Where is the Center of World Christianity Today? The Five Frontiers of Mission and Theology

This lecture contests some of the settled claims about the shifting center of Christianity from the West to the Global South, particularly that Africa is the new center of Christianity. The lecturer engages some of the new methodologies for studying the shifting momentum of Christian expansion. The lecture then will identify the five new frontiers of mission and theology today—politics, peripheries, ecology, wealth, and hope. The question of hope for the victims of history becomes a necessary theological and missional task for theology and the Christian movement in answering the perennial question: Where is God in all of this? Answering this in the face of these new frontiers will be presented as the center around which mission should revolve.