From “The West to the Rest” to “Everywhere to Everywhere”

Missionary language changes more slowly than missionary reality.

For much of the modern missionary movement, one map dominated Christian imagination. Europe and later North America supplied missionaries, money, theological education, printing, and institutional expertise. Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific appeared on the receiving side as mission fields.

The map described real concentrations of power. It never described all Christian movement. By the late twentieth century it had become unmistakably inadequate.

Mission now moves in several directions at once.

The phrase from everywhere to everywhere captures something real. It should not become another slogan that hides measurement problems or unequal power. A more careful concept is polycentric mission: Christian mission increasingly emerges from several geographic, ecclesial, and cultural centers rather than one dominant North Atlantic source.

Polycentric describes direction.

It does not guarantee equality, maturity, or faithfulness.

South Korea as a New Sending Center

South Korea became one of the most visible symbols of this missionary shift.

The latest completed survey available for this book is the 2024 Korean Protestant mission survey conducted by the Korea World Missions Association and Korea Research Institute for Mission. After its deduplication process and according to its stated operational criteria, the survey counted 21,621 Korean long-term missionaries. It also counted 516 short-term missionaries in its one-to-two-year category and 986 non-Korean missionaries sent through Korean organizations.¹

The figures are significant, but wording matters.

This is not a governmental census of every Korean Christian who might be described as a missionary. It is an institutional survey with definitions, participating organizations, and research procedures. The proper claim is therefore:

KWMA and KRIM counted 21,621 long-term Korean Protestant missionaries in their 2024 survey.

Not:

Korea currently has exactly 21,621 missionaries.

The distinction exemplifies the statistical discipline this book applies throughout.

Why Korea Matters Beyond the Number. The Korean story is historically striking because Korea itself received sustained Catholic and Protestant missionary attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Protestant missionaries helped establish schools, hospitals, churches, seminaries, translation work, and institutions. Korean Christians then developed indigenous revival movements, megachurches, campus ministries, prayer movements, denominations, and missionary societies.

By the late twentieth century Korean missionaries were serving throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the former Soviet world.

The change disrupts the old directional map.

The mission field became a missionary sender.

But the theological lesson should not be that Korea has taken the West’s place at the head of global mission.

Korean missions have themselves had to wrestle with issues including:

• cultural export;
• hierarchical leadership;
• denominational competition;
• preparation for difficult contexts;
• security;
• missionary care;
• relationships with local churches.

A new nationality does not abolish missionary sin.

The lesson is polycentricity, not replacement.

Latin America and COMIBAM. Latin American evangelical mission provides another major example.

For much of modern Protestant history, Latin America appeared in North Atlantic missionary literature principally as a field: Catholic in heritage, Protestant-minority in many settings, economically less powerful, and heavily influenced by foreign mission societies.

By the late twentieth century Latin American churches were increasingly articulating mission from their own theological and institutional perspectives.

COMIBAM—Cooperación Misionera Iberoamericana—became one important regional network. Its contemporary reporting around the 2025 congress continued to cite more than 34,000 Ibero-American missionaries serving worldwide.²

Again, this is movement-internal research rather than a globally audited independent census. The correct wording is “COMIBAM reports.”

The strategic significance does not depend on turning the figure into a ranking table. Tens of thousands of missionaries from Latin American and Iberian contexts represent a substantial missionary movement that older West-to-rest maps cannot explain.

Latin American Missionary Theology. The change is not merely personnel.

Latin American evangelical thinkers such as Samuel Escobar and René Padilla challenged missionary frameworks developed in the North Atlantic world. Integral mission debates insisted that evangelism and social responsibility could not be treated as unrelated Christian concerns. Latin American mission reflection also emerged from contexts marked by poverty, political repression, Catholic heritage, Pentecostal growth, and dependence on foreign mission structures.

Mission therefore began to move outward together with theological critique.

The former “recipient” could now ask whether the sending system itself needed correction.

That is one hallmark of genuine polycentric Christianity: authority to interpret mission moves as well as missionary bodies.

Brazil as Sender. Brazil became especially important within Latin American Protestant sending.

Its large evangelical population, denominational diversity, Pentecostal strength, linguistic identity, and mission organizations produced workers serving across several continents. Portuguese gives Brazilian missionaries particular relational and linguistic advantages in parts of Africa and Europe.

Yet Brazilian mission also demonstrates why regional solidarity should not be romanticized. A Brazilian missionary in Mozambique is still an outsider. Shared Portuguese language does not erase differences in race, class, colonial history, local languages, or ecclesial culture.

Missionary distance is more complex than North versus South.

African Missionary Sending

African Christianity is now too large and diverse for any single missionary statistic to describe adequately.

Sending occurs through:

• historic denominations;
• Pentecostal churches;
• independent churches;
• African-initiated movements;
• mission agencies;
• student networks;
• migrant congregations.

Some of the movement is deliberate cross-cultural missionary deployment.

Some emerges through migration.

Some occurs within national borders across major linguistic and religious boundaries.

The absence of one standardized global African missionary census should not lead to the opposite error of treating African mission as anecdotal.

The evidence is visible institutionally and geographically. African missionaries serve elsewhere in Africa, Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia. African-led congregations have become a feature of cities such as London, Amsterdam, Berlin, and other European centers.

“Reverse Mission”. The phrase reverse mission is often used for African, Asian, or Latin American Christians evangelizing the former Western sending world.

The phrase is rhetorically attractive. It can also reproduce the old map by assuming that the original direction was somehow normal and the new direction is its reversal.

Mission from Lagos to London is not inherently reverse.

It is mission.

The term also risks overstating missionary intent. An African church in London may primarily serve Nigerian, Ghanaian, or other diaspora Christians rather than actively evangelizing secular British populations.

Diaspora churches can become missionary bridges.

They should not be labeled missionary merely because they exist in Europe.

Migration and Mission

Jehu Hanciles has emphasized migration as one of the great historical forces shaping global Christianity. Christians move for reasons that include:

• labor;
• education;
• war;
• family;
• political displacement;
• economic opportunity.

Faith travels with them.³

This creates a missionary reality different from classical agency deployment.

A nurse moves to the Gulf for work and lives as a Christian among colleagues.

A Nigerian family moves to Germany and joins or forms a congregation.

A Chinese student becomes Christian while studying abroad and returns home.

A Persian-speaking church forms among refugees in Europe.

None of these pathways fits neatly into the old missionary-society model.

Yet none should be romanticized. Migrants are not missionary assets owned by the church. Their movement often involves exploitation, loneliness, or vulnerability. Missionary significance emerges through intentional Christian life and relationships, not from mobility itself.

Filipino Christian Mobility. The Philippines is particularly important because of its enormous overseas labor diaspora and Christian-majority population.

Filipino workers live across the Middle East, East Asia, Europe, North America, and maritime industries. Catholic and evangelical Christians among them can create Christian presence in places where formal foreign missionary activity is constrained.

Some churches and mission thinkers have therefore described Filipino labor migration as strategic missionary opportunity.

The opportunity is real.

The framing needs ethical discipline.

A domestic worker separated from children for economic reasons should not have her suffering redescribed primarily as missionary deployment. A seafarer can be a faithful Christian witness without being instrumentalized by a strategy document.

Mission through migration begins with the migrant as a person and Christian disciple, not as a resource.

India: Mission Without Crossing a Border. The old map also equated missionary sending with international travel.

India demonstrates why that is insufficient.

A Christian worker moving from one Indian state to another may cross:

• language;
• caste;
• ethnicity;
• religion;
• social customs;
• political context.

The cultural distance can exceed that faced by an American moving to another English-speaking Western country.

Cross-cultural mission is therefore better defined through meaningful boundary crossing than passport movement.

This matters statistically because international missionary counts systematically underrepresent large forms of internal mission.

China: Between Aspiration and Verified Sending. Chinese missionary aspiration has attracted substantial global evangelical attention.

Particular movements have used imagery of carrying the gospel “back to Jerusalem” across Central Asia and the Muslim-majority world. Testimonies describe Chinese Christians sensing responsibility for mission beyond China.

The difficulty is national measurement.

China’s religious environment, unregistered church networks, state regulation, and security conditions make comprehensive missionary counts exceptionally difficult.

Therefore spectacular claims that China is about to send, or already has sent, hundreds of thousands of missionaries should be treated cautiously unless the underlying methodology can be reconstructed.

This is not skepticism toward Chinese missionary vocation.

It is statistical honesty.

The future missionary contribution of Chinese churches may be enormous.

Aspiration is not deployment data.

Middle Eastern Christians as Missionary Agents. Polycentric mission must also restore agency to Christian communities in regions habitually described only as fields.

Middle Eastern Christians are frequently discussed through persecution, minority status, migration, or Western intervention. Those are real issues. They can turn ancient churches into passive objects in the missionary imagination.

In reality, Arab, Armenian, Assyrian, Coptic, Maronite, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and other Middle Eastern Christians have long acted as:

• pastors;
• theologians;
• educators;
• writers;
• institutional leaders;
• neighbors;
• evangelists.

Their knowledge of Arabic and other regional languages, Islamic societies, political histories, family systems, and Christian minority life cannot be reproduced quickly by incoming outsiders.

Responsible foreign mission should therefore begin by asking who is already present.

Polycentricity and Theological Authority

Missionary sending can become geographically diverse while theological authority remains concentrated.

A Kenyan missionary may serve in Europe but rely almost exclusively on textbooks from the United States.

A Brazilian mission agency may send workers while fundraising models still imitate North American institutions.

An Asian seminary may teach largely from translated Western curricula.

This is not inherently wrong. Excellent theology should travel.

The issue is one-directional dependence.

A genuinely polycentric church should increasingly allow theology to travel in several directions as well.

African theologians should shape European churches.

Asian biblical scholarship should influence American seminaries.

Middle Eastern Christians should contribute to Christian-Muslim theology globally.

Latin American mission theology should challenge assumptions in older sending centers.

Polycentric mission therefore concerns knowledge as well as workers.

Money Still Has Geography. Sending is multidirectional.

Wealth remains highly uneven.

North American, European, South Korean, and some other churches and agencies possess financial resources far beyond those available to many African, Asian, and Latin American partners. A partnership can therefore be geographically polycentric while financially hierarchical.

The distinction matters because money creates decision power even where nobody intends it.

Who pays missionary salaries?

Who owns property?

Who can fund graduate education?

Who controls international travel?

Who possesses visa privilege?

Who hosts global conferences?

Changing the nationality of missionaries does not answer these questions.

Chapter 27 will return to them through the problem of partnership governance.

Power Can Move South Too

The critique should also avoid a new binary in which Western missionaries possess power and Majority World missionaries represent authentic local Christianity.

A Korean missionary can dominate a Southeast Asian church.

A wealthy Nigerian megachurch can exercise power over a poorer regional partner.

A Brazilian organization can export its worship culture aggressively.

An urban national missionary can treat a rural minority paternalistically inside the same country.

The moral category is not Westernness.

It is power.

Polycentric mission multiplies actors.

It does not remove the need for accountability.

The End of the Mission Field. What, then, should become of the phrase mission field?

It remains useful in particular contexts. A worker can speak of “my field” simply to describe an area of service.

As a global classification of countries, however, the phrase is increasingly unhelpful.

Nigeria sends missionaries and contains major unreached Muslim populations.

Germany has a Christian history and receives missionaries.

South Korea sends thousands of workers and faces substantial disaffiliation.

India has ancient churches, major sending networks, Christian-majority regions, and enormous low-access populations.

The United States sends missionaries and contains immigrant communities with weak Christian relational access.

No country belongs permanently on one side of the missionary relationship.

Everywhere to Everywhere—With Qualifications. The phrase everywhere to everywhere therefore works best as a correction to monopoly, not as a claim that missionary flows are equally distributed.

Not everywhere sends at the same scale.

Not everywhere has the same resources.

Not every migrant is a missionary.

Not every church receiving foreign workers lacks local Christian witness.

The contemporary reality is a web rather than a line.

Mission moves:

south to north;

south to south;

north to south;

east to west;

within countries;

through migration;

through digital networks.

The church has become increasingly polycentric.⁴

The Paradox That Drives the Rest of the Book

This transformation creates the central empirical paradox of The Unfinished Mission.

Christianity is geographically widespread.

Its demographic center is no longer Western.

Missionaries come from many regions.

Scripture has been translated into thousands of languages.

Digital technology allows Christian information to cross borders instantly.

And still meaningful Christian access is profoundly unequal.

The problem therefore cannot be explained simply by saying:

the Western church has not sent enough missionaries.

Western missionary allocation may still deserve criticism.

So may Korean, African, Latin American, and other mission systems.

But the diagnostic frame must now become global.

The next Part moves from history to mapping.

We will ask what unreached actually means, where the deepest access gaps appear, and why religious labels alone cannot explain them.

Footnotes

1. Korea World Missions Association and Korea Research Institute for Mission, 2024 Korean Mission Status Report (published 2025). The survey counted 21,621 long-term Korean Protestant missionaries under its operational criteria and documented additional short-term and non-Korean workers associated with Korean mission organizations. ↩

2. COMIBAM, research reporting around its 2025 congress and its recent annual reporting, citing more than 34,000 Ibero-American missionaries serving worldwide. Because this is movement-internal research, all manuscript use retains attribution. ↩

3. Jehu J. Hanciles, Migration and the Making of Global Christianity (Eerdmans, 2021); Samuel Escobar, The New Global Mission. ↩

4. On polycentric mission and the transition beyond West-to-rest frameworks, see World Christianity scholarship by Hanciles, Escobar, Walls, Robert, and contemporary Majority World mission researchers. ↩