Is the Center of Christianity Shifting from Global North to South?

A conference, titled "The Future of the Church in a Globalized World", sponsored by the Center for Christian Study at the University of Virginia explores the geographically shift of Christianity.
Apr 02, 2004 07:47 AM EST

Is the center of Christianity really shifting from the global North, which includes North America and Europe, to the global South, which includes Asia, Latin America, and Africa? The conference titled, “The Future of Church in a Globalized World”, will explore just that. The event is sponsored by the Center for Christian Study from April 1-3 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Philip Jenkins, a distinguished professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, has written “[w]e are currently living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide.”

The conference will answer the following questions:

· What is the essence of the Christian Gospel in the global South, and how did the Christian Gospel originally find its way there?

· If Christianity in the global South is being exported to the global North, in what ways is it taking place through immigration, and in what ways through missionary activity?

· What can we learn from history about how the message of Christianity has been translated from one culture to another?

· How do the worship, theology, and polity of the globally southern church compare to that of the northern church?

CONFERENCE PRESENTERS

Plenary Speakers

D.G. Hart

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Philip Jenkins

Pennsylvania State University

Lamin Sanneh

Yale University

Andrew Walls

University of Edinburgh

Featured Presentations

Charles Farhadian

Calvin College

Special seminars

Frederica Mathewes-Green

Writer and Commentator

Paul Sullins

Catholic University of America

Conference sponsors

Center for Christian Study, Charlottesville, VA

Center on Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia

Christ Episcopal Church, Charlottesville, VA

Reformed University Fellowship at the University of Virginia

St. Paul's Memorial Church/Kononia, Charlottesville, VA

The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia

University Baptist Church, Charlottesville, VA