It’s hard to believe that it has been two decades since historian Philip Jenkins published his groundbreaking essay “The Next Christianity” in The Atlantic Monthly.

It contained key material from the first of three books that Jenkins published on the future of world Christianity and, thus, of the changing face of world religion — period. The first book was entitled: “The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.”

This piece of the Atlantic subtitle is crucial: “We stand at a historical turning point, the author argues — one that is as epochal for the Christian world as the original Reformation. Around the globe Christianity is growing and mutating in ways that observers in the West tend not to see.”

Sure enough, many reporters didn’t see what Jenkins was describing, even though clashes between the chilly, declining Christian West and the blooming Christian South and East are easy to see looming in the background of many major stories. As the Anglicans and United Methodists about that.

Understanding Jenkins’ work is a crucial first step to understanding the importance of a new Crux think piece by the omnipresent John L. Allen, Jr. The headline: “In new Catholic numbers, an ‘imponderable’ movement shaping history.”

First, consider this from Jenkins:

If we look beyond the liberal West, we see that another Christian revolution, quite different from the one being called for in affluent American suburbs and upscale urban parishes, is already in progress. Worldwide, Christianity is actually moving toward supernaturalism and neo-orthodoxy, and in many ways toward the ancient worldview expressed in the New Testament: a vision of Jesus as the embodiment of divine power, who overcomes the evil forces that inflict calamity and sickness upon the human race. In the global South (the areas that we often think of primarily as the Third World) huge and growing Christian populations — currently 480 million in Latin America, 360 million in Africa, and 313 million in Asia, compared with 260 million in North America — now make up what the Catholic scholar Walbert Buhlmann has called the Third Church, a form of Christianity as distinct as Protestantism or Orthodoxy, and one that is likely to become dominant in the faith.