As I share my testimony at church conferences like the one this weekend, I think what strikes them the most is that I don’t look like the missionaries we saw growing up. (I have an Asian face!) In fact, the majority of missionaries in the world today don’t look White. At the 2009 Urbana Student Missions Conference, over 25% of the participants were Asian American. There is a changing face of missions today.
Here are 5 reflections that I shared about how the face of missions has changed and is changing in this 21st century:
1. Prominence of the Global South Church. There are more cross-cultural, long-term missionaries being SENT from Asia+Africa+Latin America (and paid for by them) than there are total from Europe + N. America. Besides the U.S., the most come from India, Brazil, and Korea. Philip Jenkins writes, “Over the past century, however, the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward to Africa, Asia, and Latin America… . Christianity should enjoy a worldwide boom in the new century, but the vast majority of believers will be neither white nor European, nor Euro-American.”
2. Growth in ISLAM. Islam is #1 religion in London and Paris. Nearly 1 out of every 4 people is Muslim – Pew Research says 1.57 bil muslims in world – more than 60% in Asia, 20% in Middle East and North Africa (Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh are the top 5 in order).
3. Christian decline in the West / Re-evangelization of the West. Church attendance is in drastic decline: Denmark has less than 5%, Canada 4%, and Australia 2%, who say they attend church at least once per month. Fuller professor Eddie Gibbs writes that “Only 1% of people under 35 years old in England attend church.” The next generation in the U.S. doesn’t fare any better: Gallop Polls and Barna research confirm that between 60-80% of Christians leave their faith sometime between the start of college and 30-years old. And the percentage of people under 35 years old who identify with the Atheist/Non-Religious category is at an all-time high — 33%. This reality certainly reminds me of how important ministries like InterVarsity Christian Fellowship are in focusing on American students today!
4. Acceleration of the BIBLE TRANSLATION and Orality movement. About 340 million people still don’t have the Bible in their own language, with over 2200 languages still needing translation work done. But several organizations working on translation work have committed themselves to see every language community have a translation project started by 2025, and Wycliffe Bible Translators USA launched the Last Languages Campaign to invest in this acceleration. Moreover, oral forms of communicating the translated Scriptures are increasing. Non-Readers are also on the rise, with 50-60% of the world’s population illiterate, leading many in the missions community to call this the largest unreached group – the 4 billion who are illiterate.
5. Justice as an expression of the Church’s mission. There is an increasing understanding of the importance of the “practice of mission” (how our lives are lived out in communities) in addition to the “message of mission”. There is a growing focus on AIDS, Women and Children At-Risk. For instance, at a meeting with World Vision leaders earlier this week, I was reminded of the huge challenge of human trafficking (27 million in modern day slavery, 17,000 into in USA in 2007), which is now the 2nd largest criminal activity in the world after drug trade. AIDS ministry also continues to fare prominently in many parts of the world, esp. in Sub-saharan Africa where 90% of children with AIDS live.
Hope this gives you at least a small taste of the changing face of missions!
