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World Christianity Each January since 1985, the International Bulletin of Missionary Research has featured an annual statistical table on global mission and world Christianity. Since this table is possibly the most anticipated and without doubt the most frequently cited of our regular offerings, we felt it would be appropriate this year to provide readers with some background on who and what lie behind these statistics. Born in August 1927 in Llandudno, Wales, David B. Barrett has arguably done more than any other single person to help us see world Christianity in all of its complex permutations as a global movement. The question of how one man’s publications can so far have elicited some 800 book reviews and 1,600 articles, headline stories, or feature stories across the international gamut of journals and newspapers must be the subject one day of his biographer. For now, a shorter account must suffice. Barrett was converted to Christ in 1946 while studying mathematics at the University of Cambridge. With two degrees in aeronautical engineering, in 1948 he was appointed as Scientific Officer (Aeronautics) in Britain’s Civil Service and for the next four years took part in strictly classified high-speed wind tunnel and flight testing. During this time, he began Missionary Notes, a publication that applied scientific and aeronautical methodologies to mission, utilizing Britain’s first operational computer, the electromechanical Colossus with its 18,000 vacuum tubes and covering some 2,000 square feet of floor space. This publication, which Barrett produced from 1946 to 1960, was a harbinger of the subsequently immense outpouring of data, text, and analyses that would culminate in his groundbreaking 1982 publication World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, A.D. 1900–2000 (Oxford Univ. Press), a massive 1,010-page compendium of detailed information on the state of Christianity in every country in the world. Its second edition, compiled with the assistance of Todd M. Johnson and George T. Kurian, was published in 2001 in three substantial volumes crammed with 2,633 pages of information. But I am getting ahead of myself. When Barrett offered himself as a missionary to the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1951 for a possible scientific post, he was advised by the bishop of London to “abandon science and mathematics now and stick to Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and systematic theology.” Accordingly, Barrett returned to Ridley Hall, Cambridge, to study theology. He was ordained to ministry in the Church of England in 1954 and then served for two years as curate and chaplain at Bradford Cathedral, Yorkshire, and as a counselor in Billy Graham’s 1954 and 1955 United Kingdom crusades. In 1957 the CMS appointed him to work with Luo clergy in the vicinity of Lake Victoria, Kenya. He was surprised when the missionary archdeacon who welcomed him announced that a massive ecclesiastical schism was underway, with some 500,000 African Anglicans—including the seven key clergy with whom he was to have worked—seceding from the communion. The young Barrett was instructed by his missionary bishop to have nothing to do with the excommunicated secessionists. At the same time, encouraged by CMS London as he was learning the Luo and Swahili languages, his natural curiosity as a researcher drew him to the conflict. Denied access to pertinent documents in the mission office, Barrett went directly to the schismatics (called the Church of Christ in Africa), who eagerly shared all that they had. While remaining resolutely nonpartisan in the conflict, he carried with him a huge quantity of unanalyzed data when he returned to Britain in 1962. Barrett then joined the international ecumenical studies program at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where, studying with the likes of Henry Pitney Van Dusen and Kenneth Scott Latourette, he began to analyze his Africa materials, refining and focusing his already considerable intellectual skills for what would become his life’s work. To his amazement, he discovered that the Anglican schism in Kenya—typically dismissed as a local ecclesiastical aberration (“a bunch of disgruntled nut cases”)—had 6,000 close parallels throughout Africa. Following graduation in 1965 with a Ph.D. from a joint program between Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, Barrett spearheaded a six-month survey of Christianity across West Africa—an assignment that took him not only to every country in Africa but later to Asia, Oceania, Latin America, and Europe as well. The most immediate tangible result was his groundbreaking book Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements (Oxford Univ. Press, 1968). Barrett is quick to point out that without scores of colleagues, two of whom worked with him to produce this issue’s eight-page report, any attempt to track the world Christian movement would be futile. Todd M. Johnson is director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, researching the status of Christianity and world religions in every people, language, city, and country (see www.worldchristiandatabase.org). Peter F. Crossing is an Australian missiologist, a database programmer, and an editorial associate for the second edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia referred to above. As missions information coordinator at the Sydney Centre for World Mission (see www.pastornet.net.au/scwm), Crossing interprets and disseminates the results of missiological research to churches and mission agencies and consults with church mission committees and agencies on crucial aspects of the spread of the Gospel. He also provides database consulting for the National Church Life Survey and data analysis with MapInfo Australia. The editors of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research are honored to be associated with these three men, without whose prodigious efforts all of us would know much, much less about the most extraordinary phenomenon of which we are at once participant and observer—Christianity as a world movement. And we take special pleasure in making their extraordinarily useful statistics and analysis available to missionaries, church leaders, and scholars around the world. —Jonathan J. Bonk |
Current Issue: On Page [3] The Witness of the Student Christian Movement [8] Spreading Fires: The Globalization of Pentecostalism
in the Twentieth Century [15] Ecumenical Theological Education in Latin America,
1916-2005 [21] My Pilgrimage in Mission [25] Missiometrics 2007: Creating Your Own Analysis of
Global Data [33] Contextualizing Universal Values: A Method for
Christian Mission [38] The Legacy of Rudolf Christian Friedrich Lechler [40] Noteworthy [44] Book Reviews [45] Fifteen Outstanding Books of 2006 for Mission Studies [54] Dissertation Notices [56] Book Notes |
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