The Missiology of Western Culture's History Group had the intuition that Christendom might be a useful lens through which to gain a missiological perspective on the history of Christianity in the West. When twenty-two scholars from eight countries gathered in the Maison Nicolas Barré, Paris, in April 1997 for the group's third colloquium and to discuss the decline of Christendom in western Europe in the last two or so centuries, there was already a sense of unease about the future and, more importantly, the nature of Christianity. In our brief to the participants, the History Group had defined Christendom rather broadly, but in distinction to Christianity: Christendom is a civilisation in which (a) Christianity is the dominant religion and (b) this dominance has been backed up by social or legal compulsions. For discussion we offered the following working hypothesis: the coercion, control and domination that were part of the Christendom model of church and mission carry within themselves the seeds of the modern repudiation of Christianity in Europe. (In focusing on western Europe, we did not consider how far our definitions might apply to other Christendoms, such as Ethiopia.)

The participants, representing different national, cultural, political, historical and often denominational traditions and each being an expert in his or her field, quickly detected the dissenters' voice or the radical Reformation bias in all of this and demonstrated that the matter was much more complex and the overall picture more diverse and even ambiguous than this (see Hugh McLeod's Introduction).

This volume has grown out of a conference held in Paris in April 1997. It was the last of a series of three on the theme of ‘The Rise and Decline of Christendom in Western Europe’, organised by the History Group of the Missiology of Western Culture Project. The Group comprised Dr Neal Blough (Paris), Dr Alan Kreider (then Oxford), Prof. Hugh McLeod, and Prof. Werner Ustorf (both Birmingham). A. Kreider (ed.), The Origins of Christendom in the West (Edinburgh and New York: T&T Clark, 2001) was the result of the first of these conferences. The second focused on the period of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

The Missiology of Western Culture Project (1992–1997) was an ecumenical attempt by western missiologists to mobilise the thinking of specialists in a variety of disciplines about the interplay of the Christian message and churches with the culture of the contemporary west. Subsidised by substantial grants, notably from the Pew Charitable Trust (Philadelphia), the project sponsored study groups in seven areas (the arts, ecclesiology, epistemology, social structures and systems, history, the individual, and health and healing), and each group organised its own study processes and colloquia. The Project ended with the groups sharing their findings with each other in September 1997 in a major international consultation at the Bon Secours Center, Marriottsville, Maryland, USA. Their learnings are gradually appearing in print.