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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

37 Freston 2008, p. 132.

38 Bonk 2006.

39 Bonk 2006.

40 Escobar 2003, p. 17.

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,

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).

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

45 Fancello 2006, pp. 313-317.

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.

46 Catto 2008, p. 121.

47 Casanova 2003.

‘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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