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).