Sometime this week. the world’s population will pass the 7 billion mark

At the time of Christ the world’s population was around 250 million. It took until another 1,800 years to reach 1 billion. In 1960 it reached 3 billion.

Lamin Sanneh is Professor of History and World Christianity at Yale University. Here are his estimates of the trends in population growth and the changes in religious belief since 1900.

Note the incredible rise of Pentecostal/Charismatic movements (includes African independent churches and Chinese underground house churches) which has taken place predominantly in the developing world where the population is growing fastest.

Here are the figures on the shift from Christianity as a faith for the Western world (Europe and the US), to Christianity as the faith of the developing world (Asia, Latin America, Africa).

Finally, the incredible growth of the Christianity in Africa, outstripping the growth of Islam in that continent over the last 100 years.
This massive population growth will continue due to the extraordinary growth in agricultural productivity. By 2050 there will be 9 billion people on the planet.

What will it take to reach a lost world with a rapidly increasing population? Christianity of the developing world is showing us how. . . Movements.

“Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Studies in World Christianity)” (Lamin O. Sanneh)

Time Magazine reports:

A religious revolution is transforming Indonesia. Part of the spiritual blossoming entails Muslims embracing a more conservative form of faith, mirroring global trends that have meant a proliferation of headscarves and beards in modern Islamic capitals. More surprising, though, is the boom in Christianity — officially Indonesia’s second largest faith and a growing force throughout Asia. Indeed, the number of Asian Christian faithful exploded to 351 million adherents in 2005, up from 101 million in 1970.

  more. . .

Thanks to reader Bryan.

What is remarkable about this new strain of Pentecostalism is the heroic intensity of the ministries, which have not yet evolved into tired bureaucracies. The founders of these programs are driven by a sense of calling, a feeling of thankfulness for how God has intervened in their personal lives, and they are constantly reinventing their programs in response to what they perceive to be the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Through their research, Miller and Yamamori found Pentecostalism, like early Methodism before it, often improves the lot of the poor. Typically the mother of the household converts first, followed by her children. If her husband follows he is more than likely to stop drinking, gambling, womanizing and becomes more engaged in family life. Household income rises and the whole family is better off.

Pentecostalism is a religion of the people. Again, like early Methodism and evangelicalism generally, it is the democratization of the faith. Everyone has direct access to God, the scriptures, and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Add to this a strong emphasis on the community of faith and human dignity, and social transformation is one of the unintended consequences.

Religion can be an opiate for the oppressed masses (Marx). More often evangelicalism in general, and Pentecostalism in particular, have proven to be powerful forces for change.

As Pentecostals become upwardly mobile—better educated and more affluent—they no longer see the world as a place from which to escape. They tend to want to make the world a better place to live.

Is it any surprise that 85% of the churches that fitted the criteria were Pentecostal or charismatic?

Their conclusion after a four year study spanning twenty nations: some of the most innovative social programs in the world are being initiated by fast-growing Pentecostal churches.

Case studies cited include, AIDS projects in Kampala, ministries to children in the slums of Cairo, schools for the children of prostitutes in Calcutta, treatment programs for drug addicts in Hong Kong, political rights for indigenous people in Guatemala.

It seems that while Liberation Theology opted for the poor, the poor opted for Pentecostalism.

“Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement” (Donald E. Miller, Tetsunao Yamamori)

It is certainly a distortion of the Christian message if it is primarily interpreted as a program for the material improvement of the human condition.

The core of the Christian message is the proclamation of a tectonic shift in cosmic reality inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This proclamation radically relativizes all the empirical givens of this world, including all human institutions. Any reinterpretation of Christianity in terms of a this-worldly agenda, individual or collective, is a distortion.

Peter Berger

Peter Berger is the leading sociologist of our time. He is also a Christian.

In a this article he reflects on the impact of Pentecostal Christianity on the poor in Africa. You might be surprised by his findings.

The conventional wisdom is that Christianity reinforces the oppression of women.

Elizabeth Brusco, a feminist Marxist scholar conducted fieldwork in Columbia from 1982-1983, and found that pentecostal conversion transformed traditional gender relations by giving women a moral authority in the home to challenge their husbands’ drinking, gambling, or adultery.

She wrote up her findings in “The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Columbia” (1995).

Brusco wanted to find out, What happens to the macho value system when the husband converts to evangelical Protestantism?

The answer? He swears off the traditional masculine vices like drinking and partying most of the weekend and reintegrates himself into the household. He assumes the role of husband and father he may have neglected since the early days of his marriage and participates actively in the church community.

For many men, no longer having to maintain the facade of unrelieved masculinity and bravado is a great relief; the private world of household and loved ones is preferable to the public world of men. Brusco writes that, “In Colombia, machismo is, over the long run, very demanding and difficult for all under its sway, including the males who must perform this role” (p. 120).

Those changed male behaviors result in a radical reorientation of family consumption patterns. If formerly a goodly share of the husband’s income was diverted into wine, women, and song, that income is now channeled toward the welfare of the entire family.

Thus individual consumption by the father/husband turns into collective spending on a better diet and educating the children.

Another major shift takes place within the family, in the sphere of power relations between spouses. If the macho husband was characterized by drunkenness, infidelity, and even physical abuse of wife and children, the converted husband is pacific (appropriate New Testament behavior) and his attentions focused on his marriage and home life. Upon his conversion, however, he adopts a value system sharply at odds with the values prescribed for males by the dominant culture.

Second hand copies are still available on Amazon.

Pentecostals are known for their dependence on the Holy Spirit. Did all this goal setting undermine that dependence?

We set goals. But to get the churches going there has to be a work of God.

In South Australia, I began to pray for the larger regional towns. When I began as State Superintendent in 1978, we had just 12 churches.

We started to see where God was doing something and we just had to cooperate with Him. If you cooperated it would work.

So, for instance, Port Augusta, six people came to see me and said, we want to start a church. They were all English immigrants with an AOG background.

I told them, this is the bottom line, you’ve got no money, you’ve got no pastor, but if you want to start a church, start a prayer meeting.

Three weeks later I was at a combined function for church boards, pastors in Adelaide. Sitting there, I can feel the Holy Spirit say, “Here’s the man for Port Augusta.” Now, this guy was a board member, he wasn’t a pastor.

I looked at this guy and I thought, gee, I don’t know, he’s a nice guy and all that, but in my view he wasn’t pastor material. He was a faithful board member.

So I never said a word to him. About two weeks later he rang me and asked to meet with me.

He said I’ve been thinking of going into the ministry and he said he wondered what to do. He thought perhaps he was called to NSW. Soon after he drove through Port Augusta on a work trip and he felt God say, this is it.

I told him, Al, you’ve got no money, there’s only six people, and they’re “Poms” (English). You’ll have to go and get a job, and that’s it. He said well, I think God wants me to do it.

So, off he went. Within 6 months, he had seventy people.

Now, that story, that simple story, was repeated over and over again.

The mechanics and human willpower will not work if the Spirit is not at work.

In my twenty years as National Superintendent we planted a new church about every ten days—680 churches. That trend has continued under Brian Houston’s leadership, except now the churches on average are larger.

What role did ministry training play in fueling a church planting movement?

When I became National Superintendent, the Commonwealth Bible College (now Southern Cross) was our only college for the nation. Everyone felt it was our duty to support the denominational college.

But we had a few “renegades” like Daivd Cartledge in Townsville who decided to start their own colleges. David was the first.

David is a driver and he began to recruit from all over Australia. The College became successful.. He applied for AusStudy and recognition from the government.

The new college was graduating young leaders and off they’d go and plant all these churches.

Others followed David’s example and started colleges all over the nation. I planted one here in South Australia.

Eventually we had 18 colleges. We set up basic guidelines so they could be registered with the denomination.

The fear was, if we start more colleges they will compete with each other and not be viable. When we had just one college there were 40-50 graduates annually. Once we had colleges throughout the nation we had 1,000 graduates a year.

These new colleges were not turning out PhDs like the central college could. But they taught good knowledge of the bible and the basics of church life and leadership.

The colleges just kept feeding church planters into the movement. Without that, I don’t think we would’ve made such a difference.

The central college at first was troubled, but now has reinvented itself and provides resources and expertise to colleges all over the nation. It’s doing an even better job today because of all the new colleges.

What other changes did you need to make?

I can think of two.

Firstly, we changed our view of leadership at a national and state level. We encouraged visionary leadership rather than administrative leadership in the denomination. Our state and national leaders were at the same time, effective local church leaders.

Administrators and educators have an important part to play in a movement. But they should not lead the movement. Leaders should lead.

Secondly, we had to battle the “territorial mindset”—the idea that you can’t come in to “my territory” and plant a church.

We brought out a rule saying we could start a church anywhere, anyplace, at any time. Provided that you do two things. One, you’re ethical and don’t go after people in other churches. And secondly, you go and talk to the local pastor and tell him what you want to do. You go and talk to the State Executive and tell them what you’re going to do. You’re not asking for permission, but you are doing the right thing.

Andrew, what would you like to say to the next generation of Australian church planters?

I want to remind them of importance of the anointing.

It’s something I learnt from my dad. He was converted following the Welsh revival in a fresh outpouring of the Spirit. His Pastor was a coalminer, and he was just a dear old guy who loved the Lord and took to preaching. He taught other young men like my dad to preach under the power of the Spirit.

Well you can’t live without God. I mean, if you try to get through on methods, it just won’t work.

Have your goals and plans, but look for that God-factor every time you want to plant a church.

And so, there’s always a supernatural factor about it. I think even our guys today, church planters, sometimes overlook that.

It doesn’t matter how good you are and how big you are, it’s got to be God.

He was the National Superintendent 1977 to 1997. In 2002 he started the Family First Party and was elected into the Legislative Council of South Australia.

I met up with Andrew in Adelaide just before he retired from parliament. We talked about the astonishing growth of the Assemblies of God under his leadership.

The Assemblies of God grew steadily from its formation in 1937. Then in the late 1970s the growth became exponential. What happened?

We didn’t sit down on day one and said okay this is the way to make it happen. It was an evolving thing, I think that God just gave us clues for each stage as we needed them. All along we felt we were led.

I was narrowly elected National Superintendent at our 1977 National Conference. I was just 41 years old. Afterwards, the deputy, Phil Hills, came up to me and said, before we wind up the conference could you set some goals? We’d never set goals in 40 years of meetings.

We’d set goals for overseas missions and the remarkable thing is we always reached them.

Phil said, what about a growth goal? And I said, let’s do it. How much? And he said 50%. I said okay.

50% growth in what timeframe?

The next two years.

It seemed impossible. So I got up and told the conference, we’re going to suggest that we go for 50% increase and everyone put their hands up and voted and it happened.

After the conference I began to think how are we going to achieve this. I wrote to each of our churches and challenged them to trust God for a certain number of new decisions for Christ.

Two years later we’d grown by 68%.

So, the next two years, we said we’d go for 100%. And we got 128%.

Risk nothing and you get nothing. If you aim at something your faith will grow.

What else contributed to the change?

Another thing we did was challenge our pastors to visit Korea together. Two hundred and forty came on trip. It was faith building to see the finances come in.

We saw what God was doing in Korea and it inspired us. We were all on a high, all wanting to go back and take the word of God to the nation.

Some pastors went too far. They may have a church of 50, and they believed they would have thousands in two years. It didn’t happen. We learnt that it was far better for a church of 50 to trust God for 70 rather than a 1,000.

Despite this, it was still important to stretch people’s faith.

We came back and in the next two years saw a 120% increase. At our next conference I felt God speak say, little by little we’ll take the nation.

How was that going to happen?

We decided we’d go for a church in every Australian town of over 1,000 people within two years (1981-83). Then we had to work out how to do that.

And we set out a four point strategy:

1. Identify the towns.
2. Adopt the town in prayer.
3. Seek to start a home group.
4. Begin a small church.

We asked each church of 100 to try and plant a new church every two years. We didn’t want to make it too hard.

Some did some didn’t. Some planted two or three. Others planted none.

Every two years at the National Conference the figures and the stories would come in and people got inspired.

Some states were better than others. Queensland did particularly well. They identified all their towns and they got their districts to allocate where churches should be planted. They reorganised very well.

In the 1990′s they’d reached every town of over 1,000.

Sounds like the National Conference played a key role.

Right from the start it was important to change the tone and purpose of our National Conference. Since our beginning it was focused on the issues that divided us. There were long and heated debates about theological technicalities. The rest of the time was taken up with business.

And so, I made my decision that I’d make the conferences inspirational. We reduced the business and limited the time spent debating non-issues.

Year after year the Conference became a place for corporate vision and inspiration as stories came in of progress and as we set new faith goals.

Next post: Andrew Evans part 2

My copy is still on the way but I have read a summary article. Here are some highlights . . .

According to Anderson, Pentecostalism is probably the fastest expanding religious movement ever. Here are five of the main features of Pentecostalism that contributed to its advance from the beginning.

1. The imminent return of Christ

Early Pentecostals were convinced that their experience of Spirit baptism was a “fire” that would spread all over the world, a last-days universal revival to precede the return of Christ. Missionary newsletters were filled with one overriding concern: to evangelize the nations of the world before the imminent return of Christ.

2. Intercultural origins

From it’s inception Pentecostalism was both interracial and intercultural. The Azusa Street Revival was led by William Seymour the son of former slaves. Within two years missionaries were circling the globe with their message of spiritual power.

At the same time, in western India, an equally influential revival was led by Pandita Ramabai at the Mukti mission. Missionaries, mostly young women, were sent throughout India and church planted. Anderson traces the origin of Chilean Pentecostalism back to India rather than North America.

3. Spirit-centered Mission

Pentecostalism grew out of a common experience of the Spirit. That experience of the Spirit led Pentecostals into world missions.

Within two years missionaries were sent out to China, India, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Palestine, Egypt, Somalia, Liberia, Angola and South Africa.

This was the beginning of what is arguably the most significant global expansion of a Christian movement in history.

These early missionaries had no fixed plan. Many went out believing they had “missionary toungues”. Many left without any source of funds. Their sacrifices were startling. They were poor, untrained and unprepared. Many died on the field.

4. Personal Inflexibility and Adaptability

Like other foreign missionaries Pentecostals were not always sensitive to the local people and culture. Some took too much responsibility for the expansion of the faith and stifled local expressions and leadership.

The result was often secession as new converts reacted to missionary paternalism and control.

The truth was often that the national churches grew in spite of, and not because of, these missionaries, who were denying their converts’ gifts of leadership. The Holy Spirit was anointing ordinary people to “spread the fire” to their friends, relatives, and neighbors, and even to other communities, peoples, and nations.

5. Responsive to Local Contexts

Pentecostal mission was inherently flexible, responding creatively to different contexts. Pentecostalism both absorbed and transformed the religio-cultural context wherever it went.

Conclusion

The wildfires of Pentecostalism were chaotic, unpredictable and out-of-control. When human organizations attempted to quench the flames, as they often did, this futile effort resulted in new fires breaking out in other places and the further proliferation of new churches.

Pentecostalism has been most successful in the Majority World where half the world’s Christians live today, where forms of Christianity are very different from what Westerners often assume they must be.

“Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism” (Allan Anderson)

At the time I was in the banking industry and soon after coming to faith was appointed as a Bank Manager. A few years later I accepted the challenge of opening a new branch of the bank in Noosa Heads on the south Queensland coast, which was strategically designed to be a sound career move. Success would mean even greater opportunity for advancement.

God had other plans. We got involved in a recently planted Christian Outreach Centre Church (COC) which was growing rapidly. Our church involvement soon became the centre of our world, rather that the career. After a few more years experiencing success in the bank, God called us into ministry.

Eventually we were appointed senior ministers of the church. The church grew to about 1000 people, which brought both joy and great challenges in leadership.

I discovered Natural Church Development (NCD) and began applying a health paradigm to life of the church.

Soon after our denomination appointed a new national chairman, David McDonald, with the specific agenda to lead us back into being a dynamic church planting movement. David recruited me to work with him.

Since 2001 my job description has been to understand and implement church multiplication strategies within the COC nationally.

2. What motivates you?

Two things: Firstly, I’m motivated by the harvest. The Church in Western world is not growing. When measured against it’s mission it is not being effective.

Secondly, I have a great heart for the well being of pastors. I see many of them working at programs and systems and models of church that aren’t fruitful. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. We’ll losing too many of them from the ministry.

3. What’s your strategy?

We’ve adopted Bob Logan’s 10 points of multiplication. I coach our regional leaders to understand and implement of those 10 points on the field.

We believe for it to happen it must happen on the field and not be controlled centrally by the denomination. We don’t want to set up a large central staff to run the church planting movement. We push out responsibility to the field.

How’s it going?

We are having varying degrees of success. Where we get buy in from the regional leadership team we’re seeing great progress. We build systems for training, coaching and assessing church planters. Good church planters are coming out of the woodwork. They are responding to vision.

4. What are you learning about church multiplication movements?

You must start with shared vision and spiritual passion. Start anywhere else and you won’t get engagement.

There must be ownership of the vision for multiplication at all levels. There’s a big difference between compliance and commitment. When all pastors in the region own the vision to multiply churches, when all the individual congregations own the vision to reproduce their church, then we have commitment. There must be buy-in at ALL levels.

At the same time you also have to release prayer and increase spiritual passion for the harvest. Church multiplication is a spiritual battle.

What does that look like?

In our Hunter region of NSW they have regional gatherings of churches just to pray for the harvest. The shared vision and momentum builds as you see God at work answering the prayers of his people.

The last thing I’m learning is that you don’t start with a linear strategy. You work your strategy on a just in time basis depending on the staring point of each individual region. You go where the energy is and work with that. The others come along as they see progress in the responsive regions.

5. What is the relationship between church health and multiplication?

Parent churches must be healthy. Churches reproduce after their own kind. If a church is unhealthy, that’s what it will reproduce. You can’t think about multiplication without health. One of our early strategies was to get existing churches to become healthy.

We embraced Natural Church Development as our resource for measuring the health of churches and trained coaches to ensure implementaiton. Doing the health diagnostic without effective coaching and implementation is a waste of time. Our coaches walk beside churches to help them increase their health.

6. Existing churches are getting healthier but has that turned into multiplication?

Increasing health on its own won’t result in multiplication. Churches will just want to be healthier for their own sakes and not see the harvest. So we combined a health strategy with a continuing strategy to share the vision for church multiplication. Coaches worked with churches to improve their health and they worked with those same churches to challenge them to become multiplying churches.

The key to this dual strategy are the regional leaders. As well as pastoring their churches, each of our regional leaders head up teams that are working on church health and multiplication for the region.

To use the Hunter Valley as an example, Shane Cook is our regional leader there. He heads up a team that includes an NCD coach and a person responsible for the development of coaches in the region. So we have a regional leader with a team who is working with all our churches in that area to improve their health and get them multiplying new churches.

We want a church multiplication movement in every one of our regions. Not driven by the denomination. We’re the catalyst and resource for the regions. Importantly, each region is responsible to reach their area. But they are not limited to their region. They can plant churches wherever they want.

7. You’ve been in the role for six years now. What progress are you seeing?

It’s still early days. But let’s talk about future leaders both for existing churches and church planting. Three years ago I would say we would have had trouble identifying 20 leaders in the pipeline that we were tracking with. Today we’ve got 70 future leaders we are intentionally developing.

8. What’s the greatest challenge?

We are constantly battling with “vision drift”. Keeping the vision constantly before the people. Things get in the way. Good things. It’s a challenge for our pastors. How do you keep the vision for the harvest constantly before you with all the pressures of local ministry?

9. How do you deal with “vision drift”?

We pray.
We send out regular newsletters
We bring them together for conferences.
I personally coach all the regional leaders.
The regional leaders are personally involved in coaching many of our local pastors.

10. Do you have a coach?

Throughout this whole time Colin Noyes at CoachNet Australia has been my coach. He’s helped coach me through my understanding multiplication movements and in implementation. I couldn’t have done this without him.