Evangelicals and World Christianity: A Review Essay
Laura Merzig Fabrycky Wednesday, 1 September 2004
A review of Whose Religion is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West by Lamin Sanneh, Christianity Reborn: The Global Expansion of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century by Donald Lewis, and Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America by Paul Freston.
A few months ago, the rector of my Washington, DC-area congregation introduced a visiting bishop from Tanzania. As he did, his voiced cracked with emotion, conveying the significance of the bishop's presence that morning. Our rector—a pastor to many of America's powerful and wealthy—expressed to us congregants how he now looked to the Tanzanian bishop for leadership in the Anglican Communion and in the world. This visiting bishop currently oversees a fifteen-year-old diocese undergoing rapid growth; it is barely able to hold the massive influx of new parishioners. Indeed, the Diocese of East Tanzania represents the future of the holy, catholic, and apostolic church to a greater degree than the churches of Washington, DC, the capital of the world's sole superpower. And, because of our current global situation, replete with mobility, digital technology, and global economies, the Diocese of East Tanzania can be connected to our congregation in ways that the Church in history has never known.
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