Christianity Moves South and East

In 1900, a map of global Christianity would have appeared heavily weighted toward Europe and populations of European descent in North America and Oceania. Christian communities existed throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, but the largest institutional, financial, academic, and missionary concentrations were strongly associated with Europe and the North Atlantic world.

That map no longer describes Christianity.

The twentieth century produced one of the largest demographic transformations in Christian history. Christian populations expanded dramatically across sub-Saharan Africa, remained numerically enormous in Latin America while undergoing major denominational change, and developed important centers in Asia. Meanwhile, Europe experienced declining Christian affiliation in many societies, and North America saw substantial religious switching away from Christian identification.

The result is often summarized by saying that Christianity has moved “south and east.” The phrase is useful if it does not become a new simplification. Christianity did not literally migrate as one body from Europe to Africa. European Christianity remains substantial. Latin America was already overwhelmingly Christian before the twentieth century. Asian Christianities vary enormously. African growth has been driven by several different demographic and religious processes.

The deeper claim is that Christianity’s demographic center of gravity has changed.

Measuring a Changing Religion

Before telling the story, the data need to be handled carefully.

Pew Research Center’s major 2025 reconstruction of global religious composition estimates that Christians numbered about 2.3 billion in 2020, representing 28.8 percent of the world’s population. Christians remained the largest religious group, but their share of humanity declined from 30.6 percent in 2010 because the Christian population grew more slowly than the world’s population as a whole.¹

The Center for the Study of Global Christianity and World Christian Database use a different research system and broader modeled categories. Their 2026 Status of Global Christianity table estimates approximately 2.674 billion Christians and places 69 percent of the Christian population in the Global South.²

Those figures should not be placed side by side as though one organization must be wrong.

They refer to different observation years.

They define Christian populations through different methodological systems.

They model different variables.

This book therefore uses Pew primarily when discussing comparable global religious affiliation and WCD/CSGC when discussing the World Christianity and mission variables their system is designed to estimate.

The difference itself illustrates a recurring principle: no statistic is stronger than its definition and methodology.

Sub-Saharan Africa Becomes a Major Christian Center. Pew estimates that sub-Saharan Africa contained roughly 697 million Christians in 2020, more than any other world region. Europe, historically the great demographic and institutional center of Christianity, had about 505 million. In 2010 Europe still contained more Christians than sub-Saharan Africa. By 2020 the positions had reversed.³

The speed of this transition is remarkable.

But what exactly produced it?

Part of the answer is missionary history. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic and Protestant missions contributed significantly to Christian expansion across the continent.

That answer is insufficient.

African population growth has been rapid. Christian communities possess younger age structures than many European churches. African evangelists and pastors carried Christian faith through local networks. Independent and African-initiated churches grew. Pentecostal and charismatic movements expanded dramatically. Urban churches multiplied. Older Catholic and Protestant institutions continued developing. Christianity became embedded in families and communities whose own reproduction mattered more numerically over time than continued foreign missionary activity.

To say that “Western missionaries Christianized Africa” therefore assigns long-term demographic growth to the wrong actors.

Foreign missions helped establish and strengthen many churches.

African Christians made African Christianity a vast African reality.

Beyond the Mission Field. This demographic fact should transform missionary imagination.

African Christianity cannot remain a backdrop against which foreign missionaries act.

African theologians teach.

African churches send missionaries.

African denominations operate universities, seminaries, hospitals, media organizations, and relief agencies.

African migrant congregations plant churches in Europe and North America.

African Christians confront missionary questions inside Africa itself: Muslim-Christian relations, traditional religious practices, prosperity theology, urban poverty, migration, theological education, youth discipleship, corruption, ethnic conflict, and secularizing elite cultures.

Africa is simultaneously sending center, theological center, mission field, and collection of many local Christian worlds.

The old category cannot contain it.

Ethiopia and Egypt: Ancient Centers in a New Demographic Story. The demographic shift should also not obscure older African Christianities.

Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox traditions reach back to antiquity. Egypt’s Coptic church represents another ancient Christian world. Their theological and liturgical histories do not begin with the modern missionary movement.

This matters especially when evangelical databases classify particular regional populations according to evangelical percentages. A low evangelical percentage in a historically Orthodox Christian environment does not mean Christianity is absent.

Evangelical strategic categories may still ask legitimate questions about evangelical witness.

They must not erase other churches from the Christian map.

West and Central African Christian Expansion. West and Central Africa include some of the most dynamic Christian societies in the world. Nigeria alone contains enormous Christian and Muslim populations, distributed unevenly across regions and ethnic communities. Ghana has a large Christian majority. The Democratic Republic of the Congo contains one of the world’s largest Christian populations.

Yet numerical Christianity does not eliminate missionary need.

Rapid church growth can coexist with:

• theological undertraining;
• nominal affiliation;
• prosperity teaching;
• political manipulation;
• ethnic conflict;
• large Muslim or traditional-religion populations with limited cross-community access.

The distinction between Christian growth and mature gospel access therefore applies inside Christian-majority African societies as much as elsewhere.

Mission is not finished because a census category becomes Christian.

East African Networks. East Africa presents another set of patterns. Revival movements, Anglican and Catholic histories, Pentecostal expansion, refugee movements, Muslim-Christian contact along the coast and in the Horn, and strong national differences create varied Christian worlds.

The East African Revival, beginning in the twentieth century, demonstrates how Christian renewal can move through African relational networks rather than primarily through foreign missionary direction. Testimony, repentance, fellowship, and lay participation shaped churches across several countries.

The episode matters because it complicates the assumption that the global missionary story flows outward from formal mission agencies. Renewal movements inside receiving churches can themselves become missionary engines.

Latin America: Christian Continuity and Christian Change

Latin America requires a different interpretation.

The region was already overwhelmingly Christian, primarily Catholic, long before the twentieth century. Therefore the rise of Protestant and Pentecostal Christianity does not represent a simple movement from non-Christian to Christian affiliation.

It represents transformation within a predominantly Christian religious landscape.

Pew estimates that Latin America and the Caribbean remained about 84.6 percent Christian in 2020, down from roughly 90 percent in 2010. The region therefore experienced both continued overwhelming Christian identification and substantial decline in Christian share.⁴

Within that overall figure, denominational composition changed. Evangelical, Pentecostal, and independent churches expanded in many countries. Catholic affiliation declined in several societies. Religious nones increased.

The missionary implication is important.

A population can be historically Christian and simultaneously undergo major evangelistic and ecclesial change.

Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. No account of twentieth- and twenty-first-century World Christianity can ignore Pentecostal and charismatic movements.

Their exact global size depends on definitions. World Christian Database’s 2026 model estimates roughly 676 million people within its broad Pentecostal/charismatic category. The category includes a range of denominational and renewal movements that should not be treated as one institution.⁵

Pentecostal forms often proved highly portable because they could develop through:

• lay participation;
• testimony;
• prayer;
• healing expectations;
• flexible congregational structures;
• strong local leadership.

Critics have rightly identified serious problems in some movements, including prosperity teaching, authoritarian leadership, financial exploitation, and weak theological formation.

Those failures do not erase Pentecostalism’s role in Christianity’s global demographic transformation.

Brazil and the Transformation of Missionary Direction. Brazil illustrates several trends at once.

The country remains home to one of the world’s largest Catholic populations while also containing an enormous evangelical and Pentecostal presence. Brazilian churches became missionary senders, not merely destinations for foreign missions.

This produced a new kind of missionary relationship. Brazilian missionaries could enter Portuguese-speaking settings with linguistic advantages unavailable to North Americans or northern Europeans. Brazilian churches also developed mission organizations whose strategies emerged from Latin American ecclesial experience rather than simply copying older Western models.

Yet new senders can reproduce old problems.

Brazilian missionaries carry their own denominational assumptions, class backgrounds, theological cultures, and institutional interests.

Polycentric mission does not automatically equal postcolonial mission.

Asia-Pacific: A Region of Contrasts

Asia-Pacific contains most of humanity and some of Christianity’s most contrasting environments.

Pew estimates that only a minority of the region’s population identifies as Christian, but the aggregate hides radically different societies.

The Philippines has a large Christian majority shaped by centuries of Catholic history and later Protestant and independent movements.

South Korea possesses substantial Protestant and Catholic communities alongside Buddhism and a large unaffiliated population.

India contains ancient Christian traditions, major Catholic and Protestant populations, tribal Christian-majority regions, and enormous Hindu and Muslim populations.

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, also contains large Christian minorities with strong regional concentrations.

China contains a difficult-to-measure Christian population operating across officially registered and unregistered structures.

Japan has a small Christian minority within a society where formal religious affiliation and lived religious practice interact in unusual ways.

A continental Christian percentage tells us almost nothing about the missionary situation in any one of these contexts.

The Philippines. The Philippines shows why “Global South” is itself an analytical rather than theological category.

Spanish colonial Catholicism deeply shaped the archipelago. American rule introduced further Protestant missionary presence and educational institutions. Filipino Christianity later became embedded in a society with powerful local devotional traditions, enormous Catholic institutions, growing evangelical and independent churches, and extensive global migration.

Filipino workers now live across the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and North America.

Christian mobility follows them.

Yet it would be a mistake to treat every Filipino migrant as a missionary. Migration often arises from economic necessity and can involve painful family separation.

The missionary significance lies in possibility rather than automatic identity: Christian migrants can become relational bridges when they intentionally live and speak as Christians within their workplaces and communities.

South Korea: From Mission Field to Mission Sender. South Korea became one of the most dramatic Protestant growth stories of the twentieth century.

Protestant missionaries had entered Korea before Japanese annexation. Korean Christians then experienced colonial rule, national division, war, rapid industrialization, authoritarian government, democratization, and extraordinary economic transformation.

Church growth unfolded within those upheavals. Presbyterian, Methodist, Pentecostal, and other Protestant institutions developed large congregations, seminaries, campus ministries, prayer movements, and mission organizations. Korean churches eventually sent missionaries across the world.

The temptation is to tell this as a linear success narrative:

missionaries came → Korea converted → Korea became a missionary nation.

The reality is more complicated.

Christianity never became the faith of the whole Korean population. Buddhism, traditional practice, and nonaffiliation remained significant. In recent decades Korean Protestant churches have confronted institutional scandals, generational disaffiliation, political polarization, demographic decline, and declining trust among some younger people.

A major missionary-sending society can also become a place requiring renewed mission.

Sending and receiving are no longer opposites.

China: Growth and Measurement Difficulty

China occupies a central place in modern missionary imagination because of its population, twentieth-century political history, and reports of substantial Christian growth under conditions of state regulation.

Reliable national measurement remains difficult.

Registered Protestant churches, Catholic structures, unregistered congregations, underground Catholic communities, house churches, and varying local enforcement complicate attempts to produce one current Christian total. Estimates can differ enormously depending on source and methodology.

The correct response is methodological humility.

The existence of significant Chinese Christian communities is unquestionable.

The exact total is not.

This is a recurring lesson for the entire book: strategic confidence should not depend upon pretending contested measurements are settled.

India: Christianity Inside a Religious Giant. India’s Christian share of the national population is comparatively small, yet its absolute Christian population is large and historically diverse. Kerala contains ancient Christian communities. Northeast India contains states with Christian majorities. Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, independent, tribal, Dalit, and other churches coexist across the country.

At the same time, India contains the world’s largest Hindu population and one of the world’s largest Muslim populations.

Therefore India can be simultaneously:

• an ancient Christian land;
• a modern missionary sender;
• home to Christian-majority regions;
• home to enormous populations with very weak local Christian access.

This is precisely why political-state categories cannot serve as mission’s primary map.

Demographic Growth Is Not the Same as Conversion. The Christian shift south and east is often narrated as missionary success.

Conversion matters.

Demography matters too.

A religious population grows through several mechanisms:

• people enter through conversion;
• children are born into Christian families;
• people leave through religious switching;
• migration changes regional composition;
• mortality and age structure differ.

Pew’s 2010–2020 reconstruction is instructive. The number of Christians worldwide increased by roughly 122 million while Christianity’s share of the global population fell by 1.8 percentage points because non-Christian populations grew faster.⁶

A rise in Christian numbers therefore cannot automatically be treated as an evangelistic performance measure.

Likewise, decline in Christian percentage does not necessarily mean that more Christians left than joined. Demographic structure can matter greatly.

Missionary claims should distinguish these mechanisms.

Christian Affiliation Is Not Christian Maturity. The demographic story also raises an ecclesiological problem.

If a society becomes majority Christian, what has mission accomplished?

A census can record affiliation.

It cannot easily measure:

• depth of discipleship;
• theological understanding;
• church health;
• integrity of leadership;
• frequency of worship;
• capacity for cross-cultural witness.

A nation can be overwhelmingly Christian on paper and contain churches shaped by corruption, ethnic nationalism, nominalism, or theological confusion.

This does not make affiliation meaningless. It makes it insufficient.

Part V’s constructive horizon—mature, locally rooted, reproducing churches—therefore remains necessary even in places where Christianity is numerically strong.

The “Global South” as a Useful but Blunt Category

The phrase Global South helps describe the demographic shift away from Europe and North America.

It can also conceal enormous difference.

Brazil and Ethiopia do not occupy the same ecclesial world.

South Korea and Nigeria do not share one missionary culture.

India and the Philippines do not have the same relationship to Christianity.

The category is therefore useful at the level of global demographic transformation and dangerous when turned into a cultural explanation.

This book will use it sparingly.

The End of a Civilizational Monopoly. The deepest significance of Christianity’s demographic transformation is not that the “South” has replaced the “West.”

It is that no region can plausibly claim to be Christianity’s natural civilizational center.

Europe contributed enormously to Christian theology, institutions, mission, scholarship, and culture. North American churches became major missionary and financial actors. Those contributions remain real.

They do not make Western Christianity the default form against which all other Christianities are measured.

The contemporary church is demographically plural.

Its missionary leadership should increasingly become plural as well.

Demography Changes Mission

When churches grow, missionary traffic changes.

African churches send missionaries to other African societies and beyond.

Latin American churches send missionaries to Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Korean missions operate globally.

Filipino migrants form Christian communities across the world.

Indian Christian workers cross enormous internal cultural boundaries.

The modern missionary movement is therefore becoming increasingly polycentric.

That word can sound celebratory.

The next chapter will show why it should first be descriptive.

Several centers now send.

They do not possess equal power.

They do not avoid old missionary failures automatically.

And the diversification of senders does not by itself explain why so many populations still possess weak gospel access.

Footnotes

1. Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (June 9, 2025), based on more than 2,700 censuses, surveys, registers, and related sources across 201 countries and territories. ↩

2. Center for the Study of Global Christianity / World Christian Database, Status of Global Christianity, 2026, in the Context of 1900–2075 (2026). ↩

3. Pew Research Center, “Christian Population Change,” June 9, 2025. Pew estimated about 697.4 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa and 505 million in Europe in 2020. ↩

4. Pew Research Center, Global Religious Landscape, regional table for Latin America and the Caribbean. ↩

5. World Christian Database, Status of Global Christianity 2026. ↩

6. Pew Research Center, “Factors Driving Religious Change, 2010–2020,” and “Christian Population Change,” June 9, 2025. ↩