God's Movement in the Twenty-First Century

What has become of the God movement that broke through in the Civil Rights movement onto ordinary streets of ordinary towns? Those with eyes to see can say that it is alive and well, always there to remind the church of what we are called to be. I am encouraged by the hunger among a new generation for a deeper ecclesiology-and for a richer understanding of what it means to be the church in the world.

The earliest writings of the Christian tradition gave voice to the transnational identity of the faith community. In one of his most widely quoted meditations on the new identity of the Christian, the apostle Paul wrote that "all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ," and there is now "neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3: 27-28). Paul's explorations of life "in Christ" amplify the theme of the "new creation" and the new being's capacity to cross boundaries and to reshape loyalties. Baptism is the sacrament that brings the person into the body of Christ, which is, among other things, an alternative social world, the new humanity. "For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body-whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free-and we were all given the one Spirit to drink" (1 Corinthians 12: 13). As an institution with diminishing social influence in the West, the Protestant church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries too often strove to make itself relevant to a world that was not sure it needed God. This led church leaders to deemphasize the peculiar and the secret in Christian life. Today, however, we hear voices calling us as a global, ecumenical church to retrieve the distinctive resources of the Christian theological tradition. In recent decades, the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted dramatically southward to Asia, Latin America and Africa. The largest Christian communities in the world today are found in Africa and Latin America, and the trend points toward a global majority of nonwhite, non-Western Christians within a few decades.2My friend Mark Gornik is director of City Seminary in Harlem. Aside from his duties in academic administration and pastoral ministry, Mark has invested considerable time in studying the rise of immigrant churches in the five boroughs of New York. The title of his book, Word Made Global, captures his perspective on the shifting patterns of world Christianity. The New York Times featured Mark's research on world Christianity and globalization in a front-page Sunday feature story titled "Where the Gospel Resounds in African Tongues," and his book was named the 2012 Book of the Year by Christianity Today in the missions and global affairs category.3In an effort to understand the story of the revival of churches on the margins, which he calls "globalization from below," Mark has counted more than two hundred new African churches in New York City alone. As he sees it, the lessons of the story of world Christianity are essential for evangelical and mainline congregations in the United States.