How Christianity Became Global

Christianity’s modern association with Europe and North America can make its earlier history difficult to see. Yet the Christian movement crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries from its first centuries. Several of its most important early centers lay in Africa and Asia. The modern missionary movement later accelerated Christianity’s expansion enormously, often within the structures of empire but never reducible to them. By the twentieth century another transformation was underway: the demographic center of Christianity was moving south and east, and communities once treated chiefly as mission fields were becoming missionary senders.

The historical argument of this Part is therefore neither “Christianity was always equally global” nor “Western missions created global Christianity.” The record is more complex. Christianity became global through repeated processes of migration, translation, missionary initiative, political encounter, local appropriation, church reproduction, demographic change, and institutional transformation.