Escobar - Spontaneous Expansion

I found this interesting from The New Global Mission by Samuel Escobar (pg. 19)

It was in 1927 that Ronald Allen (1896-1947) first coined the expression “spontaneous expansion of the church,” and we can now measure the incredible extent to which a Christian testimony among the masses of this planet has been the result of such spontaneous expansion, especially in China, Africa and Latin America. In many cases such expansion became possible only when indigenous Christians were released from the stifling control of Western missionary agencies.

As we look at the religious map of the world today we find a marked contrast between the situation at the beginning of the twentieth century and the situation in the early twenty-first century. Scottish missiologist Andrew Walls has described a “massive southward shift of the center of gravity of the Christian world.” He understands the history of the Christian church and its mission as a sequence of phase, each of which represents the embodiment of Christianity in a major culture area. This is followed by the movment forward through transcultural mission in such a way that when that major culture declines, Christianity continues to flourish, now in a different setting.

The recession of Christianity among the Europe peoples appears to be continuing. And yet we seem to stand at the threshold of a new age of Christianity, one in which its main base will be in the Southern continents, and where its dominant expressions will be filtered through the culture of those countries. Once again, Christianity has been saved for the world by its diffusion across cultural lines.