Heralds from the south

At Samuel Vitalino’s church in Orlando, Fla., services are often packed to overflowing. Every week, about 70 new ­visitors file into the pews, and Vitalino estimates the church adds four or five new families every month.

Vitalino is a Brazilian pastor who planted Esperança Bible Presbyterian Church in 2021 to serve fellow immigrants. Services are in Portuguese, and most of Vitalino’s congregants are Brazilian.

But, here and there in the crowd, a handful of people sit wearing earbuds and bending over their phones—listening as the church’s team of interpreters translate the sermon into English. Vitalino estimates about a dozen of his 550 church members are English-speaking Americans, and the church adds a new American member every three months or so.

“They’re not coming because of the language,” Vitalino said. They’re coming because they see something different in his church. He calls it the “vibe” of the Global South—a broad region primarily comprising Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Christians there are often more connected with each other and more openly passionate about their faith.

Vitalino isn’t just imagining the difference. Christianity is on the rise in the Global South—a demographic earthquake becoming one of the greatest religious shake-ups since Christianity transformed the Roman Empire in the fourth century.

For the last five centuries, the story of Christianity seemed nearly synonymous with the history of Europe and her colonies. By 1900, over 80% of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America, according to researcher Philip Jenkins. As a result, scholars viewed Christian missions as a stream flowing “from the West to the rest.”

But that dynamic has shifted in little more than the span of a lifetime. Today, over 67% of all Christians live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, while many of those on other continents have roots in the Global South.

Now, some of those believers, like Vitalino, are reaching back to the West as churches here hemorrhage congregants and many young people reject organized religion as outmoded, colonial, and oppressive. Many of these Christians come first to work or study—but they are making disciples as they go, seeking to breathe life back into Western Christianity, and calling the church back to Biblical faithfulness.

IN 2015, Samuel Vitalino arrived in Greenville, S.C., to study at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He planned to earn his master’s degree and then return home better equipped to serve the church in Brazil.

But during his time in seminary, Vitalino had a front-row seat to the sorry state of the Western church. “I saw the decline,” he said. “I saw the need.”

So, the next year, he said yes when a pastor in Lakeland, Fla., asked for his help to revive his dying church.

Vitalino met with resistance right away. For one thing, he spoke English with a heavy Brazilian accent. And the church he started serving was very traditional. People there didn’t like the idea of change.

Vitalino compares pastoring there to trying to turn a cruise ship from its charted course. Whenever he suggested new ideas, church members shut him down. But Vitalino pleaded with them to stop and look around. “Your sons and daughters—they’re not here,” he told them. “You have to open your eyes.”

Eventually, the church gave him permission to try something new: a weekend event kicking off with a four-hour Friday service, followed by a Saturday barbecue, and a Sunday guest speaker.

The whole idea flew directly in the face of American notions of speed and efficiency. Church leaders told Vitalino it would never work. It was hard enough to get people to come for a one-hour Sunday service, let alone an entire weekend of activities.

But Vitalino forged ahead. And much to the surprise of church leaders, people did come. In fact, the event was such a success Vitalino heard people complaining afterward because they didn’t want it to end.

Eventually, the head pastor retired and the church brought in a new pastor, also a Brazilian. His arrival marked a new era for the church. The new head pastor had a wife and five kids, and their presence helped attract more young families and teens.

The church’s demographic makeup also started to shift. “It was a white church,” Vitalino said. “It’s not a white church anymore. You have people from different nations there.”

In October 2021, Vitalino left to plant Esperança Bible Presbyterian Church. His church has since planted five other churches across Florida and Georgia. Altogether, membership at these campuses tops 800 people.

Vitalino said the Brazilian church owes a lot to the generosity and tenacity of American missionaries. But the American church also has a lot to learn from believers in the countries they helped reach with the gospel 150 years ago. “We’re coming back to say, ‘Hey, let’s do church different,’” Vitalino said. “Let’s hold on to the truth.”

THE UNITED STATES remains far and away the top sender of missionaries—launching about 135,000 mission workers in 2023. But it’s also the top receiver of missionaries: welcoming about 38,000 the same year. Other top missionary sending countries include Brazil, South Korea, the Philippines, and Nigeria.

Although some scholars have referred to the movement of Global South ministers to the West as “reverse missions,” World Christian Database editor Gina Zurlo said that isn’t the best expression because it makes it seem like missions is something reserved for the West.

“Why is the thing that the majority of Christians do the backwards thing—reverse?” she asked. Instead, many missiologists have embraced the term “polycentric missions” to describe the exchange of Christian workers and ideas from everywhere to everywhere.

A.J. Moreira’s ministry is pretty much the definition of polycentric. Moreira is a Brazilian serving international students in the Washington, D.C., area.

Decades ago, his grandmother came to faith through the work of American missionaries. Now, Moreira and his wife live in the United States and host a weekly dinner and Bible study for students from as far away as Saudi Arabia, China, Ghana, and Bangladesh.

Once, Moreira invited a student from Afghanistan over to his house. “We had a cross hanging on our wall,” Moreira recalled. “And he asked me, ‘Hey, what is that?’”

The student had never seen a cross before.

Moreira was able to share the gospel with the student that evening. He views this work as planting seeds and trusts the Holy Spirit to bring new life in students’ hearts, even when he doesn’t get to see it come to fruition.

And he hopes students who do come to know the Lord will take what they have learned and put their faith into practice back in their home countries.

In fact, Gina Zurlo said international students and other migrants are primarily responsible for the geographic spread of Christianity today. “There are a tremendous amount of people on the move today,” Zurlo said. “And a lot of them are Christians.” Among an estimated 280 million people living outside their home countries, nearly half claim Christianity, according to the Pew Research Center.

As a result, Zurlo said, much of the South to West missions trend is actually unfolding on the heels of migration. Many of the people researchers count as missionaries are actually bi-­vocational pastors who come to the United States and Europe to study theology and serve their own diaspora communities.

Other Global South Christians come to the West primarily for economic reasons—but they end up forming churches and sharing the gospel along the way. These immigrants aren’t included in official missionary tallies, but Pepperdine sociology professor Rebecca Y. Kim argued many of them nevertheless view themselves as “everyday missionaries.”

“They’re evangelizing to their neighbors,” Kim said. “And as they do that, they are also kind of reviving the United States in terms of Christian faith.”

NEHEMIAH CHIGOJI first came to the United States to continue his soccer career. At that point, the 22-year-old from Nigeria had already played for several football clubs across Europe.

Chigoji grew up in a vibrant church. And he learned from a young age there are “no benchwarmers” in the Christian life. But he had no plans to enter formal ministry in the United States.

Mostly, Chigoji just wanted to build a better life for himself and his family. He had grown up extremely poor and athletics was his ticket out. “I didn’t want to live in those rural areas and become a farmer and die early,” he said.

But, in the United States, Chigoji started attending a Mennonite church near Los Angeles. The pastor there, Neville Peterson, took the young man under his wing and brought him on as the youth pastor. Later, when he decided to retire, Peterson asked Chigoji to consider taking his place.

“Out of my trust and respect for him,” Chigoji said, “I took the job.”

Right away, Chigoji met with pushback. The church he started leading was a historic congregation originally founded by Russian and German immigrants in 1903. “These were hardcore, stubborn Mennonite businessmen and farmers,” Chigoji said. “Nobody told them what to do,” he added.

Even though the surrounding area had seen an influx of Asian and Hispanic immigrants, the congregation was made up entirely of elderly white Americans.

Chigoji said it was a big culture shock for people when “a Nigerian kid from Jos” took over as their pastor.

Chigoji wanted to change things up and start reaching out to the local community. That included switching to a more contemporary worship style. Up to that point, the church had only ever used a pipe organ.

But many of the congregants didn’t like that idea. And some were outright hostile. “I almost got beat up by one of the older ones,” he said. The elderly church member was upset because Chigoji bought some drums for worship.

At one church meeting, Chigoji said, people stared him down and accused him of trying to kill the church.

But Chigoji said that’s exactly the opposite of what he wants to do. He wants to challenge American Christians so they can grow. In the United States, Chigoji sees a widespread problem he labels “spiritual obesity.” People are so financially and socially comfortable they don’t feel their need for God.

Nigerian Christians don’t have that luxury, Chigoji said. In his home country, jihadist military groups like Boko Haram burn churches and kill Christians. And beyond the threat of violence, millions of people battle the daily struggle of living in grinding poverty.

Still, ministering in the United States has put Chigoji’s faith to the test in plenty of other ways. During the COVID-19 pandemic, his church lost nearly half its already small congregation. Attendance dropped from about 70 to about 30, and the church still hasn’t recovered.

Chigoji said that’s been extremely discouraging. But he’s determined not to give up and is praying for revival.

In the meantime, Chigoji has seen a few signs of hope. When he first arrived, the youngest person at the church was 56 years old. But now, a few younger faces have joined the pews.

“It’s weird that a Nigerian pastor has started attracting Indonesians and Hispanics,” Chigoji said. But in some ways, it makes sense because those are the people left behind as more and more white people move away to wealthier areas.

Chigoji sees them as the future of his church. And even though his congregation is small, he imagines it as a glimpse of what heaven will be like. “There will be no Nigerian section, and there will be no American section,” he said. “There will be no black section or white section. We’re all going to be children of God.”

ONE OF THE BIGGEST IRONIES about the demographic shift of Christianity is that while young people in the West reject it as colonial and oppressive, people in formerly colonized areas of the world are embracing Jesus as the source of freedom, justice, and joy.

In fact, researcher Philip Jenkins said most Global South Christians would be very surprised if Westerners raised the subject of imperialism with them. By now, he said, many of them have fully embraced languages like French and English as their own and view colonialism as something from their grandparents’ time.

But Jenkins said there’s one major exception to that general rule: Western churches trying to introduce their own progressive views of moral and sexual issues to the Global South. When that happens, Jenkins said, many people will point to that and say, “No, no—that’s imperialism.”

Uchenna Anyanwu is an associate director with the missions organization Frontier Fellowship. Anyanwu is originally from Nigeria, and before he came to the United States, he spent a decade serving as a missionary to North Africa.

Anyanwu said many African Christians like him feel indebted to Western missionaries for translating the Bible into their languages. But now they feel their spiritual descendants aren’t living out the teachings of Scripture.

“Our Western brothers who brought this message to us are now telling us a different story,” Anyanwu said. “We say, ‘No, let’s go back to the text.’”

Justin Schell works with church leaders from all over the world through the Lausanne Movement. He said Global South churches offer a powerful witness to the moral decay of Western churches when it comes to issues of abortion, same-sex marriage, and the ordination of LGBTQ clergy.

For example, when the United Methodist Church voted to remove its long-standing condemnation of homosexuality in 2024, Schell said, delegates from Africa and Asia were some of the most outspoken in resistance to the change.

“They stood up in that assembly, walked to the microphone, and begged the Western people there to repent,” he said. “They were the faithful ones.”

Jenkins cautions people against viewing Global South churches primarily through the lens of Western conservative-­liberal dichotomies, since Global South Christianity is a vast and diverse phenomenon of its own and doesn’t directly map onto Western political divides. African Christians, for example, might pair conservative views on marriage with more progressive views on economics.

Instead of Western Christianity defining the Global South, churches there are establishing themselves in their own right. Global South Christians now far outnumber their Western brothers and sisters, something World Christian Database’s Gina Zurlo refers to as the “people power.” And while Western churches still command more money and influence, Zurlo said, the balance of power is starting to shift.

Jenkins notes Global South–influenced churches are playing an outsized role in the pockets of revival blossoming across the United Kingdom. Several of Britain’s largest congregations have African pastors and a handful of Church of England churches have evolved into “more or less evangelical megachurches with a very charismatic tone.”

Jenkins said a dive into the history of these congregations usually turns up at least one Brit who spent some time working in Chile or Central Africa and brought home a fresh perspective on Christianity, something Jenkins refers to as “the empire striking back.”

Across France and Belgium, there are also a handful of large churches with African pastors, Jenkins said. But while some of these congregations also try to reach out to Europeans, many of them primarily minister to African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants.

Frontier Fellowship’s Anyanwu hopes more of these immigrant congregations will expand their missionary horizons beyond just their own diaspora communities—in both Europe and America. “These churches need to open their eyes to see that it was not only for that purpose that the God of missions brought them to where they are,” he said.

He urges Global South Christians to seize the moment to carry the gospel across ethnic lines. “Many white Americans who come from formerly Christian backgrounds have abandoned the faith,” Anyanwu said. “They are no longer walking with Jesus.”

And that, he added, makes them a mission field.