Tuesday, August 19, 2003

CBN News - A Tidal Wave of Christianity
The center of Christendom isn't in the West any longer. It's in, of all places, Africa. If God tarries for another twenty years, two-thirds of all Christians will live in the Southern Hemisphere! So says Dr. Philip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.

Here is a critical figure: 360 milliion Christians live in Africa and represent half its people. Half! Just imagine what a shock the Rapture will be! Another 80 million Christians live in China, representing six and two-thirds percent of its people.

Many Western Christian commentators--and I mean fundamentalistic commentators, like Joel and me--have made much of the disgusting apostasy in America and the virtual abandonment of Christianity in Europe and Canada. Based on what I would be first to call an appalling spectacle, they estimate that less than one percent of the world's people will participate in the Rapture, and that the Rapture will be of absolutely no moment in the West. Either you won't have enough people vanishing to cause more than a minor fender bender or two, or else our cars will disappear with us and no one will even know we were there, much less that we're suddenly not there.

But one percent of the world's people amounts to sixty million people. Dear readers, if even half of Philip Jenkins' figures represent "real" Christians, they would represent nearly ten percent of the world's people just in the Southern Hemisphere. It might not create transport or other infrastructural disasters, but it will capture the world's notice, and will not let go until someone--maybe the SecGen of the UN--offers some explanation.::Submitted for your spread of the good news [Acts 8] files.

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