Audio Transcript

Welcome back on this Wednesday, a rare Wednesday episode, with Pastor John and myself together. No sermon clip today. We’re both in the studio with an update. This is John Piper’s year-in-review — I guess we could call it that, Pastor John — as we look back at God’s kindness in 2022. It was a busy year for you. We have a lot of ground to cover today. So let’s start with the personal life of John Piper. Don’t go into the books or conferences or ministry memories just yet. Start by giving us highlights from your life. What stands out to you personally?

That’s a trick question in a sense because personal pleasure and pleasure from ministry are really hard to distinguish. So it seems to me like you’re asking the impossible, but I think I get what you’re asking: the joys of the personal dimension of my life, apart from the work I do for Desiring God and Bethlehem College & Seminary. Let me mention maybe two or three things.

Probably the least important thing to mention, but amazingly ever-present in our home life, is that we got a new dog, a goldendoodle. Now, we had a goldendoodle for fourteen years. This dog, however, is more doodle than golden. We’re trying to come to terms with that and having a little bit of a hard time. That’s the least important thing to mention, and yet there she is all the time in the kitchen as part of our lives now.

Far more important was a once-in-a-lifetime fishing trip with all four of my sons and two grandsons at a wilderness lake in Canada where you have to fly in, land on the water, and fish for walleye and northern pike. And these fish were so hungry — they were so hungry! — we were catching them with hooks and pieces of orange duct tape. That’s not an exaggeration. My boys were having a blast experimenting. “What will they bite?” These were big fish — big edible fish. I love the sounds of my sons laughing, and when you get four quick-witted, fast-tongued Piper brothers together in one place, you better be prepared to be knocked over by the verbal rough-and-tumble and laughter. It was a really precious high point, which I pray God will use in their lives for good.

Let me just mention one more. I know it’s cheating because it mingles ministry pleasure and personal, but I can’t help but mention that I get a tremendous personal pleasure from teaching the preaching course at Bethlehem College & Seminary, where I serve as chancellor. The give-and-take with these fourteen guys this fall, for example, in the class about the glories of preaching God’s word is simply too satisfying for me personally to leave out.

Ask Pastor John

I think probably most of us feel the same way you do about ministry joys being some of the best personal joys. But let’s move into your ministry joys or ministry highlights from 2022. The fact that you and I are talking right now, of course, means that in 2022 God enabled us to record another 150 episodes of this podcast, Ask Pastor John. We’re closing in now on 1,900 total episodes as we finish up ten years together on this podcast.

Absolutely amazing. I won’t get to say very often, Tony (in public, at least, though I might say it to you more often), that I am so profoundly thankful for your partnership particularly. I know a lot of people make things happen at Desiring God. But the amount of planning, praying, curating, editing, and hosting that you do for this podcast to make it possible is mostly invisible but absolutely essential to the life of this ministry. I am so thankful.

Wow. That’s very meaningful to me, Pastor John. Thank you. As I’ve told you before, and I’ll say it again, Ask Pastor John is the honor of a lifetime for me. This will be — I am very sure of it — the most impactful ministry I will ever be a part of. You tell me I cannot know that.

Right, you cannot know that.

But I’m saying I know that. And I thank God for APJ, and I thank God for you and your very hard work that is really the engine behind it all. I love building this podcast with you. I enjoy every single week of this work because I know one day our building of it will end. And I do not look forward to that day.

Look at the Book

But APJ is not the only podcast you spent time on this year. Maybe we shouldn’t even classify it as a podcast. You spent a lot of time creating these almost-unique visual online teaching videos called Look at the Book. I think we have almost a thousand of those episodes available now at Desiring God. Anything unusual about this past year on the Look at the Book front?

Well, there is, but let me step back and give the bigger picture, because what’s special won’t make as much sense without that. Several years ago, God, I believe, put it in my heart to try to create a Look at the Book episode — these are about ten-to-fourteen minutes long — on all thirteen of Paul’s letters. The team at Desiring God thought that was an amazing thing and a good idea and got behind it and began to structure my life to that end, weaving Look at the Book creation into my weekly routine.

But we discovered that, at the pace we were going, that probably was not going to happen in my lifetime because that’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of episodes, given all of Paul’s letters and how long some of them are. So we decided to experiment last summer — so just a few months ago — with what we call a “lab blitz.” Desiring God sends me away for about seven weeks where that’s all I do. And bless their hearts, 9Marks and Capitol Hill Baptist Church provided Noël and me with a nice secluded place to stay, and the guys from Desiring God set up a studio in a bedroom. And so, for nine hours a day, five days a week, for seven weeks, all I did was Look at the Book creation. We did about 150 episodes in that time and did all of 1 and 2 Timothy.

If we now take that model of these blitzes and do that for the next two or three years, the goal actually looks doable. It looks doable. We could drop dead any time, no matter how old we are. But if I stay healthy, if my mind stays clear for the next two or three years, then it actually looks doable. I love doing it this way. I am so thankful. Staying really focused day in and day out is so much more efficient than fitting in those efforts at Look at the Book to a day here and there during my other responsibilities. We’ll probably be doing both, and I’m excited that it looks like, if God gives me life, I could do Look at the Book on all of Paul’s letters.

‘Come, Lord Jesus’

Wonderful. Any special takeaways from seven weeks of your attention being riveted on Paul’s letters?

Yes, but we don’t have time to talk about them. They’re so good, so deep, so many. You can’t look at God’s book as long as I have looked at it and not be amazed — at least I can’t. My prayer every time I start one of those days of focusing all day long on looking at God’s book is, “Lord, open my eyes that I may see wonderful things out of your word,” like the psalmist prayed in Psalm 119:18.

But maybe what would be most interesting for folks is to see the connection between doing Look at the Book on 2 Timothy and a new book that will be out in a few weeks — namely, a book on the second coming of Christ, which we’re calling Come, Lord Jesus and that Crossway is publishing.

I’ve wanted to write a book on Christ’s coming for many years. Well, here I was focused. Now this wasn’t last summer, this was earlier, as I was pondering 2 Timothy in preparation. I was focused on 2 Timothy, and I got to the end. This was probably Paul’s last letter, and these are among the last verses that he wrote in 2 Timothy 4:7–8:

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.

All who have loved his appearing. That was it. That’s what it took to get me over the edge to say, “Now I know how I want to write this book on the second coming.” So I wrote a book focused mainly on helping myself, and I hope others, love — not just hope for or understand or think about, but love — the appearing of the Lord Jesus. I finished the editing earlier this year, and it’s scheduled to be out I believe in January sometime.

Learning, Technology, Eldership

Yes, and it’s a great read. And I guess that answers one of my other questions: whether this new Look at the Book blitz that you just mentioned earlier will replace your other writing priorities.

Well, it might. I’m not sure yet about what it will look like over the summers for the next two or three years. In fact, it’s not going to replace writing in the foreseeable future because we’ve set aside some time, just a few weeks from now in January, to team up with Joe Rigney, the president of Bethlehem College & Seminary, to write a short book on how to be a lifelong learner. I know that book is in the planning stages, and the blitzes aren’t going to preempt that one, but I am, as you know, not the only writer of books or articles at DG.

When I look back over this year, what an amazing stream of substantial, insightful, Bible-saturated articles flow out daily at Desiring God. Not to mention in this past year the new books that you and David Mathis published. I mean, Tony, your book God, Technology, and the Christian Life is still, in my mind, in a class by itself. I don’t know anything like it with the combination of rich biblical reflection, a high view of providence, and a fascinating grasp of the present lay of the land of technology. I’ve got juicy favorite quotes. You’re a good writer, and you rise to some sweet levels of quotability. Here’s two of them: “Angels don’t bend down in awe of Silicon Valley. Angels kneel in awe to study the glories and agonies of Jesus Christ” (278). That’s gold. Or, “Obviously, we can escape from God’s providence like a fish can escape water for a life in outer space” (269). That’s great. Your book is worthy of people’s getting just to poke around and find those nuggets like that.

As if that were not enough for a great year at Desiring God, Mathis — David Mathis, our executive editor — published a book for church leaders. It’s called Workers for Your Joy. I think it’s one-of-a-kind because there are a lot of books on eldership, a lot of books on pastoring — goodness, there are hundreds of them — but there are not a lot built on 2 Corinthians 1:24, with the point that we are workers with our people for their joy. That’s the note of the book. This is Christian Hedonism pressed into the corners of the leader’s life.

It was a great year of publishing, I think.

‘What Is Saving Faith?’

You have not mentioned yet your book: What Is Saving Faith? That was also published in 2022. In fact, just a few weeks ago, at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Denver, a whole three-hour block was devoted to your book. Why was that? That’s never happened before, has it, that one of your books would be part of a debate at ETS.

“True saving faith has in it an affectional or heartfelt dimension, which I call treasuring Christ.”

No, that was a first, I think, and I was really glad for it. I feel privileged that that happened. The book has stirred up some discussion because not everyone agrees with my main point — namely, that true saving faith has in it an affectional or heartfelt dimension, which I call treasuring Christ. Saving faith is a receiving of Christ as a treasured Savior, a treasured Lord. Without that treasuring aspect, I think we may be just using Christ as competent, but not trusting him as an all-satisfying Savior. So I was really glad for the ETS event to try to bring some clarity to the pushback we’ve received, and I hope people will read it for themselves rather than just what others are saying. I think there are not many issues more important than whether we really have true saving faith.

Global Expansion

Yes. Well, we need to wrap this up. Any other encouraging things you see at Desiring God, more broadly, that you think our listeners might be interested in?

“It’s simply remarkable what God is doing globally to raise up young leaders with a passion for the glory of God.”

I think what is most exciting and most worthy of thanksgiving to God and to our financial supporters is the incredible expansion of the ministry globally. We now have something like thirty partners worldwide translating Ask Pastor John, books, articles. It’s simply remarkable what God is doing globally to raise up young leaders with a passion for the glory of God and for publishing — and who are amazingly savvy on the Internet — for everywhere in the world. This is invisible to most people. This growth, this exciting dimension of our ministry, is mostly invisible for people, and yet it may be the most important thing we are doing right now at Desiring God — namely, partnering with these brothers and sisters as an increasing part of our annual plan and our annual budget. I think this is a great place to end the year, thanking God for what he’s doing outside of our little sphere called America through this ministry.

Amen. Speaking of God’s work outside America, this year included my first international trip, preaching in Brazil in June, to launch my technology book in Portuguese. It launched there this summer. I got to hold the translation in hand. I met and spent time with the translator there and had lunch with our publishing partner in Brazil. So all this international work you just mentioned became very tangible for me in 2022. Because I think, if all you know of Desiring God is the English website and English resources that we create, there’s a whole other world of labor happening right now that we want to introduce you to. And we are going to introduce you to that work, beginning next time. We have thirty international partners, as you said, Pastor John. And we’re going to hear from seven of them in the next seven APJ episodes — brief updates from leaders reaching the world through the languages of French, Portuguese, Farsi, Dutch, German, Arabic, and Albanian. Each of these seven updates inspires me. And it is my joy to share them with you in these final weeks of the year.

And if you’re hearing all these updates and you want in, you can join us today. We’re looking for new ministry partners like you to come alongside us to support us as we continue to make new resources in English — including our books and articles and Look at the Book videos and this podcast — and as we get these resources translated and distributed across the globe in dozens of languages. We can only do all this with your help. So consider becoming a monthly ministry partner with us today. Much of our financial support comes from friends of ours who give, on average, $30 a month to support all of this work, everything we mentioned today (and more). To set up monthly giving, go to give.desiringGod.org. Very much appreciated.

Pastor John and I are back next time. We’ll see you Friday.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to a new week on this Monday. How do we overcome a lack of affection — a lack of expressed affection for God and expressed affection for others? It’s a great question, a humble question, from a young man who wrote in anonymously. “Dear Pastor John, let me jump straight to it. How would you counsel and encourage a brother in Christ who finds it difficult to express or discuss ‘deeper’ emotions like joy, despair, wonder, and fear? That’s me. I want deeper relationships with Christian brothers. But I also shy away when opportunity arises and deeper conversations make themselves present because I don’t know how to talk about those higher and deeper feelings. I just freeze. Or I’m tempted to make a joke.

“I know something is wrong inside of me. I read Augustine’s Confessions and stand in awe of his affection as he speaks so fluently to God in language like this: ‘My God, my life, my holy sweetness,’ or ‘What can anyone say when he speaks of Thee? Yet woe to those who do not speak of Thee; for, though they talk much, they say nothing.’ I’m a man who talks much about nothing. I want to grow here.”

I really have a special interest in this question, and I want to try to answer it because I think there are millions of people (it’s not rare) who share this blockage that prevents natural, genuine verbal expressions of heartfelt affections, not only for God and his glorious salvation, but for children — their own children — or spouses, or ordinary blessings of life. The whole realm of the emotional life and of spiritual affections is choked off for some reason.

Affections Unspoken

There are millions of people who never say anything like, “What a beautiful day. The sun is shining; the breeze is cool. I love days like this!” They never talk like that, ever. They never say anything like, “I love being married to you. Just sitting with you makes me happy. I’m so glad God brought us together.” They never say that to each other, ever. They never say anything like, “God is so great. He has been so good to me. I don’t deserve any of this. Lord, you are amazing. Thank you, Lord. I love you.” They don’t ever talk like that. These kinds of expressed affections for days, people, God, are just blocked. They never come out in words, and it’s a great sadness for them and for the people around them.

I don’t think there is any formula to fix this. The causes are sometimes very deep. God himself, by the Holy Spirit, is the only hope, because he is the decisive cause of all authentic expressions of true spiritual affections. A deep work of God is needed. For example, I had a deep and sinful aversion to lifting my hands in worship until I was 35 years old. Never once did I lift my hands in worship, or even come close, like turning them palm-up in my lap. I would see people do it, and I would actually feel disgust. And then one night, at about 3:00 in the morning, during an all-night prayer meeting, God lifted my hands in a moment of worship. It was, as I recall, mostly involuntary, and received no resistance. He broke my pride that night. And in a sense, my hands haven’t gone down since.

Step Toward Expression

I think there’s an analogy between that experience and the barriers that people can feel to verbal expressions of affections for God. So, even though there’s no formula, there are steps that you might be able to take, which — if you really want it, if you want this liberation — would become means by which God would set you free.

1. Recognize the problem.

First (and this young man who’s asking the question has already arrived at this point), you recognize that it really is a problem to be overcome, not just a neutral personality trait. Thousands of people excuse it as just a quirk of personality and think it has no spiritual dimensions about it. I don’t think that’s ever sufficient. It’s got truth in it, but it’s not sufficient. Jesus said, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34). Now, the least that means is that God designed words to be a means of heart expression. A disconnect between the two, heart and mouth, is not the way God designed it to be, and not the way it’s going to be in heaven.

2. Examine yourself.

We should do a serious self-examination as to whether our hearts really do love Christ (Matthew 10:37), really do delight in God (Psalm 37:4), really do rejoice in him (Philippians 3:1), really do fear him (Proverbs 28:14), really do treasure him (Matthew 13:44). These are all biblical commands that our hearts must experience before our mouths can express them. So, examine your heart. Are they there?

3. Discern sin’s hindrances.

We should also do a serious self-examination as to whether there’s sin blocking the genuineness of our expression of affection. There certainly was in me, oh my. I look back on attitudes that I had for 35 years that God, mercifully, was patient with, and I am ashamed. I’m ashamed. I can remember sitting in chapel at Bethel when I was a teacher there, and a woman or a man (I can’t remember which) next to me just rolled their hands over, palms up in their lap, and inside of me was disgust. Looking back on it, that’s just evil. That’s just plain evil. My resistance had so much pride in it.

“God is the decisive cause of all authentic expressions of true spiritual affections.”

And I’m aware it can work the other way around. I’m not naive that people who are lifting their hands might be totally arrogant people. I get it. They can be looking with scorn on the non-hand lifters, with pride. Of course that’s true. Pride is subtle — everywhere. But if we can see the sin that binds us, wherever it is, and name it and repent, we might be set free.

4. Memorize affection-laden passages.

Memorize parts of Scripture that give you the very words you need to express affections for God.

Psalm 18:1: “I love you, O Lord, my strength.”
Psalm 42:1–2: “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.”
Psalm 63:1: “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”
Psalm 73:25: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.”

Oh my goodness, these texts have served me so well, to loose my tongue. Memorize these, and others like them, and then say them out loud to God in private prayer, day after day — nobody listening but God. And surprisingly, you may find yourself saying them out loud in a prayer meeting, and it may be wonderfully involuntary, the way it was for me.

5. Spend time with expressive saints.

If possible, spend time with people who speak of their affections more naturally than you do. Emotional verbal freedom is contagious. I have tasted this in my life, in myself. I could name people whose freedom in mature expression of spiritual affections has been very powerful in my life.

6. Set your heart on heaven.

Realize that heaven is going to be like this: utterly free, unselfconscious overflowings of our heart’s affections. You can see this in the songs in the book of Revelation. And 1 John 3:3 says, “Everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.” In other words, the principle is this: if we really hope to be this way in heaven someday, then let’s get a head start. Let’s get a head start now. Why would you put it off?

7. Raise your expectations.

Realize that your sincere expressions of love to Christ and joy in Christ may be the means by which someone else is saved. That’s the point of Psalm 40:2–3:

He drew me up from the pit of destruction,     out of the miry bog,and set my feet upon a rock,     making my steps secure.He put a new song in my mouth,     a song of praise to our God.Many will see and fear,     and put their trust in the Lord.

“God designed words to be a means of heart expression.”

I love that. That’s why we’re in the pit sometimes — so that he can bring us up, put us on a rock, put a song in our mouth. People see, and they get saved. I think that was true for my salvation. I think, under God, I owe my faith in Christ to the free expressions of love and joy in my mother and my father while I was growing up.

8. Pray for open lips.

Finally, pray. Pray like this: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise” (Psalm 51:15). Isn’t that an amazing request? “My lips are shut; I can’t open them. Something’s wrong with my lips, Lord.” Yes, there is, in all of us. “Lord, open my lips.” Only God can make it real, so ask him, and keep on asking until he does it.

ABSTRACT: In the early 1980s, missionary and researcher David Barrett published the World Christian Encyclopedia, a massive survey of global Christianity and missions. Since then, the work of Barrett and others has shaped the church’s approach to missions in profound ways, not least by focusing attention on the world’s remaining unreached peoples. Now, new generations of researchers are tracing the gospel’s spread through the Global South and beyond, showing that today’s church is more diverse than many have imagined — and helping today’s Christians participate more strategically in the gospel’s advance.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked F. Lionell Young III, Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide, to describe how new insights and initiatives are shaping the church’s mission.

Evangelicals are serious about missions. To crib a quote from the American historian Douglas Sweeney, “Evangelicals care about nothing more than evangelizing the world.”1 Sweeney may be speaking in hyperbole, but not by much. We are passionate about doing and well-known for our activism. This is an evangelical strength. What evangelicals, as a group, have not always taken seriously is the life of the mind. As Mark Noll wrote in his epistle of a wounded lover, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”2 We have not been as passionate about thinking and are not as well-known for our erudition. This has been an evangelical weakness.3

American evangelical missions during the twentieth century often failed to combine zeal with knowledge.4 In a recent lecture on the history of missiology, Brian Stanley observed that “there is always a tendency, particularly in Christian missions, for the field to divide between the doers and the thinkers.” He rightly referred to the problem as a “fatal separation,” and one that may be more pronounced in missions than in any other area of Christian ministry. Stanley, a highly respected intellectual, is also an evangelical who is very much for missionary activity. As he put it in the same address, “The challenge is to enable practitioners to be less afraid of deep research and reflection, but to conversely challenge the thinkers with the continuing imperative of what the church is actually called to do.”5

There have been times in our recent past when the thinkers and the doers actually did get together. This essay introduces readers to the work of David Barrett and a remarkable story of success that has brought about significant changes in the way evangelicals carry out the Great Commission. A discussion about Christianity in the Global South will follow, interacting with Philip Jenkins’s recent comments about what he calls “the end of the Global South.” What does he mean — and what are the possible implications for the church and its mission?

‘Miracle from Nairobi’

In 1982, Oxford University Press published the 1,010-page World Christian Encyclopedia (WCE).6 It was edited by David Barrett (1927–2011), who served as a missionary with the Church Missionary Society from 1957 to 1985. Barrett was a British evangelical who had prepared for the Anglican priesthood at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. He was mentored by Stephen C. Neill (1900–1984), a missionary to India who later became an academic at the University of Cambridge.7 After finishing his studies at Cambridge (BA, MA), Barrett served as a missionary in Kenya (then British Kenya) before continuing his studies at Union Theological Seminary (STM) and Columbia University (PhD). Barrett the missionary, like his mentor, became Barrett the academic.

After finishing his doctorate at Columbia, where he did his work on African Independent Churches, Barrett returned to East Africa for an ambitious research project. Using Nairobi as his base, between 1968 and 1981 Barrett traveled to nearly “every country in the world” (he listed 212 countries) to harvest statistics on Christianity and missionary activity throughout the world. He worked with a team of 21 editors and more than five hundred consultants, one of whom was Patrick Johnstone, the missionary-researcher and author of Operation World.8 The project was slated to take three years but was extended to twelve, because Barrett and the entire editorial team “had seriously underestimated the size and complexity of the Christian world.”9 Barrett’s massive survey showed that the vast majority of Christians lived in the “so-called Third World,” and that there were “Christian churches in every inhabited country on earth.”10 Time magazine hailed his work the “Miracle from Nairobi!”11

As a well-trained academic, Barrett used a widely accepted conceptual framework from the study of economic geography. His data was organized around what is still known as the Brandt Line, which divided the globe between the economically developed regions of the world in the Global North and those classified as economically underdeveloped in the Global South. The term Third World was then a shorthand reference to those nations with the least-developed economies, though in the 1980s this term was gradually replaced with the more congenial-sounding Global South. The latter was a reference to most (not all) of the countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America (including the Caribbean), and Oceania. The term Global North was used for the bloc of nations with developed economies that are concentrated in North America and Europe. This nomenclature is still widely used in the discipline of global studies and informs important decisions made by governments, NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies (such as the United Nations and the World Bank). The taxonomy still holds, though in recent years, with the rapid growth of some developing economies, the lines have begun to blur.12

Seeing the Unreached

One of the more fascinating applications of Barrett’s work was related to how evangelicals made decisions about where to assign missionaries. His data on missionary allocation showed that the Western church was continuing to send nearly all of its missionaries to parts of the world where Christianity had already taken root. A classic case is Kenya, where Barrett had lived since the 1950s, and had returned again and again for research. In 1900, Christians made up less than 1 percent of the population of what was then British East Africa, though by the year 2000 the percentage had increased to an estimated 77 percent.13 Even though Kenya had been largely Christianized, it remained (and remains) a popular destination for the allocation of evangelical missionary personnel. Many parts of Africa and most of Central and South America also fell into this category. Western mission agencies, Barrett’s research showed, were continuing to send people to places where foundations had already been laid, even to countries in the Global South that were overwhelmingly Christian. Many churches seemed to hold the assumption that effective missionary strategy simply meant acquiring a passport and sending people anywhere they “felt led” to go outside of the United States. This assumption needed to be completely reassessed.

Barrett’s work encouraged evangelicals to think about what they were doing. Soon after Oxford published Barrett’s miracle from Nairobi, the Foreign Mission Board (FMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) hired Barrett to work as a consultant. The FMB (now the International Mission Board) was one of the largest and most influential mission agencies in the world. Using Barrett’s research, the FMB determined that there needed to be a greater focus on what is commonly called “unreached people groups.” Donald McGavran (1897–1990), a WCE consultant, and Ralph Winter (1924–2009), an early advisor, had already begun popularizing the language of “unreached” or “unengaged” people groups in the 1970s, though Barrett’s research was instrumental in its usage.14 The FMB set up a think tank called the Global Strategy Group to reappraise its allocation of missionary personnel. The SBC was so persuaded by the need to act on this research that, in an unprecedented display of interagency cooperation, it invited 36 other missions organizations to give serious consideration to Barrett’s proposals.15 The changes brought about by Barrett’s research over the next few decades have been called “seismic and enduring.”16 When Barrett died in 2011, the global strategist for the SBC wrote, “When David Barrett came to the Foreign Mission Board as a consultant in 1985, less than 3 percent of our mission force was deployed to [unreached, unengaged souls]. Today, as a result of Barrett’s prophetic push, more than 80 percent of the people groups our missionaries serve among are unreached.”17

“The willingness of evangelicals to think about what they were doing has led to greater evangelical faithfulness.”

John Piper made an even wider audience aware of Barrett’s work in his book Let the Nations Be Glad! The Supremacy of God in Missions, first published thirty years ago. Piper cited David Barrett, Patrick Johnstone, and Ralph Winter throughout, taking evangelicals to task for what Winter had called “people blindness.” His plea combined rigorous exegetical work with impressive missiological reflection. He corrected misunderstandings of the English word nation and urged evangelicals to place greater emphasis on declaring the marvelous works of God among all ethnic groups.18 Piper’s lively and learned contribution to missiology, which has sold more than 300,000 copies since its first printing, has probably influenced evangelical thinking on missions more than any single work that has been published over the last thirty years.19 The willingness of evangelicals to think about what they were doing has led to greater evangelical faithfulness to the missio Dei.

End of the ‘Global South’?

I recently had a conversation with Philip Jenkins about his suggestion that we might now be entering a new era, one that he calls “the end of the Global South and, consequently, of global/world Christianity.”20 Jenkins’s 2002 book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity helped focus the attention of literate laypersons and learned academics on the rapid growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As he put it then, “The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning.”21 Jenkins helped popularize what Barrett and others had been working on since the late 1960s. In light of Jenkins’s usage of the expression Global-South Christianity and his insightful work on the “coming of global Christianity,” it is reasonable to ask what he means by these comments. Is Global-South Christianity no longer a helpful category? Has global/world Christianity already come and gone?

Looking back now over the last two decades, Jenkins has observed that there has been “real progress in the popular awareness of global affairs among Christians.” He notes that “in recent years, the situation has changed utterly. Publishers have turned out countless volumes in world or global Christianity, a topic that is now very well covered in seminaries and religious departments.”22 The remarkable literary achievements of academics like Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Dana Robert, Brian Stanley, Kirsteen Kim, Kwame Bediako, Jehu Hanciles, Mercy Oduyoye, Todd Johnson, Dyron Daughrity, Scott Sunquist, Paul Hiebert, Gina Zurlo, and Wilbert Shenk (to mention only a few names!) are now enlarging the story of Christianity.23 A younger generation of academics is also standing on the shoulders of giants and writing fresh histories of Christianity with sweeping coverage of nearly every country in the world. The field of global/world Christianity now comprises historians, theologians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, and missiologists, many of them clustered around the Yale-Edinburgh Conference, co-founded in 1992 by Andrew Walls (1928–2021) and Lamin Sanneh (1942–2019).24 These scholars are interested in the broader theme of global/world Christianity, but individuals also specialize in particular regions (e.g., continents, subcontinents) and countries, and also focus on subjects like transnational movements (e.g., evangelicalism, Anglicanism, Pentecostalism) as well as specific topics (e.g., men and women, politics, migration, mission).

Generous samples of their scholarship are found in print and online academic journals published by major research universities in places like Boston, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Princeton. Lengthy bibliographic entries can be accessed in works like the Edinburgh Companions to Global Christianity, the World Christian Encyclopedia (bibliographies are listed under every country) and the new nine-volume Cambridge History of Christianity. There is now voluminous coverage of Christianity in every historical period, covering nearly every single country of the world. Gina Zurlo’s recent work Global Christianity: A Guide to the World’s Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe is an effort to make some of this scholarly work more accessible for a general readership.25 Hundreds of highly motivated academics, a surprising number of whom are evangelicals, are shedding new light on the church’s story.

Global from the Beginning

This enormous output of research on the history of Christianity from the first century to the present is now showing that the church is more diverse than we have ever imagined. When the Spirit of God came blowing in at Pentecost, the gospel was translated into the languages of Africa, Arabia, Asia, and Europe, spilling out from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. Sometime around AD 60, the apostle Paul could already say that the gospel is “bearing fruit and increasing” throughout “the whole world” (Colossians 1:6). Christianity has been a worldwide, polycentric movement from its inception, and contrary to popular misconceptions, Rome has never been the sole seat of ecclesiastical authority. In point of fact, Christianity was adopted as the official religion of Armenia and Georgia in Asia and Aksum (Ethiopia) in Africa before it became the state religion of Rome in the West. In the ancient church (ca. 100–450), networks of churches were clustered around places like Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople in Asia; Alexandria in Africa; and Rome in the West, with multiple centers of influence all confessing a near-identical creed. For a brief period in the early Middle Ages, these five regions formed a pentarchy (five coequal spheres), but even prior to the usage of this term in the sixth century, new centers had already formed further afield in Asia as far as India and China, across Africa as far south as Sudan, and to the farthest reaches of Western and Northern Europe. The work of historians is helping us see more than ever before that Christianity has been a diverse, global religion for two thousand years.

“Christianity has been a worldwide, polycentric movement from its inception.”

In our own day, the growing ethnic and geographic diversity of Christianity is pushing thinkers like Jenkins to challenge how we use expressions like the Global South and global/world Christianity. Jenkins believes that the classifications Global South and Global North are helpful ways of having conversations about macrolevel trends, but that they fail to do justice as descriptors of Christianity’s boundless diversity. With so much scholarly light having now been cast on Christianity in every country of the world, he wants to be careful about using the term Global South as though it were a religious monolith. He wants to avoid language that simply divides the church into halves. To be fair to my colleagues working in religious demography, they are not using the terms in this way, and Jenkins himself still uses Global-South Christianity in his writing. More controversially, the boundless diversity of Christianity has even led a few academics to adopt the expression “world Christianities” (plural) rather than global/world Christianity (singular), though this language is now being convincingly contested.26

A few examples will suffice to illustrate what Jenkins is talking about. Christianity has grown rapidly in Kenya, as well as in neighboring South Sudan, yet the church in both countries has been shaped by different narratives and disparate political and social realties. Nigeria is roughly divided between Christianity and Islam, creating unique conditions and challenges for the church within different regions of the same country. Christianity is growing in Northeast India as well as in the neighboring hermit-kingdom of Bhutan, but in decidedly different ways, due in part to starkly different political and social contexts. Historians still write about Korean Christianity, though the churches of North Korea and South Korea are undeniably living out their faith in different political contexts. Christianity across Central America has common features, but you can see and feel the differences between the churches of Guatemala and neighboring Honduras — and both countries are distinct from Costa Rica, with its large expat community. Brazil provides one of the most interesting examples of Christian diversity, with evangelicals and Pentecostals now diffused in nearly every tradition, including Roman Catholicism, in a way that has now influenced national elections. These are but a few examples of contrast, and we haven’t even begun talking about the vast continental differences. As Jenkins has put it, “In demographic and cultural terms, the world is anything but flat.”27 Said another way, the Global South is not a country.

Drama of Unfolding Redemption

Scholars will continue their work (and their debates), but what is important to note here is that the academic study of Christianity’s past and present has been a source of tremendous wisdom for evangelical engagement in global missions. This should encourage Christians who have been suspicious of the life of the mind not to be afraid of careful reflection. The increased awareness in our own day of Christianity’s boundless diversity also has implications for missions — a topic that needs further exploration. One implication is clear: the opportunity has never been greater for the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world. What is needed is a shift in missional thinking, one that abandons an America-first mentality, and one that adopts a gospel-first mindset. To repackage a Pauline trope, the gospel did not originate with us, and we are not the only ones it has reached. The way of the future is in working together across cultures in cross-cultural missions for the glory of God.

“The opportunity has never been greater for the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world.”

What we are witnessing today through the work of globe-trotting researchers and travel-worn academics is the glorious drama of God’s unfolding worldwide redemption. The Spirit is blowing where he pleases, the kingdoms of the world are continuing to enter the kingdom of the Lord from the east and the west, the north and the south, and the nations are singing the praises of God. These stories are now being churned out by major academic presses as scholars have turned their attention to understanding the “surprising work of God” around the world. Christian academics have eyes to see the overarching work of redemptive history in their scholarship, even as they delight in the increasing diversity of the church “that no one [can] number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). New research is helping us reimagine the Christian world and widening our gaze to apprehend more fully the glory of God, world without end. Amen.28