Michael Adegoke

Christianity began as a Jewish messianic movement in Roman Palestine. Today it is the world’s largest religion, with communities on every inhabited continent and a demographic center of gravity shifting toward the Global South. How did that happen? The tempting answers are single-cause: “because of Constantine,” “because of European empires,” “because of the Holy Spirit,” … Read More

Russian Orthodoxy did not begin in the Kremlin. It began on the Dnieper, in the conversion politics of Kievan Rus, when Prince Vladimir I accepted baptism (traditionally 988) and pulled his realm into the Byzantine Christian world. The metropolitan see that served the East Slavs was long titled of Kiev—even when politics and Mongol power … Read More

Western church history often treats Egypt as a prologue: Alexandria’s catechetical school, Athanasius versus Arius, desert monasticism, then the camera pans to Rome and Constantinople and never pans back. Egypt’s Christians, however, remained. They remained after Chalcedon split the imperial church. They remained after the Arab conquest ended Byzantine rule. They remained as a large … Read More

A stubborn textbook sentence still walks the earth: Christianity came to Africa with nineteenth-century missionaries. The sentence is false as history even when it is true as a local memory in a particular village evangelized in 1870. Africa hosted Christian kingdoms while much of northern Europe was still being converted. Aksum adopted Christianity in the … Read More

Between 1700 and 1900, Christianity’s geographic center of gravity began a shift that the twentieth century would complete: from a religion whose most powerful institutions were European to a religion with large, self-directing churches on every inhabited continent. The usual picture is a Victorian missionary in a pith helmet. That picture is late, Protestant, and … Read More

The Great Awakening is often remembered as a colonial American lightning strike: Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, George Whitefield on a field, sinners trembling, a nation of evangelicals born. That memory is not empty. It is too small. Britannica describes a revival concentrated in British America mainly between about 1720 and the 1740s, linked to Pietism, … Read More

Few topics in Christian history provoke sharper slogans. One side says the cross marched with the sword and that is the whole truth. The other says missionaries opposed empire’s cruelties and that is the whole truth. Archives support neither monopoly. Iberian padroado Catholicism, British Protestant societies, French Catholic orders, Russian Orthodox expansion, and German mission … Read More

A megachurch is usually defined by weekly attendance in the thousands—often 2,000 or more—gathered under a single congregation’s identity, frequently with multiple services, campuses, and media arms. The word sounds American, and the United States did pioneer and brand the form. Yet huge congregations also thrived in Seoul, Lagos, São Paulo, and Singapore. Critics see … Read More

For much of Christian history, official speech about other religions oscillated between mission, polemic, and temporary truce. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) marked a public turning for the Catholic Church: other religions were to be approached with respect, Jews were not to be charged with collective guilt for the crucifixion, and dialogue became a pastoral … Read More

In 1900, Christianity looked, to many Western observers, like a European religion with overseas colonies of faith. By the early twenty-first century, the typical Christian was more likely to live in the Global South—Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia—than in Europe. Seminaries in Rome and Canterbury still mattered; growth engines in Lagos, São Paulo, Seoul, … Read More