Church History: Part 6 – The Future of the Church, and the Return of Christ

Good News for Modern Man (the Today's English Version New Testament) was actually released by the American Bible Society in September 1966, as two independent sources confirm. "Just over a year ago" puts this sermon at the earliest around late 1967. I couldn't find any source confirming Pawson's "nine and a half million copies, 13,000 a day" figures. What is documented is 5.5 million copies in the first year (by roughly September 1967), and over 30 million cumulative copies within the first five years (by roughly 1971), making it the best-selling paperback of all time by May 1971. Pawson's numbers should be treated as his own stated figures, not independently verified fact.
He also recalls "the final rally of the Billy Graham crusade last year in Wembley… 120,000 Christians." The Greater London Crusade actually ran 1 June – 2 July 1966 at Earl's Court, with the closing service moved to Wembley Stadium on 2 July (not 22 May). Christianity Today's contemporary report states plainly: "some 86,000 got into Wembley"; the Billy Graham organization's own retrospective sources round this up to "95,000" or "over 94,000" inside plus about 8,000 who couldn't get in and stood outside. Even the most generous total comes to roughly 102,000–103,000, still a quarter to a third short of Pawson's 120,000.
Combining the clues, including the GNMM floor (earliest ~Oct 1967), Wembley "last year" (satisfied by any point in 1967), and the immediately preceding lecture in the series ("1900–1968") being independently dated to 1967, the best-supported estimate is late 1967, comfortably inside Pawson's pastorate at Gold Hill Baptist Church (1961–1968, per Wikipedia) before his move to Millmead, Guildford.
Source: bible-researcher.com/tev.html; thewayofimprovement.blog (25 May 2016); Christianity Today, "London Crusade Produces Historic Climax" (July 1966); billygrahamlibrary.org; Wikipedia, "David Pawson."

This is the single most impressive prediction in the whole talk, and it predates most of the literature usually credited with popularizing the idea. The qualitative observation, "younger churches" in Africa, Asia, and Latin America outpacing an aging Western church, had circulated since the mid-1950s (Donald McGavran's Church Growth movement from 1955; John V. Taylor, The Growth of the Church in Buganda, 1958). But the confident "leadership shifting north to south" framing Pawson uses predates the book usually credited as the opening shot of this argument, Walbert Buhlmann's The Coming of the Third Church (Italian 1974, English 1976), by roughly six to nine years, and predates David Barrett's full statistical treatment in the World Christian Encyclopedia (1982) by more than a decade and a half.
On the hard numbers: per the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (Gordon-Conwell) and Pew Research, in 1910 roughly 80% to 93% of the world's Christians lived in the Global North (Europe and Northern America). By 1970 itself, around the time Pawson preached this, the Global North still held a clear majority: 58.7% against the Global South's 41.3%. The actual crossover (Global South passing 50%) is generally dated to the 1980s. In other words, Pawson wasn't describing something that had happened, he was forecasting something still roughly a decade and a half away. Today the Global South holds 67% to 69% of the world's Christians, with sub-Saharan Africa alone the single largest Christian region (about 31%).
On the Paraguay example: I couldn't identify a specific source Pawson is referring to. The two closest fits for his description, the Anglican South American Missionary Society's work among the Enxet people of the Chaco from 1889, or the Paraguayan Mennonite Chaco colonies, offer no direct link to this sermon. Treat this as illustration, not a confirmed event.
Source: gordonconwell.edu/blog/the-100-year-shift-of-christianity-to-the-south; Pew Research, "Global Christianity" (2011) and 2025 update; lausanne.org/global-analysis/highlights-of-christianity-in-its-global-context-1970-2020.

Pawson's three examples all check out. The United Church of Canada formed 10 June 1925 in Toronto, uniting the Methodist Church, the Congregational Union of Canada, and about 70% of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (784 of 4,512 Presbyterian congregations chose to stay out), usually considered the world's first union across major historic denominational lines. The Church of South India was inaugurated 27 September 1947 in Madras, after 28 years of negotiation, uniting the episcopal Anglican tradition with non-episcopal traditions: the first such union since the Reformation, and controversial with some Anglo-Catholics for exactly that reason. The Church of Pakistan genuinely did form, on 1 November 1970. Pawson's "seeking to do" phrasing suggests this sermon was recorded not long before that date, not decades earlier as one might assume.
What he didn't foresee: the Anglican-Methodist union scheme back home in England, which he describes as promisingly "talking together", failed twice: at the Convocations of Canterbury and York on 8 July 1969 (69% in favour, 75% required, even though the Methodist Conference approved it the same day with 77.4%), then again at the new General Synod in May 1972. Worth correcting a commonly repeated online claim: several summaries attribute both failures partly to disagreement over women's ordination. This is anachronistic, since British Methodism didn't ordain its first women presbyters until 2 July 1974, after both votes. The real sticking point was disagreement over the proposed "Service of Reconciliation" for uniting the two ministries.
The Muggeridge quote and the unnamed Yale professor: I could not trace either to a source after extensive searching; nothing in any Muggeridge book, interview, or quotation archive, and no trace of a Yale professor who said that line. Both should be treated as pulpit-circuit anecdotes, not verifiable quotations.
Source: united-church.ca; britannica.com "Church of South India," "Church of Pakistan"; christianitytoday.com/1969/08/where-defeat-is-mandate; methodist.org.uk (50th anniversary of women's ordination).

The first half, Catholics losing ground in southern Europe, is strongly confirmed, if anything understated: in Spain, Sunday Mass attendance fell from 68% (1973) to roughly 11% to 17% today; in Italy, from 36.4% (2001) to 18.8% (2022); in Portugal, only 49% of 18-34-year-olds still self-identify Catholic against 80% of the population overall. The second half, gaining ground in northern Europe via adaptation, holds only in small, patchy pockets: real growth exists in Scandinavia, but it's driven mostly by Catholic immigration (Polish, Filipino, African, Latin American) rather than the institutional Church's "adaptation" winning native Northern Europeans, while larger Northern European Catholic populations (Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK) have seen sharp declines, especially Germany's Kirchenaustritt wave tied to the abuse scandal.
But what Pawson didn't foresee matters more: his Catholic-vs-evangelical binary misses the force that actually reshaped Western religion from 1970 onward, the rise of the religiously unaffiliated ("nones"). In the US, Pew's 2023-24 survey finds 29% of adults unaffiliated (up from 16% in 2007), a bigger group than Catholics and rivaling all of Protestantism. He correctly named the two most resilient Christian streams, but didn't foresee that the "third force" would be no religion at all.
The "evangelicals more united and more divided" prediction, meanwhile, is the single most accurate one in the passage: cross-denominational Pentecostal/charismatic identity grew from 58 million (1970) to 635–644 million people (2020), roughly an 11x increase (a genuine unifying thread), while at the same time the United Methodist Church underwent the largest US denominational schism since the Civil War (about 7,659 congregations, a quarter of the total, splitting off 2019–2023 to form the Global Methodist Church), and the Southern Baptist Convention has seen 18 straight years of membership decline.
Source: harvard.edu/gazette (Vatican II and Mass-attendance data, 2025); pewresearch.org/religion/2013/02/13/the-global-catholic-population; pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-executive-summary; gordonconwell.edu/center-for-global-christianity; christianitytoday.com/2023/12 (UMC schism).

Pawson's "done by 2000" forecast wasn't just personal optimism: it shared its deadline with a real, organized evangelical movement: the AD2000 & Beyond Movement (grown out of Lausanne II, Manila 1989, watchword "a church for every people and the gospel for every person by the year 2000"), which spawned Joshua Project 2000 to track roughly 1,700 "unreached people groups." The movement's own internal June 2000 report, from its own leader, Luis Bush, found the goal was not met: over 1,100 people groups still lacked even a minimal indigenous believing fellowship, 265 had no mission initiative at all, and roughly 7,400 smaller groups still lacked a viable church.
A quarter century past Pawson's deadline, Joshua Project now counts roughly 7,188 "unreached people groups" (3.42 billion people) and about 3,218 "frontier" groups (under 0.1% Christian, nearly 1.9 billion people) with almost no gospel access at all. Wycliffe still had 544 languages (about 36.8 million people) with no translation work even begun as of its August 2025 report, and even Wycliffe's own current internal target ("Vision 2025") is only to start a translation for every remaining language, not finish one.
The "13-person tribe" detail: I couldn't locate a specific documented case; it may be Pawson's own illustration, though it's consistent with Wycliffe/SIL's genuine policy of translating for even the smallest language communities (roughly 1 in 12 of the world's languages has fewer than 100 speakers).
Source: Robert T. Coote, "'AD 2000' and the '10/40 Window': A Preliminary Assessment," International Bulletin of Missionary Research (Oct 2000); joshuaproject.net/about/details; wycliffe.net/2025/08/25/2025-scripture-access-statistics.

This is a checkable linguistic claim, and it's only partly right. The Greek prefix anti carries two main senses in Koine Greek: the more common one, and the dominant sense in the actual usage of antichristos itself, is "against, opposed to", exactly the everyday reading Pawson is trying to overturn. But anti genuinely does carry a "substitute for, in place of" sense in some other New Testament compounds, e.g. antilytron ("a ransom in place of," 1 Timothy 2:6) or antimisthia ("a corresponding recompense"). The "Antichrist = an impersonator of Christ, a substitute for him" reading isn't Pawson inventing something from nothing: it has support from some scholars (e.g. Kenneth Wuest) and fits comfortably with 2 Thessalonians 2, where "the man of lawlessness" sits in God's temple claiming to be God. But saying the prefix "does not mean against" overstates it: standard Greek lexicons (BDAG) list "against/opposed to" as the primary sense of anti in this context, with "substitute" as a secondary sense, not the only or the dominant one.
Source: BDAG (A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament); Kenneth Wuest, Word Studies in the Greek New Testament.

The traditional view (the first ~1,800 years: the Fathers, the Reformers, the Puritans, Wesley, and Pawson)

The Church is present the whole way through: no prior secret "rapture."

The dispensational view (from ~1830: Darby, Scofield, most of modern American evangelicalism)

Two stages, separated by seven years.

This is one of the more solidly verified passages in the whole talk. The earliest post-apostolic fathers, Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho), Irenaeus (Against Heresies, Book V), and Tertullian, all teach exactly the sequence Pawson describes: Antichrist reigns, then Christ visibly appears to destroy him, then the millennium begins. No patristic text mentions a secret rapture prior to Antichrist's appearing.
The Reformers identifying the Pope with Antichrist wasn't a fringe view, it was mainstream confessional doctrine for Reformed and Puritan Protestantism. The original 1646 text of Westminster Confession 25.6 reads: "There is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ. Nor can the Pope of Rome, in any sense, be head thereof; but is that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition." This clause was only removed in later (mostly American, 19th-20th century) revisions. Luther wrote similarly in the Smalcald Articles (1537): "the Pope is the very Antichrist."
Wesley needs a small footnote: he did hold the historicist (Bengel-following) reading identifying the Pope as Antichrist, with no secret-rapture concept, but he was a postmillennialist, believing that after Antichrist's fall there would be a long golden age of gospel advance before Christ's return, not that Christ returns immediately after Antichrist falls, as Pawson's simple two-step framework implies.
Source: christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/historic-premillennialism; opc.org/documents/WCF_orig.html (1646 text); thebookofconcord.org (Smalcald Articles); wesleyscholar.com/john-wesleys-order-of-eschatological-events.

Darby really was ordained deacon in the Church of Ireland (the Anglican province in Ireland, the established state church at the time) in August 1825, and served the isolated rural parish of Calary, County Wicklow, not Dublin. "Anglican" is an accurate shorthand; "Church of Ireland" is the precise denominational name.
But "1825, beginnings in Dublin" compresses two separate events into one: 1825 is when Darby was ordained and posted to Wicklow, while the first informal Dublin bread-breaking gatherings (Darby with Edward Cronin, John Gifford Bellett, Anthony Norris Groves…) only began in winter 1827-28, after a riding accident left Darby convalescing. "1830 or thereabouts, beginnings in Plymouth" is close but slightly early: the first Brethren meeting at Plymouth was held in December 1831.
Source: Sweetnam & Gribben, "J.N. Darby and the Irish Origins of Dispensationalism," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 52/3 (2009); Dictionary of Irish Biography.

This is where Pawson simplifies a genuinely tangled history. Pairing Irving and Darby as two people independently arriving at the same secret-rapture doctrine isn't quite accurate. Close study of Irving's own teaching (C.G. Flegg, 'Gathered Under Apostles', Oxford, 1992) shows Irving taught the "translation" of the saints as part of the same Second Advent event, a brief interval within it, not a secret removal years before a future seven-year tribulation. Irving was also a historicist (prophecy fulfilled progressively through church history), while Darby was a futurist (most prophecy still awaiting future fulfillment): different interpretive systems, not one idea independently held by two men.
The more widely known story Pawson may be gesturing at without naming: that the secret-rapture doctrine originated in the 1830 vision of Margaret Macdonald, a 15-year-old in Port Glasgow, Scotland, within Irving's circle, then passed to Darby (who may have "covered up" its origin). This is journalist Dave MacPherson's thesis, argued across several books from 1973 to 1994. Most historians, both sympathetic to and critical of dispensationalism, reject direct dependence: F.F. Bruce called it "unlikely"; R.A. Huebner and Thomas Ice point out Darby's own pretrib-leaning writings predate 1830; and a close reading of Macdonald's own published vision text (1840) reads as describing being tried through the tribulation, i.e. posttribulational, not pretribulational, the ambiguity only appearing in an 1861 reprint that dropped a few lines. But this isn't fully settled either: a King's College London PhD thesis (Mark Patterson, 2001) seriously argues Irving really did play a pioneering role. In short: a real, not-fully-resolved scholarly dispute, not a simple case of two men independently having the same idea.
Source: C. Graham Flegg, 'Gathered Under Apostles' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Thomas Ice, "Edward Irving and the Rapture," pre-trib.org; Sweetnam & Gribben, JETS 52/3 (2009); Timothy C.F. Stunt, "Influences in the Early Development of J.N. Darby," in Prisoners of Hope? (Paternoster, 2004).

Scofield was ordained Congregationalist in 1883 and took up his own pastorate at a small Dallas church (now Scofield Memorial Church), not at Moody's calling. The Moody connection predates that (he assisted Moody's 1879 St. Louis campaign) and postdates it: only in 1895 did he actually leave Dallas to become pastor at Moody's own church, Trinitarian Congregational Church in East Northfield, Massachusetts. Pawson has merged two separate pastorates into one.
The Scofield Reference Bible was published in 1909 (Oxford University Press, as Pawson says), sold over 2 million copies by the end of WWII, and became known as "the Bible of fundamentalism" for its outsized influence on how a generation of American evangelicals read prophecy.
One thing Pawson doesn't mention: Scofield's pre-conversion past is documented in the public/court record and rough: forced to resign as US District Attorney for Kansas in 1873 amid bribery allegations; arrested for forgery in 1878; deserted his first wife and two young daughters c. 1877-1881 (divorce finalized 8 Dec 1883); then remarried only about three months later, 11 March 1884, close enough that some critics call it "near-bigamy," though there's no evidence of two concurrent legal marriages. Worth flagging: the most detailed and harshest version of this story traces largely to one critical biography, Joseph M. Canfield's The Incredible Scofield and His Book (1988), regarded by Scofield's defenders as biased and overstating the severity. The core events (resignation, forgery, divorce, fast remarriage) are grounded in the public record, but the framing of them as a "dark past" is contested, not an uncontroversial consensus.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._I._Scofield; library.dts.edu/Pages/TL/Special/scofield.shtml; tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/scofield-cyrus-ingerson; Joseph M. Canfield, The Incredible Scofield and His Book (1988).

S.P. Tregelles (1813-1875), the eminent Greek New Testament textual scholar, of a stature comparable to Tischendorf, really did publicly dissent from Darby's secret-rapture doctrine. In The Hope of Christ's Second Coming (1864) he argued the doctrine had no basis in Scripture or the church fathers, and traced its origin to an emotional "utterance" in Edward Irving's congregation.
"G.H. Leng" is almost certainly a mis-transcription of G.H. Lang (George Henry Lang, 1874-1958), a well-known Brethren author on resurrection and rapture. Worth noting: Lang was born decades after Darby's own lifetime (Darby died 1882), so his "dissent" is a later intra-Brethren tradition, not a face-to-face contemporary debate with Darby the way Tregelles's or Müller's was.
George Müller (1805-1898), founder of the Bristol orphan houses through the Scriptural Knowledge Institution (1834), held a futurist premillennial system largely parallel to Darby's, but clearly rejected the rapture happening before the tribulation, leaning posttribulational: he's described as "very suspicious" of the new doctrine spreading in Brethren literature.
Source: christianobserver.net (series on Darby and the pretribulation rapture); en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Lang; theopedia.com/george-muller.

Checking each verse: epiphaneia at 1 Timothy 6:14 and 2 Timothy 4:1, 8 is correct. Apokalypsis at 1 Corinthians 1:7 and 2 Thessalonians 1:7 is correct. For parousia: 2 Thessalonians 2:1 is right, but the word actually occurs at 1 Thessalonians 4:15, not verse 13 as Pawson says, though the whole passage 4:13-18 (the correct "caught up" passage) is what he's referring to, so this is a minor verse-number slip, not a content error.
Pawson's central thesis, that these three words aren't technical terms splitting two stages, matches mainstream NT scholarship: George Eldon Ladd's The Blessed Hope (1956) and Robert Gundry's The Church and the Tribulation (1973) both conclude no two-stage coming can be deduced from NT word usage; BDAG classifies parousia as the general term for the whole return, not a label for a secret sub-phase.
But one fairness note is worth adding: this was the standard dispensationalist argument before roughly 1945. By the time Pawson preached this, dispensationalism's own leading theologian, John Walvoord, had already conceded exactly this lexical point himself, writing that parousia has "no technical meaning… limiting its use to either one" side, but is used "in a general… sense… descriptive of both the rapture and the glorious return." Walvoord defended the pretribulation rapture on other grounds (imminence, distinct audiences, the "restrainer" of 2 Thessalonians 2), no longer relying on the lexical split. So Pawson is accurately refuting dispensationalism's older, more popular argument, not necessarily its most sophisticated, contemporary form.
Source: George Eldon Ladd, The Blessed Hope (Eerdmans, 1956); Robert Gundry, The Church and the Tribulation (Zondervan, 1973); walvoord.com/article/68 (Walvoord's review of Ladd).

If this sermon dates to late 1967 as argued at the top of this piece, Pawson's figure runs meaningfully below modern scholarly reconstructions for the same period. The World Christian Encyclopedia (Barrett), the same source used to build the chart in Part 5, estimates Christians at about 33.7% of world population in 1970, against a world population of roughly 3.7 billion, or about 1.25 billion people, not 850 million: a gap of roughly 30%, in the same direction as Pawson's general pattern of understating global Christianity's scale (see Part 5). Either way, his core point, that whether the true figure is 850 million or 1.25 billion, a mass disappearance on that scale would be impossible to miss, holds regardless of the exact number.
Source: World Christian Encyclopedia (Barrett), as cited in Part 5 of this series.

The "flight to Pella" tradition is real, but only attested in 4th-century sources: Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 3.5.3 (written c. AD 312-324) and Epiphanius, Panarion 29-30 (late 4th century), more than 240 years after the event. There's no first-century evidence at all: not in the New Testament, not in Josephus's Jewish War (written c. AD 75-79, covering the siege in exhaustive detail but never mentioning a Christian evacuation). Historians have debated the tradition's reliability since S.G.F. Brandon's 1951 challenge (arguing the flight was implausible given Roman control of escape routes); other historians (Craig Koester, 1989; Jonathan Bourgel, 2010) argue it does preserve a genuine historical memory, though none of them endorses the strong version Pawson gives, that all Christians were safe.
On the "one and a half million" figure: no ancient or modern source gives this number. Josephus himself (Jewish War 6.9.3, paragraph 420), presumably Pawson's loose source, records the siege death toll at roughly 1,100,000 (plus about 97,000 taken captive), and states plainly most of the dead were Passover pilgrims from across Judea trapped in the city, not only Jerusalem residents. Modern historians (such as Menahem Stern) already treat Josephus's own 1.1 million as a substantial exaggeration: Jerusalem's walled-city population is estimated at roughly 60,000-70,000, and even swollen by wartime refugees and pilgrims, falls far short of a million. So Pawson's figure isn't just one and a half times Josephus's own (already-inflated) number: the claim that "no Christians" died is also his own inference, not a verifiable historical statistic; no ancient source counts Christian survivors.
Source: Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 3.5.3; Craig R. Koester, "The Origin and Significance of the Flight to Pella Tradition," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 51.1 (1989); Josephus, Jewish War 6.9.3 (paragraph 420); Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE), summarizing Menahem Stern's assessment.

No session of China's National People's Congress has ever had exactly 666 members. The 3rd NPC, the nominal session spanning the Cultural Revolution (1964-1975), had 3,040 delegates; the 2nd (1959-1964) had 1,235; the 4th (1975-1978) had 2,864; and since 1982 the law has capped the NPC at no more than 3,000 delegates. The "666" figure matches no documented record: this reads almost certainly as pulpit-style "Revelation numerology," not a historical fact. On Revelation being China's "most-read book": no scholarly, denominational, or Bible-society source quantifies reading habits this way, emotionally plausible (apocalyptic literature often resonates strongly with the persecuted), but unverifiable as a statistic.
What's real and more worth noting: the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) genuinely was the harshest persecution period for Chinese Christianity in the modern era: churches closed, Bibles burned, clergy imprisoned and tortured, public worship banned outright. Yet underground house-church Christianity survived, and later grew explosively, well documented in Tony Lambert's The Resurrection of the Chinese Church (1991): believers met in coal-mine tunnels and mountain caves, hid hymnbooks inside covers of Mao's Little Red Book, and growth was driven substantially by lay "Bible women" who had memorized Scripture.
On "98% in one city by 2074": this isn't a UN or World Bank projection, but a garbled echo of a real but non-consensus 1962 forecast by Greek urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis, inventor of the "Ecumenopolis" concept (a hypothetical single planet-spanning city). He extrapolated then-current growth rates to predict world population reaching 50 billion by 2100, 98% urban, covering about 48 million sq km along growth corridors: a strand of 1960s "megastructuralist" urban futurism (alongside Jean Gottmann's 1961 "Megalopolis" and Herman Kahn/Anthony Wiener's 1967 "The Year 2000"), never mainstream demographic consensus even at the time. The reality: global urbanization was about 57.7% in 2024 (World Bank), with the UN projecting roughly 68% by 2050 (nowhere near 98%), while world population is projected to peak around 10-10.3 billion, not the 50 billion Doxiadis assumed.
Source: npcobserver.com (NPC seat allocation); Tony Lambert, The Resurrection of the Chinese Church (1991); en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecumenopolis; World Bank, urban population 2024; UN, World Urbanization Prospects (2018, 2025 update).