The global south takes the lead
World Christianity shifts south and east
The statistician David Barrett publishes his World Christian Encyclopedia in 1982 and the numbers tell a story that the Western church has not been paying attention to.
The majority of Christians now live outside Europe and North America. The center of global Christianity has shifted — definitively, irreversibly — to sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The church that the West sent missionaries to build has outgrown the West that built it.
By 2020, Africa alone has over six hundred million Christians. Latin America has over six hundred million. Asia has over four hundred million. Europe and North America together have less than a quarter of the world's Christians.
The typical Christian in the twenty-first century is not a middle-aged white European in a declining mainline church. She is a young woman in Nigeria or Brazil or the Philippines, in a congregation that is growing, that prays with urgency, that reads the Bible with the hunger of someone who has not been saturated with it since childhood, that expects the Spirit to act because it has seen him act.
The Christianity being practiced in Lagos and São Paulo and Seoul and Beijing is not a pale copy of Western Christianity. It is, in many ways, more directly connected to the Christianity of the first and second centuries than anything currently practiced in Oxford or Chicago.
The former mission field is now the mission force.
The periphery has become the center.
“The Church of the South is not the younger sister of the Church of the North. She is the future.”
— African theologian, attributed, c. late 20th century
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you. You will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth.”
The gospel went to the ends of the earth. And then the ends of the earth became the center.
The church that began in Jerusalem went to Rome and then to Europe and then to the Americas and Africa and Asia — and now the Christians of Africa and Asia and Latin America are coming to post-Christian Europe, planting churches in cities that once sent missionaries to their grandparents' grandparents.
This is the most remarkable reversal in the history of the faith, and it is largely invisible to Western Christians who still imagine themselves at the center of a story they have been displaced from.
The Spirit was promised to the end of the earth. He arrived. He is at work. The witnesses he is raising up look nothing like the witnesses who went before them.
Are you paying attention to where the center of the story actually is?