This panel considers the concept of boundarylessness in World Christianity, both as a phenomenon and as an academic field. The first paper highlights the impact of online church opportunities among Northeast Indian Christians living in New Delhi in the COVID-19 era. The second paper, calling attention to the experiences of Adivasi Christians in India, questions the likelihood of a truly boundaryless Christianity, emphasizing the ways in which boundaries reflect attachments to specific spaces, individuals, and objects, even in the age of digital media. The third paper attests to a boundaryless Christianity expressed through Nigerian female gospel artists’ expansion of boundaries within global ecumenism. The fourth paper makes the case that boundarylessness should be considered not merely a characteristic of World Christianity, but in fact as a guiding methodology for the field, opening up new avenues analysis regarding the national, continental, linguistic, and religious boundaries that so often go unquestioned.
Drawing upon interviews with Adivasi (indigenous) Christians in India as well as my own experience as a new mother during the pandemic, I highlight the challenges for moving beyond place-based and geographically tied religious expressions. Although digital media offers enormous potential for cross-cultural engagement, I argue that it has not and is not likely ever to result in a boundary-less Christianity. Interweaving ethnography and autobiography, I explore the ways that boundaries reflect our earthly attachments to places, people, and things. I suggest that Christianity, as an incarnational faith, calls us to engage with rather than try to transcend these earthly attachments.
This paper situates the influence of transnational linkages of Nigerian (African) Pentecostal gospel music (NPGM) with its diverse languages within the discipline of World Christianity. It focuses insight on Nigerian women’s use of technology to assert their spiritual, cultural, and economic relevance in broadening the frontiers of World Christianity towards ecumenism. The women, considered subalterns and unclean in ritual places, have become valuable resources for advancing ecumenism in world Christianity. The presence of NPGM in unexpected global religious landscapes points to the “reverse mission” theory advanced by scholars. While human migration has been the focus of scholarly debate, this dimension of NPGM transnational migration is yet to be widely researched. Therefore, this paper utilizes multiple disciplines to theorize how Nigerian women use technology to reshape and make expressive contributions to transnational religious practice and affirm how World Christianity could be more inclusive of different voices, particularly those of subaltern women.
Boundarylessness is proposed as a guiding methodology for studies of World Christianity. Boundary-crossing has always been a major theme in the field of World Christianity. It can be problematic if it reiterates national borders, continents, languages, and world religions as “natural,” but it does not have to essentialize such boundaries. Instead, it can point to the dynamism and incoherence at the heart of Christian claims, especially to the ways in which cultural assumptions have been continually reiterated and naturalized from the very first years of the Christian movement.
As a method then, boundarylessness makes such “natural” assumptions queer again, opening up space for new discourses, both critical and constructive. The classic canon of Christian theology, for instance, seems strangely over-reliant on Greco-Roman foundations, whether in scholasticism, Protestant Reformation, or Enlightenment. Questions of “authenticity” and “indigeneity” also seem misplaced. Instead, boundarylessness focuses on the changing negotiations that constitute Christian authority.