Published in the WCC International Review on Mission Vol. 114-1, May 2025

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God (Eph. 3:17-19, NIV)

In today’s Christianity, what does it mean to read the Bible “together with all the saints” (Eph. 3:18)? This is the question that runs through this astonishing and thought-provoking book, which recounts and reflects on the enormous but little-known variety of contextual expressions of Christianity today and raises the question of the unity of Christianity. In this book, the author argues for the necessary recognition of polycentrism in Christianity to advance in the quest for unity.

Christianity, like a beehive, is made up of thousands of cells of various shapes, textures, and sizes, but which together form a whole. Each honeycomb is a concrete and partial expression at the same time, but which does not exist without the other cells. This raises the question of how and in what ways Christianity in its diversity remains true to itself, and how both its unity and its diversity have been and remain recognizable. This book does not focus on the sociological aspects (even if they are present), but rather on the theological aspects of today’s global Christianity. It thus gives the German-speaking public access to a field of research and study that is highly developed in the Anglo-Saxon world, but almost absent from European specialized literature. It makes the Western European reader, often frustrated by the apparent slowness of the convergence between Protestants and Catholics, attentive to ecumenical breakthroughs and innovations taking place in Africa, Asia and Latin America but which the Western European may be unaware.

The author, Christiane Lienemann-Perrin (born 1946), is professor emeritus at the Faculty of Theology in Basel. She obtained her doctorate in 1976 and her habilitation in 1990 at the University of Heidelberg. Between 1992 and 2010, she was professor of ecumenism, mission and contemporary intercultural issues in Basel and lecturer in ecumenical theology at the University of Bern. She has taught and conducted research in Zaire, South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, Japan, Taiwan, Cameroon, Brazil and the United States.

The book is made up of 11 chapters, most previously unpublished. The others are reprints of articles published between 2012 and 2021. Lienemann-Perrin leaves us feeling dizzy with her presentation of the countless faces that Christianity takes. She clearly shows the implications of this reality for theology and traditional theological education. This concerns not only missiology or ecumenical theology, but also intercultural theology, the science of religions, and all the classical subjects of Western theology.

In the first part, the author provides the necessary elements for a general introduction to world Christianity that an extraterrestrial arriving on Earth might ask for. This includes figures and statistics. Reference is made in particular to recent monumental statistical compilations, the most famous of which is the World Christian Encyclopedia, the 3rd edition of which, published in 2020, weighs nearly five kilos. This introductory section concludes with an illuminating chapter on the criticism of European Christianity and the frequent confusion with European Christendom, as well as on the difficulties of translating these concepts into various languages. It recalls that Christianity has become a non-Western religion, something that it already was in its early days. The challenge of Christianity today is thus presented as having to manage the ‘simultaneity of non-simultaneities’ (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen), that is to say,  the parallel existence of structures whose roots and characteristics refer to different eras, due to the different social forms that Christianity takes according to the context. The tension between the universality of the Church and its contextuality is permanent.

The second part is dedicated to historiographical approaches to global Christianity. The way in which conversion was understood and experienced makes it possible to understand how Christianity in the early decades avoided assimilation into Judaism as well as into the Greek world. The key of its religious originality is baptism, which marks the difference between being inside or outside the community, rather than ethnicity or the surrounding culture. Consequently, the history of conversion is of great importance in understanding the development of Christianity according to different cultures. This introduces a series of fascinating chapters on the role of women in the history and understanding of mission, but also in the development of the diversity of world Christianity. Among others, we meet the founder of the World Day of Prayer, Helen Barrett Montgomery (1861-1934), the Indian theologian Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922), who converted from Hinduism, and the US feminist theologian Letty Mandeville Russell (1927-2007).

The third part opens with the a discussion of the impact of the growth of Christianity on the ecumenical movement and on the disappearance of the classic lines of denominational separation in favour of contrasts, such as confessional Christianity vs. non- or post-denominational Christianity; churches of membership vs. churches of participation; large churches vs. autonomous parishes; or the emergence of new ecumenical actors alongside the large, well-known organizations, particularly in Africa, where people are calling for a “double allegiance” to Christ and to Africa. There is a (re)awakening of the fact that the Reformed tradition only represents 3.5 percent of Christianity overall (European Reformed Christians represent approx. 10 percent of this figure!), and that the World Council of Churches represents only 25 percent of Christianity as a whole. The question must therefore be asked whether the ecumenism of the historic Churches has not become a trap and a prison, whether their self-understanding (which tends towards self-satisfaction), their structures, and their communication habits do not prevent them from having the courage to live “the breadth, the depth and the height of the love of Christ” in another dimension. Several attempts at developing new “global theologies” from the Catholic, Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Reformed traditions are presented. They are all attempts to draw up a framework that maintains the coherence of the great diversity of voices and the one truth of the gospel. It is therefore a question of seeking a new positioning of theology in the globalized world of Christianity. In these essays, secularized and relativist Western theology has no real future.

The book ends with a long reflective chapter on the multiple forms of Christianity. The foundation and theological thread of Ephesians 3.17-19 means that no particular confessional structures or traditions are emphasized, but the experience of all the saints (the baptized) of the love of Christ as the mark of unity. Finally, taking up the theme of the encounter of the gospel and culture, the author develops a polycentric approach to Christianity, which allows us to better grasp the processes of transformation of Christianity. She does this using the four main categories of “deculturation,” “inculturation,” “inter-culturation,” and ”transculturation,” each explained with examples from the global South.

Reflections and critical analyses provide a personal and conclusive touch to this work, which is both enlightening and reassuring about the future of Christianity. It concludes with a plea for the practice of attentive listening (zu-hören) as the cornerstone of ecumenism of reception, which is so often lacking in our Western circles, which are quick to seek harmony or antithesis.

This book offers profund insights about to the major tectonic movements at work in contemporary Christianity, which has become again a non-Western religion. The book, in its own way, takes up, systematizes, and updates work such as that carried out by Professor Walter Hollenweger (1927-2016) in Pentecostal circles in the 1970s and 1980s. An indispensable condition for the renewal and the future of the churches, in Europe as elsewhere, is recognizing and being able to grasp this evolution of Christianity toward a permanent interaction between several centers of doctrines, spiritualities, and cultures. This is particularly true for Protestants, who are often inclined to believe that modern, secular European culture is close to the values of the gospel, and do not take seriously the contribution of other forms of expression of the Christian faith that exist- One is left a little breathless by the fascinating global panorama that unfolds in this book. It questions our mono-cultural laziness, our wellmeaning, charitable Eurocentric, even neocolonialist condescension toward the thinking of Christians in the global South.

In any case, the following insights can offer a guide for further exploration and reflection.

Using the text of Ephesians 3 to affirm the ecclesiological base of the reflection on the unity of Christianity offers possibilities to open ups and unblock our Western policies and practices of ecumenism: a theology and ecclesiology based on baptism, and therefore on an affirmation of faith and personal commitment, are today at the heart of many interdenominational dialogues. This common denominator among all Christians has a potential that our Churches have not seriously exploited until now. It is not enough to draft declarations of mutual recognition. It is now time to go further. The anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 2025 could be the opportunity to broaden the dialogue on this point with other forms of being church. Institutional protectionism must be replaced by ecumenical inclusivism.

Moreover, this element brings us back to the existence in our immediate neighbourhood (in Europe) of thousands of migrant or intercultural communities. The Reformed Church in Zurich recently offered a significant contribution from church tax to Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu communities to help them integrate into society and organize themselves according to public law, but completely ignores the tens of thousands of foreign Christians (often of Protestant origin) living in Switzerland but who do not identify with Zwingli’s liturgy or the church’s synod regulations. Our European Christian monoculture, stuck between the anathemas of the 16th century, the historical-critical method, and the greatest possible coherence between faith and reason, is not convincing for the vast majority of Christians, for whom the Bible is not primarily a library of scholarly books, but a message of joy, liberation, and daily commitment.

We have inculturated the Christian faith into European culture. It would be good to engage in an exercise of deculturation in the face of the great cultural and moral platitudes supposedly Christian in our society that hide so many massacres, dramas and cowardice.

This book is essential reading for all European theology students as well as for anyone aiming for a ministry in the church, whatever their role, and their teachers and trainers. It is a fundamental work for the formation of European theologians living in a multi-religious and multicultural context. An impressive bibliography is included in most of the chapters.

Serge Fornerod was director for international and ecumenical relations at the Protestant Church in Switzerland from 2002 and 2023./