Striving for Bigger Perspectives and Seeing a Bigger God

          Christianity is more than just what happens in the blogging thinktanks of the Midwest and South of our country (myself included!). It's more than just an offensive partisan political stance. At this point, it's even more than a Western religion. God's Truth, as laid out in the Bible, is global.

          I've posted in the past about my powerful realizations of this reality, but I felt I needed to state this again. The geographical center of Christianity is in the southern hemisphere. The respective churches in Africa and China are arguably stronger than in the United States. A Christian ethnomusicologist colleague re-posted a profile of the global average Christian. Here's an excerpt:

          "The average Christian in the world right now is an African or Latin American female in her early 20’s.  She doesn’t read our blogs and she doesn’t read Christianity Today.  She doesn’t know or care who I am and she never will.  The names Piper, Driscoll, Chan, Bell, Stanley, Warren—mean nothing to her.  Like most Pentecostal women coming into the kingdom around the world, words like 'complementarian' and 'egalitarian' are not in her vocabulary, nor Calvinism and Arminianism.  Unlike some of my brothers would lead you believe (where their lunch table is the only one that cares about Scripture and THE GOSPEL while anybody who believes differently from them in these tired conversations are flaming liberals), she takes the authority of the Bible very seriously.  But more importantly, she believes in the power of the Bible in ways that are incomprehensible even for our most rabid 'conservatives.'  The western filter and language that frames these issues will not be determinative for her, unlucky as she is not to read our blogs." 

          Of course, not every American Christian is meant to be an overseas missionary, and we should be thankful for the opportunities we have in biblical education. But let's not forget how big God is, and that he works through people all over the globe. This gives American Christians good perspective, and challenges the cynics who wrongfully limit Christianity as the "white man's religion" and a bunch of other stereotypes that only make sense with very limited exposure to only some churches in America.