Mark Noll’s recent book “The New Shape of World Christianity” is a “must read” for anyone doing North American urban missiology where increasingly the urban church context is impacted by what is happening throughout the world.

The thesis of this important book is that what was learned (for better or worse) by Christian traditions in the 19th and 20th century North American context became formative and foundational for the development of what today we all World Christianity. Christian traditions were transformed by their experience of diversity and a lack of a state-church/ethnic identity into new movements whose particular shape allow them to penetrate other countries and people groups where Christianity is new.

One example is what has happened to the Orthodox church by its American experience.

A quote on how America has changed the Orthodox church:

For Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the United States is the most important region of the world where national conditions do not reinforce the division of Orthodoxy into ethnic enclaves and where ethnic members are sometimes mixed. In particular, the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), an offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Antiochean Orthodox Church have been leaders in seeking fellowship among the various Orthodox communions, planting new churches that use English as the worshiping language, and receiving converts from other Christian movements. In a world where Orthodoxy suffered massive pressure from Communist regimes throughout the twentieth century, the United States may be the place where Orthodoxy has the greatest chance to break free from its narrowly ethnic traditions. If that effacement of ethnicity for Orthodoxy will happen anywhere in the world, it is most likely to occur in the United States. P. 75