Seventh-day Adventist Mission: The Shifting Landscape

Abstract

Did you know that 26 of the 30 biggest shopping malls in the world are now in emerging markets, mostly in Asia?Only three are in the United States.Did you know that statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization show that more patents originate in Japan than in the U.S., that South Korea overtook Germany to take third place in 2005, and that China is poised to overtake Germany, too?Did you know, economically speaking, that over the past decade six of the ten fastest-growing countries in the world were African?In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan?(Africa Rising 2011:15). The Changing Contours of World MissionIt is not only in the arena of economic growth that the developing world is exceling; church growth is also advancing with breakneck speed and the religious landscape is being redrawn.For the past fifty years or so, the center of Christianity has shifted from North America and Europe to Africa, Asia, and Latin America (AALA).Church historian Philip Jenkins calls this shift "one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide" (2011:1).Christianity on a global scale has grown significantly during the twentieth century.This growth is likely to continue unabated in the foreseeable future.The outcome of this phenomenal development has been an incredible redistribution of membership.The Christian heartlands of Europe are shrinking and Africa, Asia, and Latin America are expanding, causing the center of Christianity to shift from the so-called Global North to the Global South (Jenkins 2011:2).The Global North (for this article Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) used to be the traditional 1 Ng: Seventh-day Adventist Mission: The Shifting Landscape

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