Is the Center of Christianity Shifting from Global North to South?

A conference, titled "The Future of the Church in a Globalized World", sponsored by the Center for Christian Study at the University of Virginia explores the geographically shift of Christianity.

By Katherine T. Phan, Christian Post Reporter Friday, April 02, 2004

Is the center of Christianity really shifting from the global North, which includes North America and Europe, to the global South, which includes Asia, Latin America, and Africa? The conference titled, “The Future of Church in a Globalized World”, will explore just that. The event is sponsored by the Center for Christian Study from April 1-3 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Philip Jenkins, a distinguished professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, has written “[w]e are currently living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide.”

The conference will answer the following questions:

· What is the essence of the Christian Gospel in the global South, and how did the Christian Gospel originally find its way there?
· If Christianity in the global South is being exported to the global North, in what ways is it taking place through immigration, and in what ways through missionary activity?
· What can we learn from history about how the message of Christianity has been translated from one culture to another?
· How do the worship, theology, and polity of the globally southern church compare to that of the northern church?

CONFERENCE PRESENTERS

Plenary Speakers

D.G. Hart
Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Philip Jenkins
Pennsylvania State University

Lamin Sanneh
Yale University

Andrew Walls
University of Edinburgh

Featured Presentations

Charles Farhadian
Calvin College

Special seminars

Frederica Mathewes-Green
Writer and Commentator

Paul Sullins
Catholic University of America

Conference sponsors