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One Sunday morning in Anchorage, Alaska, as I stood holding my coffee waiting for the worship service to begin, I heard a thud and noticed the basketball backboard swaying. A truck must have veered off the street and struck the building, I thought. Momentarily puzzled, I soon realized that it was not a truck, but an earthquake. Nobody stirred because by Alaskan standards this was a minor temblor.

Earthquakes cause horrific destruction in a few seconds. Shifting tectonic plates also birth new mountains, crush old ones and change the courses of rivers. As we look at the seismic charts of world Christendom, we see something like an earthquake reshaping our traditional church and missionary landscapes.

This phenomenon is discussed at length by Philip Jenkins in his new book, The Next Christendom (Oxford, 2002). Jenkins teaches history and religious studies at Penn State University. His thesis, in brief, is that Christendom is exploding so powerfully in Africa, Asia and Latin America (the “South”) that the old Christendom of Europe and North America (the “North”) is no longer the preeminent force it once was.

Seizing the rather dramatic church growth numbers of the 20th Century, Jenkins postulates that the South’s dominance will one day reshape how we in the North will worship and do our missionary work. Compared to the sudden impact of an earthquake, this change will come much more gradually, but it will come, he says.

He fears that churches in the North will not be prepared. Therefore, he goes into considerable detail describing how and why booming churches have flourished in the South. Readers will immediately note that Jenkins throws open the doors to Christendom much wider than we are accustomed to doing. Nevertheless, the advances of such widely variegated forms of Christendom will inevitably change the map of world missions.

Churches in the South that have their roots in the North will have to pedal at Mach II to keep up with those that spring up in southern soil. Indigenous southern churches have far outpaced the northern transplants in attracting new converts. How they do this is a fertile subject for study and debate. Some of them will be rejected outright by northern churches because of their mixing of old traditions with historic Christian beliefs and practices. Traditional northern orthodoxy is not their long suit.

However much we may reject some of their doctrines and practices as unbiblical, we cannot change the fact that they attract millions. In the 21st Century they may decide what is Christian and what isn’t. Their popular appeal will spread Northward because their people already flood Europe and North America.

In the South it is no longer acceptable to be bound by northern norms and dictates. People are free to do church anyway they want to. In the South they also appear to be much closer to a sense of God’s presence and his power in their lives than northern Christians are. Southern Christendom is predominantly Christianity with a compelling sense of the supernatural.

Of course, as with any kind of academic postulates, one may quibble with how Jenkins predicts the future based on stunning church growth in the South. He crunches the numbers and turns out a theory that we cannot dismiss out of hand.

We cannot afford to ignore his big picture analysis of the earthquake that has shifted Christendom to the South from the North. If we do, we may find ourselves under a heap of rubble. Was that a truck that hit us, or was it a 7.0 Richter scale earthquake? It’s time we learned to tell the difference.

Out of such openness to inquiry we may perhaps be able to discern some things God wants to teach us. Perhaps some of the things he is doing in the South will bring fresh breezes to moribund churches in the North. And as strategists look at future world missions ministries, they will be able to develop new patterns of servanthood in Christ’s truly worldwide body.