Ed Stetzer: What are the greatest differences that can emerge between older and newer churches?Philip Jenkins: There’s one word that I would come up with again and again – healing. If you want to understand the success of Christianity in the past hundred years around the world, it is in the concept of healing. Not, of course, in the sense of healing physical injuries, but a holistic a healing of the body, the mind, the soul, the spirit, and society is central to church growth around the world.
These kind of mission churches are providing a way for healing a great division in Western Christianity, where they always find this distinction between liberation theology, which aims to cure the material ills of society, and deliverance, which aims to cure the ills of the soul. What the newer churches have realized is that those two words are the same word. Any kind of mission that does not cure both is offering a flawed, partial, and inadequate message.