Includes bibliographical references and index.

Christians in Asia before the arrival of the Portuguese -- Early Portuguese contacts -- The Organizations of colonial churches -- Francis Xavier in Asia (1542-1552) -- Intercultural contacts -- Forms of Local Christianity -- St. Thomas Christians and the Portuguese before 1599 -- Forms of Catholic presence -- Accomodation strategies and the rites controversy -- Colonial forms of Protestantism -- Indigenous forms of Christianity -- Tranquebar 1706 and its consequences -- The general situation in the early nineteenth century -- Southern Asia: a new beginning in Serampore (1800) -- Missions as a means of modernization -- Public response, non-Christian voices -- Northeast Asia: a forced opening -- Indigenous versions of Christianity -- Religious revival and political nationalism -- Attempts at indigenization in the Protestant churches -- Local ecumenical initiatives and Edinburgh 1910 -- Developments in Catholic Asia -- Independent church movements -- Developments in the 1920s and 1930s -- The Asian churches during World War II -- The churches and nation building in the 1950s -- Under Communist rule -- Developments in the 1960s -- Trends at the end of the 1980s -- Ancient African Christianity -- European expansion and the new discoveries -- Encounters -- Afrcian Catholicism in the Congo -- Ethiopia and Portugal -- Slave trade -- Catholic rulers -- Catholic experiments and failures -- Protests against the Slave trade -- Abolition of the slave trade and mission -- New missionary socieites -- Livingstone and other "explorers" -- Mission initiatives and African rulers -- African Christian elite -- "Scramble for Africa" -- Concepts of Ecclesiastical independence -- Developments within the Roman Catholic Church -- Themes of the 1920s and 1930s -- National movements and Christianity -- "Wind of change" -- African churches and nation building -- African theology -- Church and apartheid in South Africa -- Conflicts and new beginnings -- The first encounters and the perspectives of victor and victim -- Legitimation and criticism of the conquest -- Establishment of colonial church structures -- Mission and missionaries -- Religious dialogue and ethnographic works -- Failed approaches to Indian Christianity -- Church and mission in colonial society -- Indian and Mestizo voices -- The reductions (settlements) of the Jesuits and their purpose -- Slavery -- Colonial Protestantism -- Heralds of Independence -- On the path of independence -- Rome and the new countries -- Popular religion and the state of the church and the missions -- Protestantism -- Catholicism becomes more Roman and European -- Confessional pluralization -- Faces of Latin American Catholicism -- The emergence of the social question -- The path to a new Latin American Christianity -- The Second Vatican Council and its reception -- The conflict on the theology of liberation -- Developments of Protestantism -- Awakening and multiplicity.