The church grows in Africa

In 1900, there are approximately ten million Christians in Africa south of the Sahara. By 2000, there are roughly 360 million — the fastest growth of Christianity in any region in any century in the history of the faith.

The growth happens through several channels simultaneously. European and American missionaries plant churches across the continent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — sometimes with genuine care, sometimes in ways inseparable from colonial power. African Independent Churches, founded and led by Africans with no connection to European mission structures, emerge from the 1880s onward and develop distinctively African forms of Christian practice and theology. The Pentecostal and charismatic movements of the twentieth century catch fire across Africa with a speed that surprises even their Western proponents.

What the outside observer misses in the statistics is the quality of the African Christianity that produces them. African theologians engage the biblical text with tools — oral tradition, communal hermeneutics, the experience of suffering and liberation — that Western academic theology has rarely brought to it. African worship, prayer, and community practice are reshaping global Christianity in ways that are only beginning to be felt.

The center of gravity of world Christianity has moved south and east. The typical Christian in the twenty-first century is not a middle-class Westerner. She is a young woman in Nigeria or Brazil or China or the Philippines.

The church that began in Jerusalem has come home — to the global south, to the majority world, to the people who were among the last to receive the gospel from the West and are now among the most faithful in keeping it.

The church of the twenty-first century looks like no single tradition, no single culture, no single theological school. It is Yoruba and Korean and Brazilian and Filipino and Chinese and Guatemalan and Ethiopian and a thousand other things simultaneously.

The Western church that sent missionaries to Africa is now receiving African bishops who are planting churches in post-Christian London. The church that went everywhere has come back transformed by everywhere it went.

Cush stretches out her hands to God. The ancient psalm is being fulfilled in ways the psalmist could not have imagined and the Western church is only beginning to see.

What does the global majority of your own tradition look like? And what might they have to teach you about the faith you share?