Vince L. Bantu - A Multitude of All Peoples: Engaging Ancient Christianitys Global Identity

T here have been so many community members the Lord has placed in my life without whom this work would not have been completed. The editorial team at InterVarsity Press has been massively helpful throughout this processJon Boyd, Rebecca Carhart, Scott Sunquist, and Amos Yong, I thank you for your guidance and patience in the publication of this book. Several colleagues provided specialized feedback for which I am profoundly gratefulJanet Timbie, Artur Obuski, Adam Ployd, Aaron Butts, Scott F. Johnson, Philip Forness, Nathan Gibson, Robert Hoyland, Stephen Rapp, Jack Tannous, Monica Blanchard, Chiara Barbati, Blake Hartung, Jeffrey Wickes, and Li Tang, thank you for the invaluable insight you provided; all remaining errors are mine.

There have been several spiritual mothers and fathers that have taught me invaluable lessons about how to follow Jesus the way he made meSoong-Chan Rah, Dante Upshaw, Brian Howell, Terry LeBlanc, Bil and Paulea Mooney-McCoy, Allen Callahan, Dennis Edwards, and Alvin Padilla, thank you for helping me to understand more of the Creators love for his people. My family is the foundation that supports all that I am and doI thank my mother for raising me in the light of the gospel; I thank my daughters, Tana and Naniki, for the joy that they inspire; I thank my wife, Diana, for her love, support, and partnership. This book is dedicated to you.

Finally, I give all thanks, praise, honor, and glory to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and I pray this work is an act of worship pleasing to you.

C hristianity is and always has been a global religion. For this reason, it is important never to think of Christianity as becoming global.

Following the valuable work of prominent missiologists, it has become commonplace among twenty-first-century Christians to highlight the significant demographic shifts in the global church. The fact that the majority of Christians now live in the Global South has led many to speak of the coming of global Christianity. Andrew Walls has challenged the contemporary church to respond to what he calls the Ephesian moment:

The Ephesian momentthe social coming together of people of two cultures to experience Christwas quite brief.... But in our own day the Ephesian moment has come again, and come in a richer mode than has ever happened since the first century. Developments over several centuries, reaching a climax in the twentieth, mean that we no longer have two, but innumerable, major cultures in the church.

Contemporary missiologists have drawn much-needed attention to the demographic shifts that have taken place in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and have given helpful challenges to the Western, white captivity of the church. However, in drawing attention to such developments, there has been an implication that global diversity is exclusively a twentieth-century innovation of the Christian movement. Indeed, Wallss statement presents Christian diversity as a phenomenon that disappeared after the early church and has only become manifest again in the Ephesian moment of the twentieth century. Too many people, both Christian and non-Christian, still perceive Christianity as the white mans religion.

Contemporary missiology has often advanced the churchs cultural self-understanding by highlighting the unprecedented recorded numbers of Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The typical Christian of the twenty-first century is not a white man but an African woman. However, the modern global church has often been presented as emerging from centuries of a Western majority church. It is this common misconception that requires further conversation. Many contemporary missiologists and church historians would have us believe that Christianity came into Africa and Asia from Europe when the reality is quite the opposite in several significant respects. Christianity is not