The following is a post that I made during the reading of Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity in a recent Doctor of Ministry program that I have now completed. This book is now being used in many seminaries and graduate schools as standard reading. While going to a seminary or graduate school can be a plus, you don’t have to do so in order to educate yourself and think with an EPIC lens.

As one who has a “classic” Pentecostal background (Church of God, Cleveland, TN; Assemblies of God; and Foursquare plus a so called “Third Wave” movement (Vineyard) I often wonder why there is ongoing resistance to the Pentecostal/Charismatic church in USAmerica? While the traditional Pentecostal movements tend to be inbred (opinion), the Vineyard opened up its arms to any Evangelical who wanted to participate before entering into a partnership with a “latter reign” type ministry during its prophetic phase, which made it much more like the classical Pentecostal groups and caused many Evangelicals to view the Vineyard as caught up in a “silliness” itself. During the Vineyards formative days there was an openness to charismatic issues by English speaking Evangelicals who were ripe for a paradigm shift because it didn’t appear to have all the “silliness” of the televangelist. So, what does count for the cultural acceptance of charismatic/Pentecostal issues in the two-thirds world and not so much in the American and English(?) version of the church? What matters of worldview are we still facing?

On page 9 Jenkins says:

In their own way, secular, liberal Americans have distinctly apocalyptic view of the future, while a millenarian expectation of the uprooting of organized religion. At the least, there is a widespread conviction that Christianity cannot survive in anything like its present form

Is this really a “secular, liberal American” view only. It seems that within the church world that there is a growing view that the church must become something other that what she presently is. If apocalyptic can roughly mean “removal of old in favor of new,” a removal of the traditional church forms with something different, then how can one hold in tension the both/and of post Protestantism with the either/or of apocalypticism? Or is it really a “modified” apocalyptic view?

In “Mission Church” (p. 4) Christendom is defined as “the gospel as passed along in the cultural shape of the Western church. Jenkins seems to be saying that the “Next Christendom” will be formed in the South and will not necessarily be Western rational in is focus. I think that would surely “scare the dickens,” as my Southern mama used to say, out of the USAmerica church where we think that we have it “correct.”

In a presentation by Rich Nathan (pastor of Vineyard Columbus, OH) he suggests that in the two-thirds world that the issues that we seem to want to deconstruct like modern/postmodern is not even an issue? Could he be right? [An address delivered to the Vineyard 2003 Leadership Conference pointed out to me by fellow cohortian Jason Clark]. How would that statement reflect on the discussions that we have about postmodern/post protestant deconstruction? Are these global churches in the moving center of the Next Christendom EPIC? because of their openness to being Pneumanauts being blown by the great WindBlower himself? Are we limiting EPIC to some new programization (if there is such a word) within the Western church? Can we be conduits through which EPIC flows to already formed churches as well as newly formed and newly forming communities of faith? This could drive us NUTS! and maybe well should.