Everybody knows that U.S. churches are a shrinking presence in the world. But sometimes what “everybody knows” is wrong, says Robert Wuthnow, director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.
If anything, American churches are now more involved in international outreach and global affairs than ever before, Wuthnow says. Thanks in large part to the impact of globalization, American churches are playing a significant role in other countries and in U.S. policies and programs abroad, adding new forms of outreach to traditional missionary efforts.
For congregations that want to be more active in the global arena, Wuthnow offers three keys for becoming a “transcultural church”: missional focus, leadership and energy.
Wuthnow is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Sociology and chair of the Department of Sociology at Princeton. He has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
His most recent books are “Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches” and “Be Very Afraid: The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation and Other Threats.”
Recently, Wuthnow spoke with Faith & Leadership about the changing landscape of global outreach and American Christianity. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: In your book “Boundless Faith,” you contend that American Christianity has been significantly influenced by globalization and is playing a much larger role in other countries and in U.S. policies and programs abroad. How so?
Because a lot of the missions literature has suggested the opposite, we were surprised to find more activity going on in international outreach from the United States now than at any time in recent history, perhaps ever. The number of old-fashioned full-time missionaries engaged in evangelism or humanitarian relief has risen in recent decades. There are more now than in the 1950s, when people thought that the missionary effort had peaked.
Newer things have also become important, such as short-term volunteer mission trips and large faith-based organizations such as World Vision or Catholic Relief Services or Lutheran Social Services. They’ve all increased their budgets, activities and staff.
When you think about the increase in global outreach, it makes sense, because globalization has reduced the cost. Transportation is faster and cheaper. The internet, e-mail, international phone service and other electronic communication has facilitated it. More Americans travel overseas and are exposed to other countries because of the large numbers of immigrants who have come to the United States over the past 30 or 40 years. All that has facilitated greater contact between American churches and people in other countries.
Q: The book challenges several assumptions about American Christianity, especially that it has withdrawn from the world, that Christianity is moving south, and that local congregations have imploded.
That’s right. The book is fairly critical of the “global Christianity” paradigm. It’s true that most Christians no longer live in the United States. Many American observers have been impressed by the vibrancy, enthusiasm and the sheer growth rates of a lot of the activity in Africa, Southeast Asia, Korea and Latin America. But that growth often has more to do with population increase than with actual conversions.
Where the global Christianity paradigm totally missed the boat was by saying, “Well, this was happening out there and it was indigenous and it was one of those interesting phoenix stories, where the missionary effort died out and then somehow the Spirit was still there and took root and started growing.” That is just completely wrong, because it misses the point that there were and are numerous connections that link churches in other parts of the world with churches in the U.S.
As churches became established in other parts of the world, the missionary effort from the United States changed. It was no longer a matter of sending the lone missionary into the bush to learn another language and make converts. It became more about going as assistants or advisors or even to learn from other folks. It’s often not even necessary to learn a different language, because English has become much more common. Combine all that with the fact that a church group can get on a plane in Chicago and before the day is over be someplace in Africa and stay for a week or two, it has become a lot easier.
Q: The book puts these changes into the broader context of globalization and the many ways that it is changing our lives. Why would it be any different for evangelism and global outreach? It is a very different world.
It’s absolutely different. One of the sources of inspiration for this book was my Great-Aunt Amanda. In the 1920s, as a young single woman, she went to Nigeria as a missionary after having studied for six weeks at Moody Bible Institute. She spent the rest of her life there except for the occasional furlough home.
One time, she wanted to build a little wall to prevent the torrential rains from damaging the little church building that she had put up herself. Because that was a capital project, she had to write to the mission board. It took a month for the letter to get to the United States by steamship, and then it took them a while to figure it out. Then it took another month for their approval to get back to her, and by that time it was the rainy season again and impossible to build a wall.
Think about how much has changed since then. Now, people can e-mail back and forth and a full-time missionary can stay in touch with family back home or the church that’s supporting them fairly easily.
It doesn’t mean that there isn’t still hardship, but it does mean that the rest of us can be much more engaged. We can think about them. We can pray for them. We can support them and go visit them. It’s just so easy to do.
Q: How else is global outreach different today than in your great-aunt’s time?
Almost all the things that were started back in the 19th century have continued. Full-time missionary work and educational programs continue. The humanitarian efforts with relief and refugee relocation that started during World War II have continued.
But on top of that, new layers have been added, including things like short-term mission trips. You see college kids at an airport, and they’re all wearing the same T-shirts and going to Peru as mission volunteers to dig ditches for two weeks. People are going as medical consultants or experts in sustainable agriculture. Lawyers are going to work on international justice issues.
A whole range of economic development programs are also being sponsored by organizations like World Vision. Microfinance programs are helping people get on their own feet economically. Major efforts are being made to eradicate malaria or combat HIV/AIDS or provide other public health services. To some extent, in both international and domestic faith-based work, we’re seeing organizations develop their own niches so they’re not duplicating other people’s efforts and a greater emphasis on strategic planning.
Q: What’s this mean for denominations? Is it good news or bad news?
What it means is that denominations have to adapt to changing circumstances. There is still a lot of activity through the denominational mission boards, but that varies. Some denominations have scaled back because of budget problems or declining membership. Others have managed to keep things going pretty well. We find more collaborative efforts across congregations; maybe all the Protestant congregations in a community band together on a mission trip.
Some megachurches are big enough that they organize a lot of the activities themselves. They’re also able to draw in clergy and laypeople from other churches in the community who come aboard and help.
Is it a positive story or negative story for denominations? It’s a mixed story. And what it mostly says to denominational leaders is that you’ve got to think through the opportunities. You can’t just say, “One size fits all,” and you can’t say, “Because the church down the block is doing it one way, we should do it that way.”
What we found really matters is a kind of intentional leadership, whether by the clergy or a lay-led mission committee. You need to think through these issues, get the necessary information and scope out the place you want to go to, the host community, so that you know what you’re getting into.
Q: What other advice do you have for congregations that want to do more in this area? You write in the book about the marks of a “transcultural church.”
The marks of the transcultural church are the key points for local congregations. The first point is that a congregation has to have an explicit missional focus, reaching beyond its members. If that’s there, then the energy and resources can begin to be mobilized. If it’s not and the church is inwardly focused or struggling or conflicted over some internal problem, then it’s not likely to do much.
The second thing it needs is organized leadership. If it’s a large congregation, that may be a global missions director, but if it’s a small congregation, it’s more likely to be a mission or global outreach committee.
Third, the leadership has to muster the necessary resources, and the trick here is to figure out where the energy is. If people aren’t interested, then nothing’s going to happen. But if there’s energy waiting to be tapped, then it’s going to happen.
Q: How does the global recession affect all of this?
I don’t think we know yet. Some people in the missions field tell us that the larger organizations have not been hurt very much by the downturn. Others have told us they know of several faith-based organizations that have been scaling back.
When we talk to individual pastors, once again it’s mixed. Even though the U.S. economy has suffered the last two years, the impact on local churches has varied. If you’re in a small town where a manufacturing plant closed, then you’re hurting. If you’re in a farming community and there’s a new ethanol plant, you might be doing okay as a church.
If this recession continues, my prediction is that overseas ministry activity will suffer. If it takes more sacrificial giving to continue these efforts, are we going to hunker down and say, “No, it’s really our own church, our own community, our own family that we need to look after”?
But, as Christianity grows around the world, we are seeing more international activity being sponsored from other countries, South Korea, Nigeria and Ghana. Those are hopeful signs.
Q: Tell us about your newest book, “Be Very Afraid.”
As we were interviewing people for “Boundless Faith,” we talked some about relief efforts for things like earthquakes and tsunamis. Then, we had 9/11 and the war going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the moment the light bulb came on was when we were having a meeting here, and we were talking about science and religion. One of the people said, “We keep debating all of the 19th-century questions about science, all the Darwinian questions about evolution, creation, intelligent design. Why don’t we get busy thinking about some of the 21st-century issues?”
We said, “What are those?” “Well, the fact that we can blow ourselves up. The fact that global warming might be irreversible at some point, or the fact of population increase or the fragility of our planet.”
At least since 1945, with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we’ve been living in a world where we have the instruments of our own annihilation. What impact has that had on our consciousness? As a culture how have we responded? The common wisdom was that we have been living in denial, and there’s some evidence for that.
In the 1980s the nuclear movement asked why people weren’t up in arms and concluded, “We must be living in denial.” Yet that didn’t quite make sense, because we had actually been paying a lot of attention in the newspapers, in our public policy and our churches, our literature, in films, in radio. The question, then, is, “How have we responded?”
The long answer is that we have engaged in an enormous amount of cultural production, inviting all the best filmmakers, philosophers and scientists to weigh in. The short answer is that we have basically taken a “can-do” attitude toward these problems. The human response in us is that no matter what happens, we’re going to keep fighting it until the end.
We usually try to rely on the experts as much as we can, but we also want to do something. That’s all well and good, but sometimes we overreact. We may say, “Oh my, this is really going to be terrible.” We hear the worst possible scenarios that are out there, so we fill our garage with duct tape and bottles of water and everything else. Or as a society, if we get hit to the point that we feel vulnerable like we did on 9/11, then we sometimes want to strike back as hard as we can. We say, “We don’t care. We just need to exercise our muscle in some way.”
In those instances sometimes we’re perhaps more easily talked into taking military action or starting wars or striking out at whatever aggressor we can imagine than may be wise.
Q: What is the church’s role in an age of terror and other existential threats?
I think churches do have a role. You can see this with some of these statements that the pope has made, when he talks about the fragility of life and the planet and the environment. You see that in churches too. One thing local congregations can do is to be a forum where you can process the information that you’re hearing on CNN among trusted people. Maybe it happens in a sermon, but more likely it happens in a discussion context. You’re reflecting back and forth and saying, “Okay, we’re hearing all of this about swine flu.” Or, “We’re hearing on the news that all these terrorists are Muslims and they hate Christianity.”
Churches can be places for people to sit and talk: “How should we be thinking about this? What are we doing as a family? What are we doing as a congregation? How should we respond?”
Q: What ties your work together?
I’ve been interested in the broad theme of how communities change. How is our society changing? Living in different parts of the country and experiencing those changes, I think about that next generation, my kids, my grandkids. What kind of world are they living in? That’s really what interests me.