Reverse Mission: A Discourse in Search of Reality?

Paul Freston

Reverse mission is a delicate topic. Who am I, a white European, to critique a concept

which can be seen as empowering non-Westerners? In addition, flippant discounting of reverse
mission ideals and efforts can betray persisting colonial attitudes (‘who do these people think
they are!’) and continuing notions of primitiveness (since now, for many Europeans, to be
Christian is to be relatively primitive, since ‘we’ have left that stage behind). In these
circumstances, a good example to follow is that of the Venerable Bede, who thirteen centuries
ago also wrote about what was effectively a process of re-evangelization of parts of Europe. It is
said of him1 that he was generous in recognising merit and in revering sanctity in the subjects of
his history, but also wise in perceiving their defects; an appropriate but demanding ideal to have
when discussing as fraught a topic as current attempts at mission in Europe by Christians from
the ‘global south’.
My discussion will ask five questions. Firstly, what is reverse mission? Secondly, is it
actually being attempted? Thirdly, if not, why not? Fourthly, if so, with what success? And lastly,
what are its prospects?

What is reverse mission?

The indispensable contexts for our discussion are, firstly, the formation of an almost
global grassroots Protestantism, heavily Pentecostal and multifocal; and secondly, the growing
conviction amongst scholars (and religious practitioners!) that Europe is religiously unique.
There has been both a considerable north-south shift in global Protestant adherence and a
significant increase in south-north exporting of Protestant forms, both through churches among
immigrants and through direct missionary work. Although Christian immigration to Europe is far
less preponderant than to the United States, its impact is magnified by the extent of European de-
Christianization. In addition, with the globalization of Protestantism, its transnational
proselytism has been transformed by the emergence of missionaries from Asia, Africa and Latin
America. The largest of the ‘tiger’ economies, South Korea, has produced the strongest such
movement, but several Latin American and African countries are also significant senders.
There is also a perception, among local and immigrant Christians and the larger society,
of serious decline in European Christianity. Ideas of reverse mission are encouraged by this
perception, as well as by the far higher levels of churchgoing among the non-white population
and by the arrival of Muslim immigrants which has raised the question of Christianity’s
connection with European identity.
The idea of reverse mission differs from that expressed in the 1974 Lausanne Covenant (a
‘Vatican II’ of evangelical Christianity) that ‘missionaries should flow ever more freely from and
to all six continents’.2 Instead of this from-everywhere-to-everywhere world, reverse mission
envisages an inversion of the from-to world of the late fifteenth to late twentieth centuries. As
Ojo puts it, ‘reverse mission refers to the sending of missionaries to Europe and North America
by churches and Christians from the non-Western world, particularly Africa, Asia and Latin
America’.3 But this is more than a geographical inversion. ‘Reverse mission’ is also from below.
Along with the changed direction of arrows on the map go inverted social positions, resembling
the expansion of Christianity in its first centuries.
 One does occasionally encounter another concept of ‘reverse mission’. As long ago as
1972 Roger Bastide talked of ‘listening to the word of God expressed in the sacred of the pagans,
with a view to benefiting the metropolitan churches’, a process which would ‘invert the flux’ of
missions. But, in a sense closer to contemporary usage, the same author also says that the
metropolitan churches have great need of ‘black or yellow missionaries... not copies of their old
masters but... from a Christianity which is truly Asian or rooted in négritude’.4
Within the dominant contemporary idea of ‘reverse mission’, there are two main
elements: reversing the direction of missionary-sending; and reversing the direction of
colonization. The two often overlap, but not always. For Brazilian Protestants, for example,
while reverse mission in the first sense is largely to the United States and Britain, in the second
sense it is to Portugal. Beyond this level, the concept’s imprecision increases. If reverse mission
is to the former colonizer, does that include American or Australian missionaries in the UK? If
not, are they excluded because their de-colonization was many generations ago, or because these
countries are as wealthy as the UK, or because the missionaries are as white as the native
Britons? If, however, reverse mission is to the former evangelizers, does that exclude Eastern
European countries that never engaged in missionizing in the global south, thus ruling out
Sunday Adelaja in the Ukraine? And what broader definition of reverse mission might include
him? If ‘black-to-white’, that would rule out Asians and most Latin Americans. It seems there
has to be a consciousness of an inverted order, a ‘world turned upside down’, for there to be
reverse mission. But what is included in this ‘inverted order’? Is it relative poverty, or colonial
history, or skin colour? Would white Argentines doing mission in Spain be ruled out whereas
mestizo Peruvians would be ruled in? And if one adopts the title of Catto’s thesis on reverse
mission, ‘from the rest to the West’, 5 is Adelaja to be excluded, not because Ukraine did not
colonize or evangelize Nigeria but because Ukraine is not part of ‘the West’?
If the criterion is merely geographical, then the target population becomes unimportant.
But is an African evangelizing African immigrants in London reversing anything? Significantly,
Ojo describes how African immigrants in the 1990s began more and more to define their mission
as ‘to the Western church’, stimulated both by an intensification of migration and by increasing
perception of secularization in the West.6 Images of Europe as the ‘dark continent’ began to
inform this conviction of divine calling. Adogame also feels that changes in immigrants’
situation played a part in the rise of the ‘reverse mission paradigm’, especially strains on the
welfare system and the growing electoral salience of immigration issues.7
One notes the emphasis in these authors on African immigrants. Many African churches
have prophecies regarding their future role, and that of their nation, in world evangelization, an
example of which is the following addressed to Africans in general: ‘says the Lord, “your voice
has not been heard in the nations… shake yourself out of that pity and… social bondage… For I
have chosen a people looked down upon, despised and a people spat upon and I have put my
glory upon them”.’8 This is a fine example of use of biblical themes of chosenness of the
downtrodden and despised, assuring them they have something to offer to the wealthy and
powerful. The idea of being chosen carriers of a religious message for the world is perhaps the
only element in the self-image of the colonial powers which can be realistically appropriated
today by many former colonial peoples as part of their own construction of a positive national
self-image.

Is Reverse Mission Actually Being Attempted?

 The theme is actually as old, or older, than the colonization process in some parts of the
world. As the West African Christian leader Edward Blyden wrote in 1880: ‘Africa may yet
prove to be the spiritual conservatory of the world… when the civilized nations... shall have had
their spiritual perceptions darkened... [through] a captivating and absorbing materialism, it may
be, that they have to resort to Africa to recover some of the simple elements of faith’.9
Not only is the idea older than generally thought, but the practice also. We read of a
Jamaican evangelist in Britain in the 1880s, and of black ministers leading congregations at
various moments during the nineteenth century.10 A notable precursor of Nigerian missions was
the African Churches Mission run by Daniel Ekarte. In what he perceived as the racist and
ungodly slums of inter-war Liverpool, Ekarte’s mission catered to black and white alike.11
The inter-war years also marked ‘the beginning of the widespread use of indigenous
Christians as ambassadors or “reverse” missionaries to the West’. These did not come
autonomously, but were usually brought on short visits by Westerners with their own agendas.
After the international missionary conference in Tambaram in 1938, for example, Mina Soga, the
only African woman there, toured the US for 6 months. 12 Not for nothing does Latourette write in
1936 that ‘members of the younger churches are beginning to come as missionaries to the West’;
he cites a mission sent to the churches of Britain by the Indian churches, ‘at their own expense’.13
However, the major differences in the contemporary situation are the greater perception
of spiritual need in Europe, the growth of autonomous missions from the global south and the
presence of a huge Christian immigrant community in Europe.
In relation to immigrants, Gerloff talks of ‘a tremendous expectation by African
Christians to be able to contribute to their “host societies”.’ 14 Währisch-Oblau says that some
‘come to understand themselves as charged with bringing revival to a dying church’. 15 Olupona
stresses how many Africans in the US interpret their presence as a divine plan to plant new
churches in the West, and how this ‘ideal of spiritual agency provides purpose and a sense of
home... [giving] meaning and direction to the migration process’ beyond social and economic
objectives16. Nor are such ideas limited to Africans. An Indian missionary writes of how the ‘sick
man’ Europe is ‘a wide open door for Indian Christians’ because of its enthusiasm for Indian
food and religions.17

If Reverse Mission is not Happening, why not?

To wish to contribute to one’s ‘host society’ is understandable from the viewpoint of
Christian altruism, and also of self-esteem and even self-justification. But the wish is not the
reality, as numerous researchers have found. Thus, van der Laan18: ‘the native Dutch... do not
respond to their evangelistic efforts`; Adogame19: ‘white converts’ form a ‘negligible
percentage’; Währisch-Oblau: ‘even large very international churches have relatively few
German members’. The last-named author, however, does add that ‘in some migrant churches,
Germans who were evangelized and baptized there eventually left and joined a German-majority
church saying they never felt at home’, a revealing comment but which does in fact point to
successful evangelization of some members of the native population. She also says Protestant
churches have begun courses to train leaders of migrant churches for a missionary role in
Germany, since most pastors have little knowledge about life there. But ‘major theological
obstacles’ over ‘differing concepts of mission’ do not seem to presage too much success. In
addition, on the German side there is the constant suspicion that these are either just economic
migrants exploiting the system, or victims who need assistance.20
 Clearly, neither those seen as exploiters nor those seen as victims will be readily
recognized as missionaries with a viable message for one’s own society. But besides the problem
of perceptions on the part of the host population, there are problems on the other side. Attracting
adherents from the native population is often mentioned by diaspora churches as a priority, and
indeed is sometimes given rhetorical pride of place as a justification of their existence in the new
country. But in practice it is usually low on the list of priorities, and gets constantly overridden
by the demands of ministering to the diaspora community. No changes will be made that might
substantially harm the latter objective.
Then there is the problem of mission being done by a community of immigrants who
have come with a variety of motivations, mostly non-religious. Why should they be better
missionaries to the natives than were white colonial settlers wherever they went?
In addition, as my research into Brazilian churches abroad has shown, the diaspora
context is extremely complicated, both ecclesiastically and ethically. In the unstable world of
diaspora churches (at least in the Brazilian case), motivations are very mixed and the
ecclesiastical context becomes a sort of ‘wild West’ where defects are magnified.
It is also true that diaspora churches often have little understanding of the society they are
in (or indeed of the native churches, of which they are often excessively critical), and especially
they understand little about Europe’s uniqueness as a new type of post-Christian society.
One can, of course, imagine other ways that diaspora churches might achieve an impact
on the native population. Some native churches might be attracted to the vitality of nearby
diaspora churches and selectively imitate their methods. Or the ‘second generation’ might move
into native churches and revitalize them. But this is not inevitable. The second generation may
either assimilate and secularize, or else remain in a spiritual ghetto. In fact, without intentional
efforts to the contrary, these are the most likely outcomes.
It is true that, in Britain today, the largest church is run by a Nigerian. But even its pastor
admits that ‘we are seen as a black thing and not a God thing’. 21 Similarly, Nigerian attempts at
cross-cultural mission in the United States have had little success. The main actor there has been
the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG). The strategy for international expansion, says
its leader Enoch Adeboye, was to ‘begin in countries where there were Nigerian immigrants’. 22
But the RCCG insists it ‘didn’t bring this church to the United States to be another Nigerian
church’.23 Nevertheless, its American churches remain overwhelmingly African. This is hardly
their fault, though. The American religious world is hugely segregated by race, and overcoming
such a social barrier to the spread of a faith usually requires the efforts of specialized full-time
missionaries.24
In short, there are many reasons for doubting the capacity of diaspora communities to act
as missionaries to native populations. It is not that immigrants are obtuse and do not realise the
possibilities they have for mission, as some missions organizers imagine. There are other reasons
why a diaspora location is rarely a good springboard for mission.
Thus, even though Hanciles affirms that ‘recent migration movements provide a vital
outlet for missionary expansion’ and that ‘official missionary efforts reflect the Western model of
missions and barely represent the tip of the iceberg of the African missionary movement’, he has
to admit that ‘few African immigrant pastors have the capacity to minister interracially or
interculturally’, and anyway they are ‘inhibited by the needs of their immigrant congregations’.
In short, ‘successful intercultural mission requires sacrificing the immigrant ethos’. 25 We can
conclude therefore that as long as immigration continues apace, little cross-cultural work will be
done.
 Some pastors affirm that the experience of racism inflamed their missionary vision. This
is a highly attractive facet of reverse mission ideas, both sociologically and morally. But it does
not guarantee effective mission to the native population. In fact, that aim might be impossible to
achieve without changes that the very protagonists are generally unwilling to make, i.e. a
willingness to Europeanize or Americanize oneself that the very experience of discrimination
discourages. So reverse mission rhetoric risks becoming little more than a survival strategy. And,
however understandable such a strategy may be, how long can it persist even as rhetoric if the
results are clearly absent?
At the academic conference at which the first version of this paper was given, another
presenter showed a photo of the foyer of the main RCCG church in London. It was dominated by
an unashamedly Afro-centric map of the world: the continents were separated out, with Africa
moved to the mid-Atlantic and further north, accentuating its global centrality. I intentionally
asked whether Livets Ord, the Swedish church with which the RCCG was being compared, had a
Swedish-centric map of the world in its foyer. The question was, of course, greeted with laughter.
Indeed, if such a map did exist, most Western onlookers would react in one of two ways: either
with laughter (‘how can the Swedes imagine they are the centre of the world’) or with
indignation (‘such ethnocentrism, in the twenty-first century!’). But we tolerate such
ethnocentrism from a Nigerian church, and rightly so, because it is only the tiniest part of just
reparations for all the historical injustices visited on Africa. But we should also recognize that as
part of a global mission strategy (such as the RCCG prides itself on) such ethnocentrism is a
serious barrier, even if it is ‘from below’ and therefore far less catastrophic in its social
consequences than colonial-era Western missionary errors. The question may be shocking, but
one has to ask whether the concept of ‘reverse mission’ as used by many diaspora churches is not
a sort of historical ‘self-reparation’, rather than a thought-out, reflexive, cross-cultural
missionary strategy.
Effective evangelization of Europeans by diaspora churches would thus presuppose both
a fundamental reorientation of priorities and rethinking of strategies on the part of the diaspora
churches, and a fundamental attitudinal change on the part of native Europeans, in which
diaspora churches and preachers would be seen no longer as fanatical or merely exotic, or even
in need of help, but as purveyors of a message, practices and lifestyle relevant to the problems of
Europe.

If Reverse Mission is Happening, with what Success?

The overflowing of diaspora churches into the native population is not the only way
reverse mission can be conceived, and some other modalities are, in principle, more likely to be
successful. As Catto says, reverse mission does exist in ‘attention-grabbing pockets’. The most
significant motivations behind what we shall style non-diasporic reverse mission seem to be
gratitude for past blessings and the perception of the European situation. A comment by one of
Catto’s interviewees combines these elements. ‘[You Europeans] have the material resources, but
we [Africans] have the faith, and in many ways you exploited us, you ripped us off, but we’re
grateful for the faith... Now we will… give it back to your children and your grandchildren’.26
One modality in which non-diasporic reverse mission happens is through southern
ministers working in traditional northern denominations. An archbishop of York born in Uganda
is the most visible, but his example is multiplied many times over at the congregational level:
Ugandan priests in the Church of Wales; Tanzanian Lutheran clergy in Germany; Brazilian
Presbyterian ministers in the Church of Scotland.
 Another modality is of traditional northern agencies becoming recruiters of southern
missionaries for the northern context. An example is the Church Mission Society, which has
brought Anglicans from Uganda, Pakistan, India and elsewhere to ‘challenge and encourage’
British Christians.27
Sometimes the link is a partnership between a local church in the north and a church or
ecclesiastical institution in the south. One case is the Melanesian Brotherhood, of Anglican
Pacific Islanders who take temporary vows and have made several visits to the English dioceses
of Chester and Exeter.28
In the ‘free church’ world, many cases from the UK are documented by Jeffery and
Johnson. However, it is noteworthy that the only connections with ‘global southern’ countries
where foreigners come to minister to the native population (rather than to ethnic minorities)
involve just two nationalities: Brazilians and Koreans. As for others, the ‘economic imbalance’
and ‘huge disparities in lifestyle... made us very wary’, after bad experiences with a ‘begging’
mentality on the part of prospective ‘partners’.29
The Korean missions movement30 is by far the largest of the ‘new’ movements and is
very global. It also practises reverse mission (in the post-colonial sense) to the former colonial
power Japan. In addition, South Korea would seem well-placed for a bridging role, as a recently-
Christianized country which is also able to fund its missions at ‘Western’ levels. It is largely
unjustified to see the Korean movement as peddling the ideological content of a right-wing
fundamentalist ‘American gospel’31; on the contrary, its message and style are very Korean.
Criticism, both internal and external, has been fierce: unbridled competitiveness, cultural
insensitivity, intense pressure on missionaries to ‘honour’ their sending church by producing
quantifiable results. Korean missions continue to expand, as do the controversies regarding them.
The question is how far excessive ‘Koreanness’ might harm the long-term exportability of its
missionary message. In any country, the early years of missionary-sending are vital for reflecting
on the extent to which the necessary indigenization of the gospel in that particular context has
made it too indigenous to export.
The most successful southern link for the sort of projects we have mentioned seems to be
with Brazil. Links such as those with ‘Go to the Nations’, whose missionaries think of
themselves as ‘the grandchildren coming home to help the grandparents’32, a soft familial phrase
which is a far cry from the triumphalism of much colonial-era missionizing, but which also
contains its own implicit judgement on the European situation.
Brazilians seem to be a favourite option for those British church leaders who, perhaps in
despair at the unproductiveness of other strategies, have embraced the concept of a necessary
boost from an outside source. They talk of ‘combining Brazilian enthusiasm with British
maturity’, and aim to ‘infect UK churches with their passion for relationships, prayer and
worship’. Another aspect is that the Brazilians come ‘from a situation where they’ve seen the
church growing and miracles happening’. But that seems to take second place to the relational
dimension in the British idealizers’ vision. Although they do sometimes recruit individuals, the
strategy is often to bring a number of Brazilians together so they can demonstrate a different
communitarian quality of Christianity. One British leader talks of the Brazilian groups as ‘very
winsome’ and ‘very affirming of people’, and considered their culture ‘a healthy contrast to UK
culture’. Another British pastor ‘brought a chunk of the Brazilian church and let it loose’ in his
church, resulting in young converts. However, as one pastor said, the Brazilians ‘like to travel in
packs’, doubting their ability to integrate into British culture, which could be seen as the flip side
of the relational communitarianism which these pastors value so highly.33
 Other Brazilian modes of south-north mission include placing ministers through
Presbyterian partnerships with fraternal churches in Scotland, Spain and Portugal, as well as the
direct transplant of the denominational model by several pentecostal churches, notably the
Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. The UCKG has remained limited to ethnic minorities
in most of Europe, but has made considerable inroads amongst the native population in Portugal,
aided by linguistic and cultural affinity and perhaps by Portugal’s somewhat precarious
‘Europeanness’. The UCKG has over a hundred churches in Portugal and makes no effort to hide
its Brazilian origin, even proudly admitting to what it calls a ‘reverse “colonisation-
evangelisation”.’34
In Britain, on the other hand, the UCKG deliberately started out amongst Africans and
Afro-Caribbeans. While it intended the black community to be a beach-head and not a prison, it
has been largely unable to go beyond. In the US, the church had a similar experience. As a
perceptive article by one of its pastors put it, ‘up to now, the [UCKG] is the reflection of a
peculiar society... permeated by the belief and fear of the spirits and, consequently, exorcism is
the most frequent practice... We will have to see how [it] adapts to cultures in which people do
not have the same fear of spirits’.35 The UCKG responded by opting for the Hispanics and
forgetting the Anglo-Americans.
Other Brazilian missions groups have found the going tough in Europe, which is not only
expensive but also sceptical. And as one missions leader says, ‘few churches want to invest in a
missionary to Europe. They think “what’s he going to do in the First World, tourism?”.’36
Brazilian missions in Europe are thus a mixed picture. In some ways, Brazilians seem to
be idealized by some European church leaders as being at just the right cultural distance: clearly
different, but not too much. While racially diverse, many are partly or totally of European
descent. They do not provoke too many fears of economic exploitation; in recent years Brazilians
have benefited from membership in the BRIC category, and indeed from being the emerging
global power whose rise is regarded with the most equanimity worldwide. In addition, Brazilian
identity (as ‘a peaceful country which wins the World Cup’) is generally an advantage,
supplemented by the impression of exuding greater ‘human warmth’ than other foreign
missionaries.37 The cultural and national prestige which missionaries carry can, of course, be an
important preparatio evangelica. Brazilian missionaries benefit from the sphere of Brazilian
cultural irradiation which is especially dense in Lusophone countries but goes far beyond
through music and football.
Inasmuch as the capacity of missionaries or immigrant believers to influence the religious
life of the host population depends partly on the latter’s perception of cultural proximity, it is at
least arguable that, if any southern Christians do stand a chance of having an effect on native
Europeans, it is probably the Latin Americans more than the Africans and Asians. Since Brazil
has the second-largest number of practising Protestants in the world (and one of the fastest-
growing), it is highly significant in any inquiry into whether the new Protestantism of the global
South could have a role in ‘re-Christianising’ Europe; or alternatively, whether ‘European
exceptionalism’ will be too difficult even for the most enthusiastic and (in cultural terms)
relatively Western of southern missionaries.
The non-diasporic missions movement undoubtedly has advantages. There is much of
interest in southern missionaries’ critiques of the West, regarding both its spiritual state
(abandoned heritage, cold churches, reliance on wealth and technique) and its social condition
(general coldness, weak family life, treatment of the elderly, a lifestyle that the rest of the world
could not achieve without environmental disaster). Many of them exude a sense of spiritual
power, of having experienced ‘the hand of God’ at work, which leads to an optimism regarding
prospects for the faith. This is fortified by an emphasis on relationality, on a quality of communal
life that has often been lost in the West.
Another advantage of southern missionaries is that they do not carry post-colonial guilt,
and their very lack of geopolitical privilege may be advantageous in certain circumstances. Bonk
tells how the material and social culture of past Western missionaries seemed itself to be
miraculous to many of the peoples evangelized, leaving ‘little need for spectacular displays of
tongues, healings, resurrections and the like’.38 But this model of conspicuous material power
could scarcely be imitated by most of today’s southern missionaries, who have to rely not on ‘the
marvels of sophisticated machines… and incomprehensible wealth’39, but on healing the sick and
exorcising demons. As a Latin American missiologist puts it, ‘there is an element of mystery
when the dynamism of mission does not come from people in positions of power or privilege, or
from the expansive dynamism of a superior civilization, but from below, from the little ones,
those who have few material, financial, or technical resources but who are open to the prompting
of the spirit’.40
On the other hand, southern missions are also riven with problems. One is a very high
rate of attrition (early return home), often linked to financial difficulties. Another problem,
common among those of pentecostal bent who have been highly successful in ministry in their
own countries, is to underestimate the need for training and patient negotiation of learning
curves. After all, if one has the recipe for success and is filled with the Spirit, what more is there
to learn? If the model transplanted from one’s own country does not work abroad, it must be
because the natives are stiffnecked.
Classical Western missionaries usually had a less enspirited worldview than the peoples
they evangelized, whereas today’s southern missionaries (despite considerable variety among
them) often have a more enspirited worldview than Europeans or North Americans, even than
most Christians in those continents. As Jenkins comments, ‘modern optimism means angels
remain quite acceptable to popular belief, whereas giving credence to demons raises doubts
about sanity’. This is reflected in the ‘staggering official and media ignorance of (and prejudice
against) the charismatic Christianity of the global south’. 41 This accentuates the barrier that all
southern Christian attempts to re-evangelize Europe face: that for many people, Christianity is
dangerous, even when brought by non-Europeans. The fact of being a Christian proselytizer may
actually strip a non-white person of the usual protection against criticism afforded by political
correctness.
Catto’s study of reverse missionaries in Britain describes how those who started out with
‘Kenyan expectations’ of numerical success have had to adjust. ‘Success in terms of “bums on
seats” has been relatively rare.’ Reasons given stress the self-sufficiency of the people, the
cultural pattern of extreme privatization of faith, general ‘materialism’, and the intellectual
influence of the Enlightenment. Even the Melanesian Brothers are ‘admired for their lifestyles
and faith, but not emulated’.42 Is that to be the fate of southern missionaries in general?

Ukraine: Exception that Proves the Rule?

It is to a very different part of Europe that we must look for significant cross-cultural
success by southern missionaries. The largest Christian church in the whole of Europe has been
built up in little more than a decade and a half by a Nigerian pastor in Kiev, and this church is
frequented overwhelmingly by native Ukrainians.
 It is true that Ukraine was a relatively fertile environment for proselytizers. The context
was the end of communism, leaving an ideological vacuum, economic collapse and social
confusion; but also the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of Ukrainian nationalism,
leading to a new country located precariously between the eastward expansion of the European
Union and the continued regional influence of Russia. And Orthodoxy in Ukraine was divided. In
fact, Casanova considers Ukraine the most diverse and competitive religious system in Europe,
and indeed the only European country that approximates the American model of religious
denominationalism, since structural conditions in Ukraine at independence in 1991 were similar
to those of the late eighteenth-century United States.43
This was the context for the success of Sunday Adelaja. 44 Having gone to the Soviet
Union to study journalism, Adelaja moved to the newly-independent Ukraine, soon starting a
church which is now popularly known as God’s Embassy. The obstacles for a black evangelist
were, of course, immense: Orthodox priests would tell him to ‘go and play basketball’. But
success in rehabilitation of addicts, plus a growing media presence and eventually a more
socially diverse membership, gave the church considerable visibility. This in turn led to serious
opposition, characterized by Adelaja as a conspiracy by elements within the state and one branch
of the Orthodox Church to have him deported. But by then he also had influential allies,
especially after parliamentarians and businessmen started joining the church, the prize catch
being the mayor of Kiev. In accordance with Adelaja’s vision of a charismatic version of
Niebuhr’s ‘Christ, the transformer of culture’, God’s Embassy has invested heavily in social
ministries, and its members have been substantially involved politically.
Significantly, the church reputed to be the second-largest in Kiev was also founded by an
African who was a former student in the Soviet Union, the Victory Church of the Zimbabwean
Henry Madava. The Ghanaian Church of Pentecost has also done well there, under the leadership
of another former African student from Soviet times; and its predominantly Ukrainian
membership contrasts with that denomination’s failure to attract native Europeans in other parts
of the continent.45
How reproducible is this success in other parts of Europe? Will Ukraine be the pioneer, or
will it remain the exception that proves the rule of African inability to achieve large-scale
breakthroughs? God’s Embassy is the nearest thing yet to ‘reverse mission’, unlike the African
churches in Western Europe that embrace the slogan but without the efficacy. Even so, it might
be objected that true ‘mission in reverse’ would be not to Eastern Europeans who never
colonized or missionized Africa, but to the Western Europeans who did. Ukraine, still thwarted in
its aspiration to join the European Union, relatively poor and engaged in an uncertain process of
nation-building, is a far cry from the major countries of Western Europe.

Adelaja as the ‘exceptional exception’

If Ukraine is exceptional, how repeatable is Adelaja himself? His very lack of experience
in Christian leadership in Nigeria and his independence from Nigerian organizations reduced the
temptation to import methods. His initial status as a student meant he had no pressure to be
immediately successful. All his significant learning experiences as an evangelist and church
leader have taken place in Ukraine, unsaddled by baggage from his homeland. Can someone not
blessed with that trajectory unlearn enough to eventually be cross-culturally effective in a similar
manner?
Adelaja’s example reinforces doubts about the strategy of using the diaspora as a
springboard for mission to the native population. Many groups still ‘bet on the diaspora’ as a
missionary bridge, whereas they are more often trapped by it: by the pressure to service
immigrants’ spiritual and social needs; occasionally by the repercussions of their poor reputation;
and nearly always by the ‘profiling’ of their churches in the eyes of the local population.

What are the Prospects for Reverse Mission?

Reverse mission via diaspora churches is unlikely to work. Non-diasporic reverse mission
is more promising, but even so faces huge obstacles and positive results are still few and far
between (except in Ukraine). Over time, however, some success may be achieved; after all, lack
of early success is typical of most missions efforts anywhere. In any case, disproportionate
attention has been paid to diasporic reverse mission, partly because it is easier to research.
Attention must shift more to non-diasporic modalities.
While many religious movements distant from the Christian tradition, and therefore in a
sense ‘exotic’, gain a few followers in the West but do not succeed in becoming mass
movements, what are the chances for southern Christianity which is, for Europeans, a curious
mix of the exotic and the familiar? It would have to fuse with European traditions and become a
genuinely European product in order to have a chance of becoming a large-scale phenomenon.
The cultural differences would need to be seen by Europeans as theological rediscoveries.
But so far, as Catto stresses, Western culture is taken for granted in these missions efforts;
it is as if no special training is thought necessary to work within it. 46 This contributes to a
persisting ethnocentrism (‘what works in Latin America/Africa/Korea will work in Europe’).
Indeed, the problem of mission as post-colonial compensation is that it discourages efforts to
consciously discard one’s culture in preaching the gospel, since the whole point of ideas of
‘chosenness’ is to restore ethnic/national/cultural pride. To be willing to consciously attempt to
divest oneself of one’s culture requires great cultural self-confidence, in fact an awareness that
one’s cultural prestige is guaranteed anyway and that efforts to divest oneself of it will likely be
admired by others as self-abnegatory.
Meanwhile, many southern missionaries blithely conclude that the problems of European
Christianity are largely due to the European churches themselves, and see their own presence as
God’s plan to change the continent. There is gross underestimation of the difficulties involved,
and an inability to see European Christianity as not so much the problem as the result of having
to survive in a difficult environment. As Casanova says, what makes Europe unique is the
triumph of secularism as teleological theory, a self-fulfilling prophecy resulting in a
‘secularization of demand’ which impedes a truly competitive religious market in Europe.47
Other problems result from organizational characteristics. Southern missionaries
associated with denominations founded in the West have ‘natural’ links with native churches and
hence a bridge to the native population. In theory, that could give them key roles to play in
reverse mission efforts. Yet many of the people studied by Catto could be said not to be doing
‘true’ reverse mission because they are not in control of their own agendas and funding. On the
other hand, overseas-founded denominations (including most Pentecostal ones) do not have such
links and thus often remain ‘ghettoized’. Although in full control of their purses and plans, one
might say that they also are not doing ‘true’ reverse mission because the reality of diaspora
entrapment does not match the rhetoric of reaching the native population.
There are also problems with the Pentecostal nature of many reverse mission efforts.
Northern Protestantism is far less pentecostalized than in most parts of the south, and Europe has
been especially resistant to Pentecostalism. Indeed, it could be argued that, in Europe, the true
postcolonial ‘othering’ happens with Pentecostals; an unwanted and unfriendly exoticizing.
Pentecostals are the true successors to the ‘primitive savage’. Their otherness is not located in
skin colour or ‘native dress’, but is much deeper; it is a worldview and the daring to relate that
worldview to modern life and recommend it to Westerners! That is the true scandal of the
Pentecostals; they are the colonial other who has come to the former metropolis not to beg or
steal or do the menial jobs or humbly learn Western wisdom, but to tell the West that it has lost
its way! The scandal of Pentecostalism is that it is not humble, it represents the ‘other’ who still
thinks he is right and (unlike the intransigent ‘native’ of colonial times) is now armed with a
universalism which thinks its standards apply to all. ‘Reverse mission’ efforts expose their
exponents to an ‘othering’ of the unfriendly, unwanted, unsympathetic, intolerant type.
European attitudes may change, of course, however slowly. As Davie says, European
religious patterns, while globally unique, are not immutable, and in response both to internal and
external stimuli they may gradually shift from religion as obligation to religion as choice.
‘Vicarious religion’ (her characterization of the dominant European pattern which still reflects
the old state-church monopolies) may not last much beyond mid-century. 48 Similarly, Martin
wonders whether the burgeoning denominations of Latin America can take off in Latin Europe:
‘there are new spaces being cleared in which a competitive denominational culture can
flourish’.49
Christian intellectuals, of course, also hope for some sort of ‘return’. For Chesterton,
‘Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and at the end... the same religion has
again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a
new religion... [with] the strength of the original red wine’.50 Since he wrote in the 1920s, the de-
Christianisation of Europe has deepened; maybe inevitably, from his perspective, so that it could
be reborn as a ‘new religion’. And maybe rebirth needs the agency of the global south to bring a
freshness of the ‘original red wine’. For Walls, ‘it will be quite in accord with the previous story
of the Christian faith if the second evangelization of the West... were to be effected by means of
cross-cultural Christian contact’.51 That seems to be the reverse missionaries’ hope: a renewal of
Christianity as a young faith in Europe, provoked or catalyzed or assisted or modelled by various
streams of influence from the Christianity of the global south.
All this, if it ever does happen, may take a long time. In the meantime, how long can the
rhetoric of ‘reverse mission’ last if it produces few results? The concept (regardless of the
practice) is popular with southern Christians because it is a relatively easy and plausible way to
boost the self-image of postcolonial nations and their diasporas (stemming from an
understandable desire to reverse the persisting inequalities in postcolonial geopolitics). And it is
popular with some northern Christians because it offers a hope based on what I would call (on an
analogy with orientalism) a ‘meridionalism’, that is, a romantic perception of the south as the
salvation for the tired West.

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1
By Leo Sherley-Price in his Introduction to Bede’s best-known work (Bede 1968, p. 28).

2
Quoted in Catto 2008, p. 50.

3
Ojo 2007, p. 380.

4
Bastide 1999 [1972], p. 101.

5
Catto 2008.

6
Ojo 2007, p. 380.

7
Adogame 2007.

8
Quoted in Asamoah-Gyadu 2002, p. 32.

9
Quoted in Hanciles 2008, p. 350.

10
Killingray, 2003.

11
Adogame 2008a, p. 300.

12
Robert 2008, p. 123-128.

13
Latourette 1936, p. 198.

14
Gerloff 2000.

15
Währisch-Oblau 2008.

16
Olupona & Gemignani 2007, p. 7-8.

17
Thomas 2004, pp. 14-15.

18
Van der Laan 2006, p. 55.

19
Adogame 2008b, p. 210.

20
Währisch-Oblau 2008.

21
Matthew Ashimolowo, quoted in Jenkins 2007, p. 89.

22
Newsweek 20/12/08; Superinteressante, May 2009, pp. 15-17.

23
http://rccgonlinemessages.blogspot.com/2009/03/its-not-in-package.html

24
Stark 2001, p. 67.

25
Hanciles 2008, pp. 345-6, 372.

26
Quoted in Catto 2008, p. 117.

27
Clark 2000, p. 337.

28
Catto 2008, pp. 155-187.
29
Jeffery and Johnson 2003, pp. 33-4, 72.

30
See Freston and Kim (forthcoming).

31
As do Brouwer et al 1996.

32
Freston 2004.

33
Quotations in the above paragraph are from Jeffery & Johnson 2003, pp. 12-17, and from the author’s own interviews.

34
Freston 2000.

35
In Freston 2000.

36
In Freston 2004.

37
Freston 2008, p. 132.

38
Bonk 2006.

39
Bonk 2006.

40
Escobar 2003, p. 17.

41
Jenkins 2006, p. 184; Jenkins 2007, p. 101.

42
Catto 2008, pp. 136, 247.

43
Casanova 1996

44
The following is summarized from Ojo & Freston (forthcoming).

45
Fancello 2006, pp. 313-317.

46
Catto 2008, p. 121.

47
Casanova 2003.

48
Davie 2002, p. 147.

49
Quoted in Davie 2002, p. 82.

50
Chesterton 1925, pp. 250-259.

51
Walls 1996, p. 261.