Books on the topic 'Global Evangelical Church'

This chapter describes the importance of indigenous and indigenizing preachers in various parts of the Majority World for the emergence of global Christianity. Indigenous preachers, raised in the swaddling clothes of missionary Christianity, left the garments behind to present the message of Christ in hues and tones more suited to non-Enlightenment cosmologies. Case studies include William Wadé Harris (‘The Black Elijah’), who subverted British colonial religion and rule by conducting an extensive anti-fetish campaign throughout parts of West Africa; David Yonggi Cho, who by incorporating and redefining Korean minjung founded the largest church in the world in South Korea; and C. René Padilla’s Misión Integral, which arose as an evangelical response to materialist liberation theologies in South America. The chapter notes the value of indigenous cultures in the rise and character of indigenized Christianity.

The dramatic growth of Christianity in the Global South over the last century has shifted the balance of power away from strongholds in Europe and the United States. While we typically imagine religion traveling from West to East and from North to South, David R. Swartz shows that lines of influence also run in other directions. Missionaries and non-Western evangelicals have shaped the American evangelical church. On issues of race, economics, human rights, and social justice, these complex transnational relationships often feature accommodation and mutuality, and they often push toward cosmopolitan sensibilities among elite and establishment evangelicals. But they also feature resistance among American evangelical populists, many of whom voted for Donald Trump in 2016. And on issues of sexuality and the supernatural, they draw sustenance from the Global South. This geographically expansive book, which spans Asia, Africa, and South America, offers new insights into a tradition that imagines itself as both American and part of a global communion. It considers how evangelical networks not only go out to, but also come from, the ends of the earth.

Singing the Congregation examines how contemporary worship music shapes the way evangelical Christians understand worship and argues that participatory worship-music performances have brought into being new religious social constellations (“modes of congregating”). Through ethnographic investigation of five of these modes—concert, conference, church, public, and networked congregations—this book seeks to reinvigorate the analytic categories of “congregation” and “congregational music.” Drawing from theoretical models in ethnomusicology, congregational studies, and ecclesiology, Singing the Congregation reconceives the congregation as a fluid, contingent social constellation that is actively performed into being through communal practice—in this case, the musically structured participatory activity known as “worship.” By extension, “congregational music-making” is recast as a participatory religious musical practice capable of weaving together a religious community inside and outside local institutional churches. Congregational music-making is not only a means of expressing local concerns and constituting the local religious community; it is also a potent way to identify with far-flung individuals, institutions, and networks that this global religious community comprises. The unique congregations examined in each chapter include but extend far beyond local churches, revealing widespread conflicts over religious authority and far-ranging implications for how evangelicals position themselves relative to other groups in North America and beyond.

The Ottoman Syrians - residents of modern Syria and Lebanon during the Ottoman Empire - formed the first Arabic-speaking Evangelical Church in the region. Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria offers a fresh narrative of the encounters of this minority Protestant community with American Presbyterian missionaries, Eastern churches and Muslims at the height of the Nahda (or Arab renaissance), from 1860 to 1915. Drawing on rare Arabic publications, the book challenges histories that focus on Western male actors. Instead it shows that Syrian Protestant women and men were agents of their own history who sought the salvation and modernization of Syria while adapting and challenging missionary teachings. These pioneers included scholars, poets, novelists, activists, school teachers, Protestant pastors, evangelistic preachers, Biblewomen, and public speakers. Such Syrian Protestants established a critical link between evangelical religiosity and the socio-cultural currents of the Nahda, making possible the literary and educational achievements of the American Syria Mission and transforming Syrian society in ways that still endure today. Locating Syrian Protestant narratives within American, Ottoman, and global histories, this book brings Middle Eastern Studies into conversation with the field of World Christianity and explores questions of American-Arab relations and gender roles in the Islamic world.

The Handbook provides a comprehensive exploration of a great renewal movement in Christian history, which has profoundly influenced not only the world Anglican Communion, but other Church traditions as well. Commencing with the Movement’s roots within both High Church and evangelical Anglicanism, and its genesis within the University of Oxford and notably Oriel College, the Handbook considers the relatively short period when the Movement could properly be called the Oxford Movement—including its publication outlets such as the Tracts for the Times, its vibrant personalities, its early years of expansion, its opposition and the backlash it inspired, culminating in the crisis of 1845–50, a crisis which for many marked its end, but which in truth brought renewed growth and diversification. The Handbook then examines the development of the Oxford Movement up to the present day, including the gradual adoption of the name Anglo-Catholicism, its adaptation to different national and cultural contexts, its growing commitment to liturgical and devotional reforms, its pastoral, missionary, and global outreach, its diverse influence on literature and the arts, and its wider ecumenical concerns.

The introduction sets out the book’s scope, argument, and goals; places the exploration in historical and cultural context; and frames the study in relationship to recent scholarship in ethnomusicology, evangelical studies, and congregational music studies. It first defines contemporary worship music from both North American and global perspectives and discusses that music’s relationship to closely related Christian popular-music genres. The chapter then situates the rise of contemporary worship music in relationship to several important social developments, including the widespread conflicts over music and worship in evangelical churches (the “worship wars”), the development of the Christian-music recording industry, the adoption of new technologies within congregational worship, and the influence of pentecostal-charismatic practices. Finally, in describing the book’s research methods, the introduction identifies several challenges the author faced in navigating distance and proximity in the field as a result of her own religious upbringing as an evangelical and her complex relationship to communities in her study.

This chapter bases its analysis of rapid changes in conceptions of race and gender in the contextual shifts in authority, autonomy, and demography within Dissenting Protestantism around the world, particularly between the bureaucratized, wealthy global North and the poor, mostly non-white and female churches in the global South. The chapter ‘embraces the intersection’ of categories of race and gender to avoid overlooking lived, embodied experiences of people as both ‘gendered and raced’. Subjects covered include Pentecostalism’s fresh expressions of gender and conceptions of race, women’s work in the international missionary movement and the social gospel, new dissenting Christianities and expressions of racial identities in a context of decolonization and the rise of independent churches; the civil rights movement in the USA and the rise of second-wave feminism; conservative reactions to evangelical feminism, ‘complementarian’ gender roles, and the demographic shift in (D)issenting Protestantism—the rise of the global South.

Methodism was originally a loosely connected network of religious clubs, each devoted to promoting holy living among its members. It was part of the Evangelical Revival, a movement of religious ideas which swept across the North Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. This chapter charts the growth and development, character and nature, and consolidation and decline of British Methodism in the nineteenth century from five distinct perspectives. First, Methodism grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century but struggled to channel that enthusiasm in an effective way. As a result, it was beset by repeated secessions, and the emergence of rival Methodist groups, each with their own distinctive characteristics, of which Wesleyan Methodism was the largest and most influential. Second, while Methodism grew rapidly in England, it struggled to find a successful footing in the Celtic fringes of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Here, local preoccupations, sectarian tensions, and linguistic differences required a degree of flexibility which the Methodist leadership was often not prepared to concede. Third, the composition of the Methodist membership is considered. While it is acknowledged that most Methodists came from working-class backgrounds, it is also suggested that Methodists became more middle class as the century progressed. People were attracted to Methodism because of its potential to transform lives and support people in the process. It encouraged the laity to take leadership roles, including women. It provided a whole network of support services which, taken together, created a self-sufficient religious culture. Fourth, Methodism had a distinctive position within the British polity. In the early nineteenth century the Wesleyan leadership was deeply conservative, and even aligned itself with the Tory interest. Wesleyan members and almost all of Free Methodism were reformist in their politics and aligned themselves with the Whig, later Liberal interest. This early conservatism was the result of Methodism’s origins within the Church of England. As the nineteenth century progressed, this relationship came under strain. By the end of the century, Methodists had distanced themselves from Anglicans and were becoming vocal supporters of Dissenting campaigns for political equality. Fifth, in the late nineteenth century, Methodism’s spectacular growth of earlier decades had slowed and decline began to set in. From the 1880s, Methodism sought to tackle this challenge in a number of ways. It sought to broaden its evangelical message, and one of its core theological precepts, that of holiness. It embarked on an ambitious programme of social reform. And it attempted to modernize its denominational practices. In an attempt to strengthen its presence in the face of growing apathy, several branches of Methodism reunited, forming, in 1932, the Methodist Church in Britain. However, this institutional reorganization could not stop the steady decline of British members into the twentieth century. Instead, Methodism expanded globally, into previously non-Christian areas. It is now a denomination with a significant world presence. British Methodism, however, continues to struggle, increasingly of interest only as a heritage site for the origins of a much wider and increasingly diverse movement.

The chapters in this volume concentrate on the Dissenting traditions of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and the United States. The Introduction weaves together their arguments, giving an overview of the historiography on Dissent while making the case for seeing Dissenters in different Anglophone connections as interconnected and conscious of their genealogical connections. The nineteenth century saw the creation of a vast Anglo-world which also brought Anglophone Dissent to its apogee. Yet any treatment of the subject must begin by recognizing the difficulties of spotting ‘Dissent’ outside the British Isles, where church–state relations were different from those that had originally produced Dissent. The chapter starts by emphasizing that if Dissent was a political and constitutional identity, then it was a relative and tactical one, which was often only strong where a strong Church of England existed to dissent against. It also suggests that in most parts of the world the later nineteenth century saw a growing enthusiasm for the moral and educational activism of the state, which plays against the idea of Dissent as a static, purely negative identity. The second section of the Introduction suggests identifying a fixation on the Bible as the watermark of Dissent. This did not mean there was agreement on what the Bible said or how to read it: the emphasis in Dissenting traditions on private judgement meant that conflict over Scripture was always endemic to them. The third section identifies a radical insistence on human spiritual equality as a persistent characteristic of Dissenters throughout the nineteenth century while also suggesting it was hard to maintain as they became aligned with social hierarchies and imperial authorities. Yet it also argues that transnational connections kept Dissenters from subsiding into acquiescence in the powers that were. The fourth section suggests that the defence and revival of a gospel faith also worked best when it was most transnational. The final section asks how far members of Dissenting traditions reconciled their allegiance to them with participation in high, national, and imperial cultures. It suggests that Dissenters could be seen as belonging to a robust subculture, one particularly marked by its domestication of the sacred and sacralization of the domestic. At the same time, however, both ‘Dissenting Gothic’ architecture and the embrace by Dissenters of denominational and national history writing illustrate that their identity was compatible with a confident grasp of national and imperial identities. That confidence was undercut in some quarters by the spread of pessimism among evangelicals and the turn to premillennial eschatology which injected a new urgency into the world mission. The itinerant holiness evangelists who turned away from the institutions built by mainstream denominations fostered Pentecostal movements, which in the twentieth century would decisively shift the balance of global Christianity from north to south. They indicate that the strength and global reach of Anglophone Dissenting traditions still lay in their dynamic heterogeneity.