The modern era: mission, division, and renewed dialogue

The last few centuries carried Christianity far beyond Europe. The great missionary movement of the 1800s and 1900s planted the faith across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, so that today the church's center of gravity has shifted to the global South, most of the world's Christians now live outside Europe and North America. The same period multiplied denominations, especially within Protestantism, and produced new movements: the modern Pentecostal revival (from the early 1900s), now among the largest and fastest-growing streams; and, in reaction to fragmentation, the ecumenical movement, twentieth-century efforts among the traditions to talk, cooperate, and in some cases heal old breaches (in 1965 the pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople formally lifted the mutual excommunications of 1054, though full communion has not been restored). Alongside renewal ran real conflict and failure, the church has been complicit in and a corrective to slavery, colonialism, and war, depending on the time and place, which honest history records rather than smooths over. The one certainty is diversity: Christianity enters its third millennium as a genuinely global faith of many tongues and traditions, held together by the shared confession the councils forged.