Examining the changing face of Christianity

A century ago, 80 per cent of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America; today, nearly 70 per cent live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, making Christianity a predominantly non-Western religion. A critical mass of scholars who are looking into the implications of this shift has made the University of Toronto a leading centre for the study of global Christianity. Christianity today has more than 2.2 billion adherents worldwide. The majority are overwhelmingly poor, displaced from rural villages into overcrowded cities in search of work, and adhere strictly to the word of Scripture, which can command their loyalty far more than state or society. "We focus on the politics of global Christianity, which includes Pentecostalism and other forms of Charismatic Christianity, from historical and ethnographic perspectives," said anthropologist Kevin O'Neill in the Department for the Study of Religion. O'Neill is one of seven scholars exploring Pentecostalism from an empirical perspective. He is joined by Simon Coleman, Pamela Klassen and Ruth Marshall from the Department for the Study of Religion, Girish Daswani and Valentina Napolitano from the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Geography's Ju Hui Judy Han.