Andrew Walls: The Most Important Scholar You Didn’t Know

Philip Jenkins writes at Patheos about how Andrew Walls , who passed away last week, influenced his historical thinking and writing. He says:

I have never made a secret of how often I drew on Walls’ work in books like my Next Christendom , and The Lost History of Christianity : just check my footnotes. But no matter how often I cited and quoted Walls, I repeatedly found specific ideas that I derived from him (and duly footnoted) being ascribed to my own amazing insights, despite any protests I might make. And do understand here, that is an accurate statement of the case: I don’t do false modesty. Walls himself was amazingly understanding and generous about this neglect, but he could properly have been far more outspoken.

His title was certainly correct for me. I had never previously heard of Walls. I do think that because of my interest in African Christianity that I read his works.

In 2007, Christianity Today has published an article about Walls . It talks about his work in African church history:

Most Americans and Europeans think of Christianity as a Western religion. Prominent leaders of the last 50 years, like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Pope John Paul II, are known primarily for their influence in the West, though in fact each of them has played a significant role in wider, global Christianity. But the most important development for the church in the 20th and 21st centuries has not been in the West at all, but in the astonishing shift of Christianity's center of gravity from the Western industrialized nations to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In a short time, Christianity has been transformed from a European religion to a global one.