Irony of fate: missionaries are still going to Africa, but for African Christian leaders, it is the West that needs help. Two years ago, Nigerian pastor Jerry Eze arrived in London to lead a prayer conference at Twickenham, the world's largest rugby stadium, and the 82,000-seat arena was soon packed - not with rugby fans or concertgoers, but with thousands who came to pray with an African preacher.
To Eze, what happened at Twickenham showed how Christianity is changing around the world: for generations, Christian mission flowed primarily from Europe and North America to Africa - missionaries often arriving alongside European militaries, closely linking mission with colonial rule in the minds of many Africans. The United States remains the world's largest missionary-sending country by far, according to the World Christian Database - but now the traffic is two-way: a new generation of African Christians is spreading the gospel in the opposite direction.
"When I was growing up, the common picture of a missionary was a Westerner coming to Africa," Tshepang Basupi, Southern Africa director of Africa Inland Mission, told CNN. "Today, we have Africans going to other parts of Africa, to Asia, to Europe and to North America." Many are finding their style of preaching highly popular among the African diaspora, satisfying a hunger for a different kind of Christianity - rather than bringing a new religion, they bring a new style of religion to places they see as having lost the fervor they see at home.
Eze describes himself as "a missionary to the West": "For us here in Africa, it is the fervency and the zeal with which we do it... the fire is leaving the West." A 2024 Lausanne Movement report found missionary activity now much more global, with Nigeria alone sending an estimated 20,000 missionaries abroad in 2020; CAPRO, a Nigerian mission group, says it has over 800 missionaries from more than 27 countries working in 46 nations.
Some African Christians also see it as restoring Christian values they believe the West has moved away from - but Malawian theologian Harvey Kwiyani is skeptical, saying the West has for the most part "moved on from Christianity" and that the increasing movement of African Christians into the West, sometimes described as "reverse mission," assumes mission belongs to the West - Basupi rejects this: "Mission is not for the West only; it is for every believer."
The decline is visible: Pew found 67% of Europeans identified as Christian in 2020 versus 75% in 2010; in sub-Saharan Africa, the number of Christians grew 31% between 2010 and 2020, reaching 697 million - now home to the world's largest Christian population. Eze believes "the baton of revival is in Africa right now."
