Christianity in the Non-Western World

This is a programmatic essay by the Scottish missiologist Andrew Walls, who taught in Sierra Leone and Nigeria before founding the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, first in Aberdeen and later in Edinburgh. It appeared as the lead article in the inaugural issue of the journal Studies in World Christianity in 1995 and was later gathered into his collection The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History. The occasion was a demographic fact that Western theological faculties had barely absorbed: by the end of the twentieth century the majority of the world's Christians lived in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, while the discipline of theology still treated Europe and North America as the normative center and everything else as mission field, appendix, or curiosity.

Walls's central move is a contrast. Islam, he argues, has expanded cumulatively and territorially from a fixed heartland; its sacred geography and sacred language remain where they began. Christianity has expanded serially. It has no permanent center and no untranslatable original language. It advances by taking root in a new cultural world while receding, sometimes vanishing, from the one that carried it there. Jerusalem gave way to the Hellenistic Mediterranean; that world gave way to the barbarian north and west; northern Europe's Christendom gave way in turn to the Atlantic world; and that phase, which lasted a few centuries and mistook itself for permanence, is now ending. The North African church disappeared. The churches of the Middle East dwindled. Europe secularized. What looks like catastrophe in one place has repeatedly coincided with birth somewhere else. From this Walls draws his deeper claim: because the Incarnation was itself an act of translation, Christian faith is infinitely translatable, and no culture — least of all the West — can hold proprietary rights over it. The consequence for scholarship is blunt. Church history and theology must be rewritten with the Western phase understood as one episode among several, not as the plot.

The essay has become one of the founding texts of the field now called World Christianity, cited across missiology, church history, and theological education, and its argument has proved durable as the trends Walls described have deepened. It also does pastoral work, offering a way to read the shrinking of familiar churches without despair and without triumphalism.

Who should read this: anyone teaching, studying, or ministering in a shrinking Western church who needs a longer view than decline narratives allow, and anyone in mission or theological education who suspects their curriculum is provincial. Readers wanting devotional writing or a practical program for renewal should look elsewhere; this is historical analysis, dense with argument, written to unsettle assumptions rather than to comfort.