African Christians reverse colonial missionary flow, bringing 'fervent faith' to the West

Two years ago, Nigerian pastor Jerry Eze stood in the wings at Twickenham Stadium in London, looking out at 82,000 empty seats and wondering if he had made a terrible miscalculation. The vast rugby arena stretched before him, row after row of silence. Then the doors opened. Worshippers began filing in—not in dozens or hundreds, but in thousands—until the stadium was full. When Eze took the stage that night to lead a prayer conference, he felt the weight of what was happening: an African preacher commanding one of the world's largest venues, drawing a crowd that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier.

What Eze witnessed at Twickenham was not an anomaly but a reversal of centuries of religious geography. For generations, Christian missionaries flowed in one direction: from Europe and North America into Africa, often arriving alongside colonial armies and becoming entangled in the machinery of empire. That pattern shaped how millions of Africans understood Christianity itself—as something foreign, something imposed. The United States remains the world's largest sender of missionaries today, and American missionary work in Africa continues; just last year, Kevin Rideout was released after nine months in captivity in Niger, where he worked with SIM International, an organization that has operated there for over a century.

But the current is shifting. A new generation of African Christians is moving in the opposite direction, bringing their faith to Europe and North America with a confidence and fervor that is drawing crowds and reshaping what Christian mission looks like. In 2008, roughly 18,400 African missionaries were working abroad. By 2020, Nigeria alone had sent an estimated 20,000 missionaries overseas. CAPRO, a Nigerian mission organization, now deploys more than 800 missionaries from 27 countries across 46 nations, including Canada, where teams work among indigenous communities. The numbers tell a story of momentum: Christianity is surging in Africa—the continent added 697 million Christians between 2010 and 2020, a 31 percent increase—while it is contracting in the West. In Europe, the share of Christians fell from 75 percent in 2010 to 67 percent in 2020. In North America, it dropped from 77 percent to 63 percent over the same decade. In the United States, only 62 percent of adults identified as Christian in 2023-24, while 29 percent claimed no religious affiliation.

African missionaries argue they are filling a spiritual void. Eze describes himself as "a missionary to the West" and says African Christianity offers something the West has lost: what he calls "fervency and zeal," a passion rooted in African practice and culture. "The fire is leaving the West," he said. Other African pastors echo this diagnosis. William Kumuyi, whose Global Crusades have taken him across continents, speaks of African Christianity as characterized by "unreserved faith, fervent prayer, and reliance on God's supernatural intervention"—qualities he believes Western societies desperately need. Harvey Kwiyani, a Malawian theologian based in England who studies African Christianity's role in the West, notes that African missionaries are also bringing conservative theological positions on sexuality and lifestyle choices, including the view that activities like attending pubs are incompatible with Christian faith. They see themselves as re-evangelizing the West, calling it back to what they consider authentic Christian values.

Yet Kwiyani is cautious about how far this movement can reach. The West, he argues, has largely "moved on from Christianity," and many people there no longer consider themselves religious at all. "Christianity itself is a very demanding religion," he said. "It requires you to shift your culture so you can be shaped by this golden spirit that most Westerners don't really want to deal with at the moment." The reality on the ground reflects this complexity. African churches in the West are growing, but primarily among migrant communities—Africans and other diaspora populations seeking familiar forms of worship. A 2021 World Council of Churches study found that migration is driving the growth of minority churches in some European countries, but as Dondo Iorlamen, the international director of CAPRO, acknowledged, "They are not growing among the Whites. They are growing among the migrants, especially Africans."

Still, some African leaders insist their ambitions extend beyond diaspora communities. Kumuyi said that while migrant populations often provide an initial foothold, the goal is to reach the broader host population. Eze's conferences now draw some White attendees alongside predominantly Black crowds, and he is preparing to return to Britain for a conference at Manchester's Old Trafford stadium, with nearly 100,000 people registered. Tshepang Basupi, the Southern Africa director of Africa Inland Mission and himself from Botswana, oversees more than 100 missionaries and rejects the term "reverse mission" altogether. "Mission is not for the West only; it is for every believer," he said. He also insists that Western missionaries remain necessary in Africa and that the two flows should be understood as equal partnership, not replacement.

The movement does carry historical weight. The word "missionary" itself still evokes colonialism for many Africans—the memory of religious workers who collaborated with imperial powers to subjugate populations. Iorlamen acknowledged this directly: "Some people don't like it. It reminds them of colonialism and the offenses some missionaries committed—conniving with the colonial masters to enslave people." Yet Eze frames the current moment differently. "They preached God to us," he said of Western missionaries. "We accepted Him and wanted to know Him. Now, we're going back to show them what He can do." Whether that represents a genuine spiritual revival in the West or simply the mobilization of Africa's growing diaspora remains an open question—one that will likely define the next chapter of global Christianity.