Good book....

I just finished a very interesting book called, "The Next Christendom" by Philip Jenkins. It was quoted often during our cross-cultural training and is about the shift in Christianity throughout the world. Whereas the church used to be almost synonymous with Western culture, it is now thriving and growing exponentially in Latin America, Africa and Asia. As the West (more accurately the North) has secularized and stagnated in population, booming third-world cities in the southern hemisphere are becoming the geographic centers of the faith. And there are remarkable implications - for church practice, missions, immigration, politics, etc.
The writer, a prof at Penn State, does his best to be objective and non-committal, but while he does not seem to be an evangelical Christian, he is far more sympathetic to evangelicals than most Western academics. Though I did not agree with every approach he took, I really enjoyed the book, and recommend it, if even just for the remarkable analyses of demographic projections and the church's interaction with culture. It certainly opened my eyes to a more global view of what God is doing, and was particularly insightful for our upcoming ministry in Peru.