Winds of the Spirit

A Profile of Anabaptist Churches in the Global South

Conrad Kanagy, Tilahun Beyene, Richard Showalter

• Publisher: Herald Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780836196368
• eBook ISBN: 9780836197075
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In this groundbreaking study, the authors make an unsettling claim: Anabaptist churches of the Global South have more in common with the church of the first three centuries than they do with contemporary churches in Europe and North America that claim the Anabaptist name. With data from 18,000 church members in ten countries, they show how historical patterns of church renewal are repeating themselves today in the Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The study does more than crunch statistics; it probes the sources and nature of the renewal and growth. And it pushes readers to ask what these trends can teach the church of the North in their own quest for faithfulness and vitality.

"A compact and informative thesaurus on emerging ecclesiastical and cultural meanings of ‘Mennonite.’ Christian faith today is not merely a world religion, but a substantially non-Western phenomenon."
—Jonathan J. Bonk, executive director, Overseas Ministries Study Center

1

Introduction

Conrad L. Kanagy¹

The twentieth-century charismatic/Pentecostal renewal in the Holy Spirit has not entered the world scene on one single, sudden clear-cut occasion, nor even gradually over a hundred years. It has arrived in three distinct and separate surges or explosions sufficiently distinct and distinctive for us to label them the first wave (the Pentecostal renewal), the second wave (the charismatic renewal), and the third wave (the neo-charismatic renewal). All three waves share the same experience of the infilling power of the Holy Spirit, Third Person of the Triune God. The Spirit has entered and transformed the lives not simply of small numbers of heroic individuals and scattered communities … but of vast numbers of millions of Christians across the world today.… Charismatics are now found across the entire spectrum of Christianity … in 9,000 ethnolinguistic cultures, speaking 8,000 languages covering 95 percent of the world’s total population.”² —David Barrett, longtime analyst of world Christian trends

During the mid-1980s, I lived for several months in a Quichua community in the rural highlands of Ecuador. While there, I questioned residents about the mass movement to evangelical Christianity that swept through their village in the 1960s. What I learned challenged the assertions of scholars who argue that such conversions are due primarily to the imposition of Western neocolonialist forces.³ I observed peasants who, as former Catholics, had for decades felt abandoned by their church. They had found empowerment and autonomy in evangelical Christianity. As Catholics, the Quichua rarely interacted with their priests, who came to the community only to oversee major life course events such as baptism, marriage, and death. As evangelical Christians, these peasants were now responsible for their own religious life and for the rituals that gave life meaning.

By the 1980s, any evangelical missionary presence was long gone, and the church was overseen solely by Quichua pastors local to the community. The success of the evangelical movement among the Quichua was in its populist origins. Protestant evangelicalism fit more readily the relatively egalitarian structures of power in Quichua society than had Roman Catholicism. In many ways, evangelicalism enabled the church to reflect the Quichua sense of identity, leadership patterns, and cohesiveness. In sum, among the Quichua, evangelical expressions of the gospel were more readily contextualized than those of Roman Catholicism.

In addition to the cultural compatibility of the missionary message, other factors—religious, cultural, and economic—influenced the receptivity of Quichua peasants to the evangelical message. Such forces were also shaping the shifting religious landscape in other parts of the Global South during the same period, providing a rich foundation for the growth of evangelical and charismatic expressions of Christianity in the decades that followed. Changes affecting the Roman Catholic Church globally, the national redistribution of landholdings from wealthy to impoverished, and national political turmoil contributed to a climate that made the Ecuadorian Quichua more likely to accept the teachings of evangelical missionaries. Conversion to evangelical Christianity connected these new converts with evangelical Christian non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which were more than willing to provide economic development assistance to the communities of the new converts. Sanitation programs, potable water projects, and agricultural development efforts became lifelines for communities that had been neglected by the Roman Catholic Church and government entities.⁴

Instead of being co-opted by Western neocolonial forces, the Quichua had made a rational religious choice—one that made sense to them—within the social, cultural, and political context in which they found themselves in the 1960s. Conversion for the Quichua was an act of empowerment: they stepped aside from a religious identity that felt distant and abstract and embraced a new identity that felt local and concrete. Far from being victims of neocolonialism, they were savvy religious entrepreneurs who, in coming to Christ, had found spiritual freedom, retained their cultural identity, and strengthened their community autonomy. Far from being Marx’s “opiate of the masses,” religious conversion became for the Quichua an “engine of hope.”⁵

The debate about the nature of religious conversion and religious experience reflects a sociological tension that goes back to the nineteenth century. The assertions of Karl Marx—that religion is nothing more than a drug—exist as a radical alternative to the more positive views of, for example, Emile Durkheim, who saw religion as a social glue, and Max Weber, who understood religion to be a factor in economic and social change.⁶ At a personal level, the research described in this book connects back to my first sociological analysis in Ecuador in 1985. While the conversation about religion’s impact on society has taken twists and turns in the quarter century since, the argument continues over whether religion is a drug or a catalyst for change.

Emerging interest in global Christianity

The debate about religion’s role and function has been informed over the last two decades by the rapid growth of Pentecostal forms of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which some refer to as the “Global South.” While a number of scholars, including Andrew Walls, Lamin Saneh, and others, had been writing about the expansion of Christianity in the twentieth century, it was the publication of The Next Christendom by Philip Jenkins in 2002 that catalyzed scholars’ and practitioners’ interest in the important shift taking place in the global church.⁷

Jenkins argues that the growth of Christianity in the Global South over the past two decades is largely neglected by scholars in Europe and North America. This oversight, he says, is due in part to the lack of personal religiosity of many academicians, who still accept the early sociological notions that religion will eventually disappear with increased education and scientific awareness. But, he argues, the slowness to recognize Christianity’s growth also reflects an academic skepticism about the Pentecostal type of Christianity that is rapidly expanding in the Global South.

In the 1960s, many assumed that if Christianity took root in the Global South at all, it would emerge from a liberation theology framework that emphasizes a need for a global redistribution of power and resources in order to bring about a more just and equitable society. Many expected this theologi-cally-driven movement to be a vibrant catalyst for radical change that would usher in political revolution. Liberation theology did in fact mobilize the poor and create Christian communities in many places.⁸ However, the Christianity that is expanding today in the Global South has relatively little to do with the neo-Marxist perspectives of liberation theologians.⁹ Instead, it tends to be a conservative Pentecostalism that prefers capitalist modes of production and, where politically engaged, often embraces democratic means of voting, running for office, and legislation. As noted by Johnson and Ross in the Atlas of Global Christianity, the social and cultural forces leading such change are very similar to those that the Quichua experienced:

Christianity as expressed in Pentecostalism has thrived in the Global South amongst peoples marginalized from power precisely because it both incorporates their cultural values … and responds to their deeply felt needs for healing and a voice in the midst of great poverty and socioeconomic and political marginalization.¹⁰

In 2003,1 traveled with my two coauthors, Richard Showalter and Tilahun Beyene, to Ethiopia and Kenya to meet with Anabaptist leaders from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. What we found took me by surprise. While both a sociologist and a Mennonite pastor, I was largely unaware of the rapid growth of Mennonites (often referred to as Anabaptists) outside my own continent. In North America and Europe, church membership and attendance trends among many progressive denominations—including my own Mennonite denomination—have been downward for some time. Not only was I shocked at the upward trajectory of the churches in Africa; I was also impressed with the intentional way that this growth was nurtured and tracked by church leaders. Statistical measurements, monitoring of evangelism efforts, and intentional discipleship programs for every participating church revealed energy for recruitment and growth that was foreign to my experience as a North American Christian and pastor.

I returned to the United States with a vision for telling this story from a sociological perspective, tracking not just membership numbers (something on which much research about Christianity in the Global South is based) but also the beliefs, religious practices, values, and attitudes of ordinary members of these churches. Unable to locate funds for a global study of Anabaptists, several other colleagues and I succeeded in implementing a study of Anabaptist groups in the United States. As codirector of the 2006 Church Member Profile, I conducted a survey of members of Mennonite Church USA, the largest denomination of assimilated Mennonites in the United States.¹¹ The findings of the profile startled many members of Mennonite Church USA. To mention a few:

• The average age of members was fifty-four years, up from forty-nine years in 1989.
• The percent of members within childbearing range (between eighteen and forty-five years of age) was 30%, a figure even lower than that among mainline Protestants and certainly among evangelicals.
• The “market share” of Mennonite Church USA of all Anabaptists globally had dropped to 7% from 15% in 1989.
• The church had declined in membership by 16.4% since the late 1980s.
• The percent of Mennonites with a four-year degree had doubled in just over thirty years to 38%, more than most other religious groups in the United States.
• Twenty-two percent of Mennonites expressed no interest in church planting—up from 8%.
• Only 2% of Mennonite members were new believers without previous church experience.
• One-third of Mennonites had never invited someone to church, up from 16% in 1972. Only 13% had invited others to church on a regular basis, monthly or more.
• Fifty-nine percent of Anglo Mennonites felt that the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit were genuine gifts of God’s Spirit, and 44% had experienced the charismatic gifts at some point in their lives.¹²

While most Mennonites in the 2006 profile expressed agreement with questions related to Christian orthodoxy—such as Jesus was born of a virgin, Jesus physically rose from the dead, and the Bible is inspired—they exhibited little energy for evangelism and outreach, even while affirming the need to do so. Interestingly, however, members that were racial or ethnic minorities—many of them immigrants from the Global South—were much more likely than Anglo Mennonites to engage in evangelism and outreach and to embrace the charismatic gifts of the Spirit.

These findings among Mennonites in the United States reflect the vast changes that have taken place among U.S. Christians in general since World War II. Declining and aging memberships, minimal evangelical fervor, increased individualism, and changes in moral attitudes despite continued affirmation of orthodox beliefs characterize many denominations in the United States In other words, Mennonites in the 2006 profile largely mirror trends in North American mainline Protestantism in general.¹³

Not only had Mennonites in the United States changed dramatically since the first profile in 1972, but also they were quite different from the portrait of Global South Christians that Philip Jenkins sketched in The Next Christendom. Jenkins argues that the Christianity emerging in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is theologically conservative, charismatic in worship and experience, and evangelistic in its outreach. He adds that its adherents are young and that Christianity’s growth is often in contexts of poverty and oppression.

The Multi-Nation Anabaptist Profile

In early 2008, Eastern Mennonite Missions agreed to sponsor a study of Mennonite churches with origins in its mission-sending movement. In 1933, Eastern Mennonite Missions sent its first international missionaries to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in Africa, and over the subsequent decades was actively engaged in evangelism and church planting in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, particularly in regions where an evangelical expression of the Christian church did not yet exist. Eastern Mennonite Missions’ interest in a profile of global churches was to develop a “photograph” of the churches it had planted and to measure where these churches were on a host of religious and social variables.

This book is an effort to provide insight into the realities of these churches and to test a variety of sociological assertions that have been emerging over the past two decades as scholars of religion have increasingly turned their attention to the southern hemisphere. The empirical data supporting arguments in earlier studies of Christianity in the Global South have often been anecdotal, based on membership patterns, or gathered largely through ethnographic research. We do not know of anyone who has collected data on attitudes, values, and beliefs from ordinary church members as we have in the Multi-Nation Anabaptist Profile (MNA Profile). While our data are limited in that they do not represent all Anabaptists globally and are not representative of Christian groups outside the Anabaptist family, the Profile provides a new and useful window into the forces shaping Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America today.

Some may criticize the Profile’s research limitations and miss the more important story that the data reveal: a narrative consistent with what Jenkins and others have been reporting about Christianity’s growth in the Global South. While important to strengthening future efforts, too much focus on the shortcomings of research methods can be a smokescreen to avoid realities that some of us in Europe and North America would like to deny about Christianity’s demise in our own backyards. But frankly, it matters little what those of us in the West think about present or future trends of Christianity in the Global South. The precipitous declines in birth rates in Europe and North America and the lack of engagement in recruitment and evangelism have resulted in a Western church that is diminishing as quickly as the church in the Global South is expanding. Based on the data that are emerging, it is quite likely that the churches of Asia, Africa, and Latin America will have the last word in terms of what it means to be Christian in the twenty-first century.

At the same time, the MNA Profile data—as well as the history of Christianity—suggest that those in the Global South should not automatically assume that their current growth patterns will continue indefinitely. Demographic trends such as death rates, birth rates, life expectancy, and migration play a major role in the growth and decline of a church. Whether a church relies primarily on conversion and/or on reproduction helps to determine the future of that church. Historically, North A...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A History of the Churches in the Profile
• 3 An Overview of the Profile
• 4 Characteristics and Trajectories of Anabaptist Churches
• 5 Anabaptist Beliefs and Practices
• 6 Congregational Life
• 7 The Missionary Posture of Global Anabaptists
• 8 Anabaptism from Sixteenth-Century Europe to the Twenty-First-Century Global South
• 9 The Holy Spirit’s Movement among Global Anabaptists
• 10 Emerging Visions of Anabaptism in the Global South
• Bibliography
• The Authors