Apostolic Christianity is a notion which is a favourite one to many revivals throughout history, and many a moment wishes to patent it. However, that is really not possible, since Apostolic Christianity is before all the denominations, all the movements, all the specialties which have emerged. I hope to now and then publish parts of a paper I am working with. My main thesis is that the Apostolic Christianity which we found in earliest Christianity is the foundation and future of Christianity. But no church has the whole fullness of it. And I think that is a key—no movement or church can live on its own, nor have the monopoly on the true doctrine or praxis. The Holy Spirit wants to lead the Body of Christ into a new fullness and unity to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

The article is really written from my own kind of ecumenical perspective—I have a problem identifying myself with any label.

Here is my first part:

1. Challenges

Presently especially two forces are making strong inroads in religious Europe: Islam and secularisation. For twenty years Islam has become an increasingly important factor in European religious geography, and sometimes the notion ‘demographic time-bomb’ is used. Europe’s Muslim population has more than doubled in the past 30 years and will have doubled again by 2015.[1] At the same time so-called Christian countries like Italy already experience demographic crises. Some experts think that, with the same pace of growth as now, in 2075 Europe would be an Islamic continent. Even though this may be exaggerated, and a range of factors behind such a development is less than predictable, it is already a fact that some cities in the EU has more than 20% Muslims, and some reports project that all of the EU will have such a share of Muslim believers by 2050.

Secondly, secularisation makes its inroads in society and church. The national Lutheran churches in the Nordic countries presently gather ≈1,2% of the population for Sunday worship, and these churches more and more lose the grip of the young people (it could, however, be noted that the situation is quite different in some Catholic European countries). If free-churches in Sweden continue the present trends in terms of membership, they would look radically smaller by 2050. Church life also suffers from an inner secularisation parallel with a dominant post-modernism. In mainstream Northern European Protestantism central tenets in classical Christian faith such as parts of the Christological doctrines are being questioned.[2] Values pertaining to biblical family ethics, like marriage being a life-long union between one man and one woman, and biblical sexual ethics at large, are being increasingly challenged. E.g., in Britain now half of the marriages are civil marriages, and recently a British court decided that a person was not allowed to wear a necklace with a cross at work. A sign of the inner secularisation of the Swedish Lutheran church is the ordination in 2009 of an openly lesbian bishop of Stockholm.

However, a kind of secularisation may also be touching the core of Pentecostal-Charismatic experience, in that the dimension of the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit in churches where this has been a constitutive element often is getting less and less attention. Is the experience of the supernatural presence of the Holy Spirit, manifested in the gifts of the Holy Spirit considered an asset or a problem to such churches? The Singapore-based Pentecostal theologian Simon Chan notes that “[n]ow Pentecostals are experiencing fatigue. Instead of praying for a fresh outpouring of the Spirit as their forebears did, they perpetrate novelties and are themselves victims of novelties”[3] It seems like the classical Protestant churches as well as free-churches, including Pentecostal-Charismatic churches in the West, are failing to attract and keep the people, much less offer a viable alternative to the new immigrants. The result is decrease and de-Christianisation. Moreover, looking at Christianity at large it is characterised by division. This disunity and denominalisation of Christianity, which is not least evident in Protestantism, is also part of the reasons for unfortunate dichotomies between sacramentalism and revivalism, between the spiritual and social dimensions, between liturgy and evangelism. A consequence of this is an unlucky specialisation, so that one denomination specialises in one part and one in another—and is at the same time reduced accordingly. Charismatic Christianity is reduced to one such specialty.

Even though this scenario is sketched from a European point of view, similar signs of secularisation are evident even in North America, as well as in churches and seminaries in the Southern hemisphere, which are dependent on Western Protestantism. However, at large there are very different tendencies in the South, where the prophecies by Philip Jenkins of a ‘Next Christendom’ seem to come true.[4] Likewise, Paul Freston calls Latin America “the heartland of world Christianity.”[5] However, even though Pentecostalism is strongly on the rise in several Latin American countries—and there are people here who have much more to say about this than I do—Freston prognosticates that within two decades, the numbers might flatten and stabilise. These denominations, he predicts, will enter into a phase not too dissimilar from those in Western societies: more birth members, an increasing fragmentation and an increasing migration from its base among the poor till the middle class might affect Pentecostalism. And what will the global medial pressure do to the young generation? In these countries, also people with ‘no-religion’ are on the increase. But there are many positive signs, Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity seems to grow, and in fact order churches as well. The Vatican recently reported that the Catholic church had grown with 19 million (up 1.7%) 2008. Another area where revival has been going on since the fall of the iron curtain is the former Soviet Union, e.g. the Ukraine where Pentecostal-Charismatic churches are constantly growing into a Next Christendom in the North—in some of these countries even Othodox Christianity is experiencing some renewal. The next charismatic Christendom in the Former Soviet Union of course also needs to se Apostolic Christianity which can stand the tests of time.

To sum up, this brief and sketchy picture shows that, in the northern hemisphere at large, Christianity seems to be losing much of its privileged position. It is difficult to know how the developments in the South will be in the next 25 years, even though the trends are mostly very encouraging. The point is that, at least on the northern part of the globe, but in the longer run also in the southern, different threats do challenge church and theology to form strategies, which can turn the tide, which can strengthen Christianity and once more see a breakthrough into modern society, in spite of opposition. How does the Christianity look, which can meet these challenges, prevail and expand in the years ahead? I will argue that only Apostolic Christianity will do. It is born both in persecution and in power to break through.

[2] One example is the former Archbishop of Sweden, K G Hammar, who publicly and programmatically questioned classical parts of the creed, like the Virgin birth.

[3] Simon Chan, “Spirit, Church and Liturgy: The Making of a Pentecostal Ecclesiology,” in EPCRA Conference (Uppsala: 2007).

[4] Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, 2 revised and expanded edition ed. (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2007).

[5] Paul Freston, “Researching the Heartland of Pentecostalism: Latin Americans at Home and Abroad,” Fieldwork in Religion 3, no. 3 (2008).