GroshLink

This spring, our graduate fellowship wrestled with Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Lisa Espineli Chinn, InterVarsity's Director of International Student Ministry, quoted from this piece Wednesday morning at IVCF's Mid-Atlantic Regional Staff Conference. She was considering Philip's interaction w/the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8:

The Ethiopian church is equally ancient, and the Egyptian court official is one of the first Gentile converts identified in the book of Acts. Like the Armenia counterpart, the organized church in Ethiopia is also owed much to Syrian missionaries of the third and fourth centuries. By the time of the first Anglo-Saxons were converted, Ethiopian Christianity was already in its tenth generation.

Later in the morning, I received a cell phone call from an Korean student studying at Pitt reminding me of his recent inquiry regarding this same piece. He was looking for some advise to pass along to his friend who was applying to Emory's Candler School of Theology where the admissions essay asked for a response to an Atlantic monthly article by Jenkins which summarized much of the material of his book.

More on this piece later . . . But if you have not read it, I would highly recommend you do such.

Jenkins is not only a well known Penn State University historian of religion, but also a follower of Christ active in a local congregation and a periodic speaker at the graduate ministry at PSU.

Other books by Jenkins include

• DreamCatchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality
• Hidden Gospels
• Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History
• Pedophiles & Priests: Anatomy of a Social Crisis
• The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice
• Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide
• Hoods & Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania 1925-1950, A History of the United States