity of who is an Evangelical, who is a Pentecostal, who is a charismatic. So we're wrestling with all those kinds of discussions as well.

Well, when you get into that, how do you identify? That's the question I get when I talk to people about stats. And they want to know how many Christians are in the world.

Inevitably, they want to know about certain sex groups, cults that have been classified, and usually.

I remember talking to Todd Johnson about this, your colleague, and he was mentioning that you allow self identification because it's too difficult for your quantitative purposes to go through the different aspects. So is it that self identification fills you in that stat?

Is that how that works, that they identify as Christian, or do they not identify as Christian, even though they might be like Jehovah's Witnesses, for example? Where do they fit in there?

Yeah, absolutely. That's a fabulous question.

And it's a question everyone should always ask whenever you see statistics, what is the definition of the thing that they are Describing statistically. Ask the questions, scrutinize the data, be a little bit skeptical and then do your homework to find the answer.

So it's okay to ask those kinds of questions of data, even my own data. Ask the question, what do you mean by this? Who are these people?

So because we are social scientists, we are using self identification as our measuring stick for all religions in the world. If I were a theologian or a biblical studies scholar or something else, I might use a different measuring stick.

So if you self identify as a Christian, you are a Christian. So that means groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Mormons, they self identify as Christians.

So therefore we include them as such. I'm not going to make any theological statements about who's quote in or out of world Christianity. That's someone else's job, frankly.

So you're just looking at the quantitative, just from a self identification for sheer statistical analysis, not a theological junction or any type of theological parameters put with all of these.

That's correct.

But you're not only looking at global Christianity. I mean, yes, I know you're examining global Christianity, but you also see other religions too.

And do you see that when you're identifying like Islam?

When you're looking at Islam, I mean there's of course you have the Sunnis, the Shias and then Sufis, which is kind of another sub kind of group into that. And then you have kind of the folk Islam. Do you use the same type of criteria for describing them?

Because other Muslims would say, okay, that's not a Muslim. You're like, well, they identify as such.

Yes, we use the same self identification tools as we do for Christianity, for other religions as well.

So if you self identify, identify as a Muslim, you're a Muslim, even if this particular school of Islam doesn't think your school is quote real Islam. Because global Islam is just as diverse as global Christianity is.

Islam in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, is way different than Islam in Saudi Arabia, the home of Mecca and Medina. They're just different kinds of Islam, much like Christianity in Saudi Arabia and Christianity in Indonesia are really, really different.

So that's why taking the self identification route kind of protects us a little bit frankly from making statements, making qualitative judgments. I don't want to be in the business of making judgments on people's faith or the practice of their faith. I'm not interested in that.

I want to describe who they say they are and where they fit in the global picture. That's what I want to do.

Okay, so that makes it a bit more objective, though, across the board, because you're applying the same criteria through every. I mean, it's the same mechanism, that being judgment. So you're not putting a theological layer on top of this.

That's for theologians and biblical scholars, right?

That's right.

Okay. So taking that into consideration, you've seen these. These movements, these growths, these branches.

We all know, though, that, I mean, you're examining, even over time, the best that you can, according to the information that you have. And we've seen this shift, and I've seen it time and time again.

I've seen it in your research, where you've seen a shift in global Christianity over the past hundred years, give or take, but specifically from the Global north and the Global South. Now, I want us to just take in for a minute, define these two different arenas or spheres, I guess, locations.

I'm not even sure what to describe it as, but Global north is what regions does that take in? And Global south, because it's not just a clear line dividing, the equator being the dividing line. It's not that clear of a line.

Exactly. We're using United nations designations for how we structure the world. I don't decide, for example, how many people live in India.

The United nations puts together in their demographic database every two years how many people live in India and all the other countries. My job is to figure out the religious situation of all the people who live in India.

So the United nations divides the world into Global north and Global South. So the Global north is Europe and North America, and the Global south is Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania.

Now, this is not a perfect way to divide up the world, but we need language to talk about what we're doing. And there has been discernible trends of the shift of Christianity from the Global north to the Global South.

That's what my predecessor, David Barrett, discovered and quantified for the first time something that people had sensed was happening. Ooh. Europe and North America are becoming more secular, but Christianity seems to be growing in Africa and other places.

And the David Barrett came along and said, yep, that's true. And here are the numbers that I can. That I've come up with to show you that the shift is happening.

And from there, the whole field of world Christianity just exploded because people realized and started asking questions, well, what's the role of Western Christianity if we're not the majority anymore? What does that mean for mission? What does it mean for theological education? What does it mean for money?

You know, where's the money in world Christianity? Where are the resources? The implications of the shift are massive and still being worked out by Christians around the world today.

I'm about to explode with questions. I have so many questions. I have so many questions, Gina. Okay, so with the shift that's going on, this shift. So, okay, you said 60. How many.

What's the percentage now in Global South? 63%, 67%. How many resources, though, does North America have, specifically the United States, in proportion to it? Because we have.

How many Christians in the global north, not just the United states? I know.

33%, 33%.

And how much of the world's wealth?

How much of Christian wealth?

Yeah.

A lot of it. A lot of it.

Okay. You gotta be a statistician and you throw out a lot of man. You gotta get.

I don't have every number in my head all the time. You want me to look it up in the database? I'll look it up. Let's just say most of it.

Okay, most of it. Okay, most of it.

That's one of the tensions of world Christianity. Most of the Christians live in the south, but most of the Christian money is still in the North. So what do we do about that?

Oh, that's a great question. Tell us, is there an answer? No, there's not an answer.

There's no. No easy answers.

There is no. There are no easy answers. Very complicated. You also mentioned Christian families within a movement. What are these Christian families?

That was something that I hadn't seen. So I was curious on what you were talking about when you were writing about this. What are the Christian families within the movement?

Yeah, so the families level is a rather new addition to our taxonomy, which puts together Protestants and Independence into discernible families that some people call denominations Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Adventists, all different kinds of groups. So often when people ask, what is your denomination? They expect, oh, I'm Baptist or own Lutheran or I'm Methodist.

Technically, the denomination level for us is you're not just Baptist, you're American Baptist, you're not just Lutheran, you're Evangelical Lutheran Church. Missouri Synod. Right. So it's one level lower, but the family's level helps answer questions like how many Methodists are in the world?

How many house churches are in the world? That level. So it's our attempt to use language that normal people use and understand more clearly.

So how many families are there?

Well, that's a great question. We went back and forth quite a lot to try to figure out how many Christian families they were, and we landed on about 20.

But it's a pretty nebulous, you know, line, I think, in some way, because we can define it any way we want. We're the ones making up the taxonomy of world Christianity. So we have a lot of power, frankly, to decide what it's going to be.

It's scary. It's like, oh, what's it going to be? You know, being Italian, it kind of sounds a little bit like the Mafia.

Instead of the five families, we have the 20 families. We got the 20 families of Christianity, and we're going to name them.

No, don't worry. No one's going to be wearing cement boots at the end of this, so don't worry.

Wow. All right, so let's focus in on North America just for a moment. I want to move around the world talking about these.

What are the fastest growing religions in North America? And, well, specifically the United States, because I know you have Canada and you've got Mexico when we're talking about North America.

But let's just zoom in on the United States. What are the fastest growing religions in the United States?

So all religions are just within Christianity.

All religions.

Okay. So if we look at immigration trends, we know that Islam is growing pretty quickly in the United States.

And it's not because people are converting to Islam in the usa. It's because of the arrival of Muslims from other places around the world.

Now, under recent presidential administrations, that has been lessened, so we're seeing less of that. But I think Islam is definitely on a growth trajectory.

But what's also on a growth trajectory is the Pentecostal charismatic movement, both because of people leaving what we call mainline denominations for Pentecostal churches, but also the arrival of immigrants from Latin America. Many of them are Catholic. Many of them are Catholic Charismatic, or many of them are Pentecostal as well.

So both kind of internal switching within Christianity and also the arrival of newcomers to the country.

What are the. The fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States?

That data, I don't know off the top of my head, but I'm gonna take an educated guess that it's Latinos.

Okay. Do you know who would be second?

No, I'd have to look that up.

Okay. I was just curious because I know that we're becoming more diverse as a culture. That's for sure.

Absolutely.

And what I mean, yet there's also been a massive decrease of Christianity within the United States. Specifically, what are we seeing there from a statistics standpoint?

Yeah. The USA is an outlier in so many different ways, both good and bad.

So the United States is the country with the most Christians in the world today and projected to continue to be the country with the most Christians. But the internal dynamics of Christianity are changing.

So how can Christianity be declining in the USA but still be the country with the most Christians? Well, it's because of immigration from Latin America. Most Christians. Most people in Latin America are Christians.

So when they cross the border and they come here, that helps bolster the Christian population in the usa. So that means white Christianity is declining the fastest in the United States.

But Latino, Latina Christianity, even black Christianity, Asian Christianity has a much more robust staying power than white Christianity appears to have.

And what are the fastest then? I mean, if you're seeing Christianity go down and it still has the. The world's largest amount of Christ, what's the second largest?

Isn't that Brazil or is that Russia?

Brazil.

You had the top 10 countries of Christianity and nine out of 10 were in the global north, if I remember correctly. And then fast forward and it was like, whoa. I mean, it was a huge shift.

So seeing that trend, what does that mean for the church here in the United States going forward?

That's the million dollar question.

What is the role of the United States in a world Christianity where Western Christianity is no longer the majority, but the USA is still the country with the most Christians, and the USA is the country that sends the most missionaries overseas. And the USA is home to most of the Christian wealth.

Okay, so the USA clearly has a role in the formation of world Christianity in some way, but it can't be what it was. It cannot be the exportation of American culture combined with mission.

It cannot be the exportation of American theological trends along with theological education. And so that's what Christians of the global south are really critiquing and pushing Back against.

They're like, we don't want to be American Christians in Brazil. Want to be Brazilian Christians in Brazil. We don't want to. We don't want American theology in the Congo. We want Congolese theology in the Congo.

And that is a really hard thing for American Christians to understand, frankly, because like anyone else in the world, we're very American centric. Everyone where they live is kind of centered on themselves. Thai Christians are Thai centric, Mongolian Christians are Mongol centric. Right.

American Christians are American centric. But we've just had this history in America of imposing our values on other people and expecting other people to go along with them.

But in terms of world Christianity, that era is over. We are not to be exposing other people to our values and expecting them to just wholesale them, wholesale, adopt them anymore.

That is a colonial narrative that's passed.

And we need to think of new narratives of partnership and mutual respect and taking a step back for other people to take the spotlight and to take the stage. We need more humility in this new world Christianity.

You just opened up a fire hose, Gina. You just shot everyone with so much information right there. And it was awesome. It was awesome.

Talking about colonialization for a moment, and I know some people are like, I don't understand what you're talking about.

Basically the idea is, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that as Christianity was transmitted within a lot of missions, they kind of piggybacked off of one another. The colonialization aspect, making colonies of these different places and the propagation of the faith. Sometimes they worked hand in hand.

Sometimes you hear missionaries not liking the colonialization aspect of it because they wanted to disseminate the gospel. So there's good and bad in there.

What are the negative impacts, though, of colonialization within these different countries that we still see to this day?

You think I opened up a can of worms? I think you opened up a can of worms, to be totally honest.

So it is often stated that Christianity spread around the world primarily in the 20th century on the wings of colonization. Christianity, civilization, commerce and colonization all went hand in hand.

And this is kind of the ugly underbelly of the Western missionary movement because missionaries went along with colonial administrators to all these different places around the world. And most of them were very well intentioned. They did want to reach people with the gospel.

They did want to embed themselves in culture and learn new languages.

But they were also products of their time and really could not separate the gospel and what they read in scripture from their European culture or American culture.

And so the kind of Christianity that they were introducing to, say, people in sub Saharan Africa was a Western form of the faith that you didn't actually get from reading the Scriptures itself. So they did the incredible work of translating the Bible into local languages. Unbelievable efforts.

And in doing so, they raised the dignity of these African languages and gave Africans the power to interpret scripture themselves. Like, what's more Protestant than that? Right? Sola scriptura. Right. We need to be able to translate and understand the Bible for ourselves.

And so the Africans, when they read the Scriptures for themselves for the first time, they looked at the missionaries and said, why have you kept the real Christianity from us? Because what were they reading in Scripture? They were reading about the Holy Spirit coming down.

They were tongues of fire, miracles about Jesus and people following Jesus. They saw all these agricultural references that made a lot more sense to them than to my people living in New York City. Right.

And so all these people encountered this kind of Christianity from the missionaries that didn't really fit. But then they were empowered to find the real Christianity straight from the Scriptures, straight from the example of Jesus.

And then that's why African Christianity is just so robust today, is because they're interpreting it in ways that make sense for them. So there's the good and the bad of colonialism, is there? And. And I think the legacies of colonialism are still ongoing.

The racism, the sexism, the political power moves that happen, all of that is still ongoing. And there's still the ramifications of that you can see all throughout the world. But for on.

But the other side of that is the fact that we have authentic forms of Christianity that we might not have had otherwise.

120 years. And the makeup of the global church has done a radical flip. God is doing an incredible work.

But now 6 out of 10 Christians, almost 7 out of 10 Christians, don't look like me any longer. They actually look the opposite of me. It boggles my mind because the US still has the most Christians in the world, the most resources.

But even here, the dynamics are changing significantly.

The work that people like Gina and her team do is invaluable, not least because it helps us to get a clearer picture of what is going on, on, on the ground around the world. So we can join God in that. We can see both the good and the bad.

We've talked a little bit about colonialism and that's a word that gets thrown around a lot today, often as a weapon. Some don't even want to touch it because of that. But as Gina said, there's both good and bad that goes alongside it. That shouldn't surprise us.

We are both made in the image of God and fallen. We all, including Christians, carry both with us all the time.

Understanding the realities the global church faces in this time of radical change can help us to reimagine our place in it, to deploy resources better, and to recognize ways in which we may need to change. Not to accommodate to our culture, but to be more faithful to Christ and to one another in it.

And in doing so, we will find ourselves renewed and our churches renewed.

Next time we continue the conversation, we're going to be talking about self theologizing the impact of immigration on the global church, why Christianity is often a women's movement met around the world, and the impact of secularism and so much more. Conversations like this can only happen because of people like you.

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If something from this episode has stuck out to you, shoot me an email@travispolloswater.org I'd love to hear from you and then we'll read your comments on the air, provided that they're good. With that in mind, that's it for today. I want to thank our Apollos water team for watering the world.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered Stay watered everybody.