Church History — Unit 10: The Twentieth Century to Today

Unit 9 closed in 1900 with the gospel carried to every continent by the great missionary century. The twentieth century would test the church as no century had before — and at the same time see it grow larger, more global, and more diverse than at any point in its history. If the nineteenth century carried the gospel out from the West, the twentieth century watched the center of gravity of world Christianity shift away from the West entirely. By the year 2000, most of the world's Christians lived in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, not in Europe and North America. This is the single most important fact of modern church history.

The century opened with confidence. John R. Mott, the great missionary statesman of the era, had made the Student Volunteer Movement's motto famous a generation earlier: "The Evangelization of the World in This Generation." That same spirit of confidence filled the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, which Mott chaired. Protestant mission leaders believed the whole earth might be reached within decades. Then came two world wars, the rise of atheistic communism, the collapse of European empires, and a wave of secularization that emptied many Western churches. The optimism of 1910 did not survive the trenches of the First World War. And yet, while the church declined in its old heartlands, it exploded in the places the missionaries had planted it.

This unit traces the great movements of the modern era: the revivals that birthed worldwide Pentecostalism; the church's failure and faithfulness under the totalitarian horrors of the century; the Roman Catholic transformation at the Second Vatican Council; the recovery of evangelism in the West even as its culture secularized; the Protestant surge across Latin America; and the southward shift that has made Christianity, for the first time, a truly worldwide and majority non-Western faith. Through all of it runs the thread the whole course has followed: the Promise of Matthew 16:18. Twenty centuries threw everything they had at the church Jesus said He would build, and the gates of Hades have still not prevailed.

The Pentecostal century did not begin in a vacuum. In 1904–1905 a revival swept Wales under the preaching of Evan Roberts, a young former coal miner. In less than a year roughly 100,000 Welsh men and women were converted. The social effect was startling: taverns emptied, crime rates fell so far that some courts had no cases to try, and whole valleys were swept up in prayer and song. The Welsh Awakening became the most widely felt revival of its generation.

Its importance reached far beyond Wales. News of the awakening crossed the ocean and stirred hungry hearts in Los Angeles, where Frank Bartleman corresponded with Roberts and prayed for the same outpouring. When revival broke out at Azusa Street in 1906, observers saw the connection directly; Bartleman would say the Pentecostal movement was "rocked in the cradle of little Wales." The Welsh fire helped kindle awakenings in India, Korea, China, and Africa as well.

Then in April 1906, in a humble former stable on Azusa Street, a revival broke out under William J. Seymour, the one-eyed son of former slaves. It lasted about three years and is widely regarded as the birthplace of modern Pentecostalism. It was strikingly multiracial in a segregated age — black, white, Hispanic, and Asian worshipers prayed together — and within months it was sending workers around the globe. From the small chapels of Wales to a Los Angeles mission, the Spirit lit a fuse that would become the fastest-spreading Christian movement of the twentieth century.

Pentecostalism emphasized the baptism and gifts of the Holy Spirit — speaking in tongues, healing, prophecy — as available to ordinary believers today, not merely in the apostolic age. By the end of the century, Pentecostal and charismatic Christians numbered in the hundreds of millions, making this the most numerically significant new movement since the Reformation. From the 1960s onward the charismatic renewal also flowed into older bodies — Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran — so its influence reached far beyond the classical Pentecostal denominations.

The movement's center of strength quickly became the global South. Across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, Pentecostal and charismatic churches grew explosively — precisely in the regions where the nineteenth-century missionaries had planted the gospel. Today the largest single congregations on earth are charismatic churches in Seoul, Lagos, and São Paulo, gathering tens of thousands each week. Energetic worship, an expectation of the miraculous, and lay leadership made the movement spread fast in the developing world.

Whatever one's theological assessment of its distinctives, Pentecostalism is the great demographic story of twentieth-century Christianity. It turned a handful of believers in a Los Angeles mission into a worldwide movement of perhaps half a billion people within a century, and it is the chief engine behind the southward shift that has remade the face of the global church.

Not every chapter of the modern church is a story of growth and faithfulness. One of the darkest is the failure of much of the German church during the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the great majority of Germany's Lutheran and Catholic clergy did not resist. Many actively supported the regime; far more stayed silent as Jewish neighbors were stripped of their rights, deported, and murdered. The church that had given the world the Reformation largely failed the most basic test of love for neighbor.

There was a faithful minority, and it must be honored. A group of Protestant pastors formed the Confessing Church, which declared in the 1934 Barmen Declaration that Christ, not the Führer, is the head of the church. Its most famous voices were Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who joined the resistance and was executed by the Nazis in 1945, and Martin Niemöller, who spent years in concentration camps and later wrote the haunting confession that began, "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out." Their courage shines all the brighter against the surrounding silence.

The lesson of this chapter is sobering and necessary. The church is not automatically on the side of righteousness simply because it is the church; clergy and congregations can be captured by nationalism, fear, and prejudice and can betray the gospel they preach. Church history must tell this honestly. The Promise of Matthew 16:18 guarantees that the church will endure — but it never promised that every generation of Christians would be faithful, and the German church under Hitler is the twentieth century's gravest warning.

The twentieth century produced more Christian martyrs than any century before it, and the chief engine was atheistic communism. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Soviet state set out to eradicate religion: churches were closed, clergy imprisoned and executed, believers sent to the labor camps of the Gulag. Yet the Russian Orthodox Church survived seventy years of official atheism and emerged when the Soviet Union fell in 1991.

The most dramatic case was China. When the Communists took power in 1949 and expelled all foreign missionaries, Western observers feared the Chinese church would die. Instead, driven underground and cut off from outside help, it multiplied. The unregistered house-church movement grew from perhaps one million believers in 1949 to tens of millions by the end of the century — a modern echo of Tertullian's ancient observation that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Figures like Watchman Nee, who died in a Chinese labor camp, and Richard Wurmbrand, tortured for fourteen years in communist Romania, became symbols of a suffering church that would not deny its Lord.

Persecution did not end with the Cold War; in the twenty-first century it is intensifying in new places. North Korea is consistently ranked the single most dangerous nation on earth to be a Christian, where believers are sent to prison camps for owning a Bible. In Nigeria, thousands of Christians are killed each year in waves of violence. Across much of the Middle East, ancient Christian communities that survived for nearly two thousand years have been shattered by war and pressure, and many have fled. The same lesson the first-century church learned under Rome still holds: the gates of Hades do not prevail, even against prison camps and machetes.

The largest single body in world Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church, underwent its most significant transformation in centuries at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), called by Pope John XXIII. Vatican II did not change Catholic doctrine at its core, but it reshaped the church's posture toward the modern world, toward other Christians, and toward its own worship.

The most visible change was liturgical: the Mass, celebrated in Latin for some 1,500 years, was now permitted in the vernacular — the local language of each people — so ordinary Catholics could understand and participate. The council encouraged Scripture reading among the laity, described the church as the whole "people of God," and opened a new era of ecumenical dialogue, referring to Protestants as "separated brethren" rather than heretics. Relations with Eastern Orthodoxy and with non-Christian religions were addressed in a more conciliatory spirit.

Vatican II divided Catholic opinion and still does — some welcomed it as a long-overdue renewal, others lamented it as a capitulation to modernity. But no one disputes its scale. It is impossible to understand the Catholic half of world Christianity over the past sixty years without it, and its emphasis on the vernacular and on lay Scripture reading brought Rome, in some respects, closer to concerns the Reformation had raised four centuries earlier.

While the church shifted southward, the twentieth-century West still produced preachers of global reach. The towering figure of mass evangelism was Billy Graham, whose crusades from the late 1940s onward preached the gospel in person to more people than any other individual in history — an estimated 215 million across more than 185 countries — calling them to a personal decision for Christ. Graham's integrity, his refusal of scandal, and his willingness to cross racial and denominational lines made him the most trusted Protestant figure of his age.

Alongside mass evangelism came a recovery of serious biblical thought. In London, Martyn Lloyd-Jones drew thousands to expository preaching at Westminster Chapel. The Oxford scholar C. S. Lewis became the century's most-read Christian apologist, commending the faith to skeptics through books like Mere Christianity. The 1974 Lausanne Congress, convened by Graham and others, united evangelicals worldwide around both evangelism and social responsibility and gave the global movement a common voice.

Yet the broader West grew steadily more secular. Church attendance in Europe fell sharply and the cultural authority of Christianity weakened across the developed world. The twentieth-century Western church thus lived in tension: producing some of history's greatest evangelists and apologists, while watching its surrounding culture drift from its Christian foundations. The mission field, once thought of as "over there," had come home.

Few regions changed as fast as Latin America. For four centuries it was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic; in the late twentieth century a Protestant — overwhelmingly Pentecostal — surge swept across it. In Brazil, evangelicals grew from a small minority to roughly a fifth of the population; in Guatemala they approached or passed forty percent. The pattern repeated across Honduras, Nicaragua, and beyond: vibrant, fast-growing Pentecostal churches reshaping nations long defined by Catholicism.

Mexico, however, was long the great exception. Even as its neighbors shifted, Mexico remained stubbornly Catholic, and missiologists point to a particular reason: Our Lady of Guadalupe. The image is not merely a religious devotion but a symbol of Mexican national identity itself, woven into the founding story of the nation. To leave the Catholic Church could feel like leaving Mexican-ness behind, which made evangelical conversion socially costly in a way it was not elsewhere in the region.

Yet even the Mexican exception is now eroding. Between 2010 and 2020 the share of Mexicans identifying as Protestant or evangelical rose from about 7.5 percent to 11.2 percent — nearly fifty percent growth in a single decade — while the Catholic share fell below 78 percent for the first time in the nation's history. Pentecostalism leads the surge, and even historic Mexican denominations have absorbed charismatic worship. The wall that Guadalupe and national identity built is lower than it was, and Mexico is at last joining the Latin American story its neighbors began decades earlier.

In its old Western heartlands, the twenty-first-century church faces two great pressures: numerical decline and internal division. The decline is steep. Across Europe, weekly church attendance has fallen to single digits in many nations, cathedrals built to hold thousands now host dozens, and in the United States the fastest-growing religious category has become the "nones" — those who claim no religion at all. The cultural Christianity that once filled the pews of the West is collapsing within a single lifetime.

Alongside decline come major realignments over moral and doctrinal questions. Questions about women in ministry have divided Christians who nevertheless share a high view of Scripture. Those who restrict the pastoral or elder office to qualified men appeal especially to Paul’s instructions in 1 Timothy 2:11–12, 1 Timothy 3:1–7, Titus 1:5–9, and 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. Other Christians read those passages in light of biblical examples of women exercising significant ministry: Deborah served as judge and prophetess (Judges 4–5); Huldah spoke prophetically to national and religious leaders (2 Kings 22); Priscilla, with Aquila, helped instruct Apollos more accurately (Acts 18:26); Phoebe is called a diakonos in Romans 16:1; Philip’s four daughters prophesied (Acts 21:9); and 1 Corinthians 11:5 assumes women prayed and prophesied. Galatians 3:28 declares that in Christ there is neither male nor female, though Christians disagree over whether that equality in Christ removes distinctions in church office. CTS recognizes this as an area in which Christians committed to biblical authority reach differing conclusions; the purpose here is to understand the biblical arguments fairly rather than make one denominational position a condition of study.

Other moral controversies, including sexuality, have also produced major denominational divisions. Church history should record those fractures accurately without turning every disputed contemporary question into a CTS denominational boundary.

The denominational record is plain. Mainline bodies moved first: the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America opened ordination and marriage to LGBTQ members, and each lost under ten percent of its congregations to more conservative bodies. The United Methodist Church split far more dramatically — roughly 7,600 congregations disaffiliated by the end of 2023, the largest denominational divide in the United States since the Civil War, with most joining the new Global Methodist Church formed in 2022. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant body, is now under similar strain over women serving as pastors, disaffiliating churches over the question, with members departing on both sides. (Christian nationalism, a related twenty-first-century pressure, is addressed in the Systematic Theology course.)

These fractures are painful, but church history puts them in perspective. Denominations have split before — over slavery in the nineteenth century, over modernism in the twentieth — and the church has gone on. The Western decline is real and sobering, yet it is only half the global picture: while the West argues and empties, the South believes and fills. The center of Christianity has simply moved.

The defining fact of Christianity today is that it is a global, majority non-Western faith. In 1900, about 80 percent of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America. Today roughly two-thirds live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America — the regions scholars call the global South. Africa alone went from about 10 million Christians in 1900 to well over 600 million today. The typical Christian of the twenty-first century is no longer a European man but more likely an African or Latin American woman.

This shift is reshaping the faith's center of energy. The most vibrant missionary movements today often send workers from the global South to the secular West — Korean missionaries to Europe, Nigerian and Brazilian church planters in North America. For the first time since the early centuries, the church's growing edge is largely outside the West, and the questions that consume Western denominations look very different from those that animate the booming churches of Lagos, Seoul, and São Paulo.

This course began with a Promise: "I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it." We have watched twenty centuries throw everything they had at that Promise — persecution, heresy, corruption, schism, the silence of cowards, and the indifference of the comfortable — and we have watched the church survive every one of them. Today that church is larger, more global, and more diverse than at any moment in its history, with more believers across more nations and languages than the apostles could have imagined. The empires that tried to crush it are gone; the church Jesus said He would build remains. That is not propaganda. It is the historical record of twenty centuries. And it is where this course leaves you — not at an ending, but in the middle of a story whose final chapter Christ Himself has already promised to write.