아프리카 기독교

Christianity in Africa

While every day in the West, roughly 7500 people in effect stop being Christians every day in Africa roughly double that number become Christians. The expansion of Christianity in twentieth-century Africa has been so dramatic that it has been called 'the fourth great age of Christian expansion.' According to much-quoted, statistics, there were 10 million African Christians in 1900, 143 million in 1970, and there will be 393 million in the year 2010, which would mean that 1 in 5 of all Christians would be an African. There are other estimates and the range of variation reflects the ambiguity and incompleteness of the raw data on which they are based. Much depends on how one defines a Christian, and Africa is full of small, independent churches that have never filed a statistical return. Kenya has the largest Yearly Meeting of Quakers in the world, outside the United States, and more Anglicans attend church in Ugand than in England. It is clear that, in the words of one thoughtful scholar, perhaps one of the two or three most important events in the whole of Church history has occurred... a complete change in the center of gravity of Christianity, so that the heartlands of the Church are no longer in Europe, decreasingly in North America, but in Latin America, in certain parts of Asia, and ... in Africa. Since 1970s to an ever-increasing extent, African intellectuals are reconstructing the text of Christianity's encounters with African cultures