Only 10 percent of these were refugees and asylum seekers. Today, more than 4. News and information, including news about the global church, can reach nearly every corner of the world.
Less young people are in the church? After being sent out in and participating in various ministries around East Africa, Chikwekwe joined the pastoral staff at Nairobi Chapel , a nondenominational church in Kenya. There, the leadership was engaged in an intentional conversation about the role of the African church in global missions. They studied the teachings of 1 Corinthians 12, about the roles of different members of the body of Christ, from a global perspective—and concluded that Africa, as an essential member of the global church, needed to do more.
Faith Mugera, pastor of global partnerships at Nairobi Chapel, is one of the key leaders of the resulting missions efforts. If so, then we absolutely cannot dismiss ourselves from that. If we as the African church are not functioning right, then the global body is missing out. Nairobi Chapel is at the leading edge of an increasingly strategic approach to missions among Global South Christians. At the turn of the century, Chikwekwe and other missionaries like him were often sent out with few resources, minimal connections, and no plan aside from sharing the gospel wherever they could.
Now more churches and ministries are borrowing from their Western counterparts and placing a heavier emphasis on goal setting, training, and strategic partnerships. Mugera and her colleagues, for example, have set the audacious goal of planting churches worldwide, with 20 of those in capital cities across Africa and 10 in international cities of influence. To support this goal, they train three separate cohorts of young leaders each year in leadership and spiritual development, as well as life skills like resourcefulness and relationship building.
Nairobi Chapel has already sent ministers and church planters to Chicago, London, Sydney, and Christchurch. Their next mission field: San Francisco, which they have spent the last year praying and fasting for. You have to raise a lot of financial support. You need a missions agency. These challenges have forced Nairobi Chapel and other churches and missions organizations to think creatively about how to send out missionaries, often relying on multinational collaborations and alternative visa options.
Outside of Africa, Nairobi Chapel relies on existing local churches to invite their ministers, sponsor their visas, provide homes, and raise financial support for their expenses. Other ministries are capitalizing on an increasingly global economy and job market. One Hong Kong—based couple I spoke with is targeting Chinese businesspeople migrating to Africa and elsewhere, challenging the Christians among them to also be evangelists. In the Philippines, missions groups are training some of the more than 2 million Filipinos who work abroad as everything from engineers to domestic helpers, equipping them as tent-making missionaries who can witness to their employers, colleagues, and neighbors.
For these missionaries, simply applying for a visa to a country that does not welcome migrants who look like them can be an act of faith. Some majority-world missionaries experience prejudice and hostility in the countries they have come to serve. Melody Mweu, a Kenyan missionary who served in Khartoum, Sudan, told me she initially had trouble being accepted by the upper-class Sudanese women she encountered.
Beauty Ndoro similarly recalls needing quite a bit of time to gain the trust of her Nicaraguan neighbors in the slums. But she and her husband kept showing up, talking to people and praying for them.
These racial tensions can have real consequences. Hondurans Jairo and Lourdes Sarmiento have been leading a church plant in a low-income Latino community in California for several years. Enduring such hardships requires significant faith and perseverance, which many in the Global South have in abundance.
This spiritual grit has often been shaped by decades of poverty, war, colonization, and political instability. Among the missionaries I interviewed, almost all of them shared stories of childhood hunger, abuse, neglect, or persecution. Two women had been nearly sexually assaulted in their home countries, and another was almost raped while on the mission field, but they were miraculously protected. Even in South Korea, today one of the most industrialized nations in the world, memories of war and its hardships continue to influence how missionaries approach their work.
Some mission groups question whether to send missionaries to developing countries at all, Johnson said. Humanitarian work became common, and churches in the s started large nongovernmental organizations, she said.
With the increasing globalization of communications and transportation, there has been an exponential increase of short-term volunteer missions, Robert said. News Updated.
By Daniel Lovering 5 Min Read. Thomas R. McKibbens, playing the role of Adoniram Judson, waits to speak during ceremonies to mark the th anniversary of Judson's departure for Asia in Salem, Massachusetts February 20, A case study of a Korean mission movement in the United States.
The article is based on an in-depth case study of one of the largest missionary-sending agencies in South Korea that sends many of its missionaries to the United States. Prado, Oswaldo. The article explores the growth of Brazilian Protestantism to become a force in international missions. Case, Jay Riley. The author examines the efforts of early American evangelical missionaries, finding the ministries that were most successful were those that empowered the local population and adapted to local cultures.
In fact, he writes, influence often flowed the other way, with missionaries serving as conduits for ideas that shaped American evangelicalism. Jenkins, Philip. Robert, Dana Lee. The work examines Christian missions and their relationship to the current globalization of Christianity. Sanneh, Lamin O. Newest Additions View the most recent additions to the Data Archive. View More Measurement Wizard Browse concepts used in the study of religion, review how survey researchers measured them in the past, and quickly compare the results of more than 7, survey questions.
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