There’s a popular notion which suggests that it can be helpful to compare every century of Christianity’s existence to one year of life. That would make Christianity 21 years old, a young 21, grown up enough to exhibit a basic maturity but still far from a finished product.
How insightful is this notion? That’s a complex question because Christianity expresses itself in communities of worship and in spiritualities that vary greatly across the world. For instance, just to speak of churches, it is difficult to speak of the Christian Church in any global way. In Africa, for the most part, the churches are young, full of young life and exploding with growth, with all the strengths and problems that come with that. In Eastern Europe, the churches are still emerging from the long years of oppression under communism and are struggling to find a new balance and new energy within an ever-intensifying secularity. Latin American churches have given us liberation theology for a reason. There, the issues of social injustice and those advocating for it in Jesus’s name and those reacting against them have deeply coloured how church and spirituality are lived and understood.
