The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith

Front Cover
InterVarsity Press, 2009 - Religion - 212 pages
2010 Christianity Today Book Award winner! With characteristic rigor and insight, in this book Mark Noll revisits the history of the American church in the context of world events. He makes the compelling case that how Americans have come to practice the Christian faith is just as globally important as what the American church has done in the world. He backs up this substantial claim with the scholarly attentiveness we've come to expect from him, lucidly explaining the relationship between the development of Christianity in North America and the development of Christianity in the rest of the world, with attention to recent transfigurations in world Christianity. Here is a book that will challenge your assumptions about the nature of the relationship between the American church and the global church in the past and predict what world Christianity may look like.
 

Contents

Tables and Figures
8
Introduction
9
The New Shape of World Christianity
19
NineteenthCentury Evangelical Identity Power and Culture as Anticipating the Future
39
Posing the Question
67
What Does Counting Missionaries Reveal?
77
Indictment and Response
95
American Experience as Template
109
American Evangelicals View the World 19002000
127
What Korean Believers Can Learn from American Evangelical History
151
The East African Revival
169
Reflections
189
Guide to Further Reading
201
Index
207
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2009)

Mark A. Noll (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University) is Francis McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is advisory editor for Books & Culture and subeditor for the new Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Noll's main academic interests concern the interaction of Christianity and culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American societies. He has published articles and reviews on a wide variety of subjects involving Christianity in modern history. Some of his many books include The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Is the Reformation Over?, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys and The Old Religion in a New World.

Bibliographic information