In a 2007 article, CT described British church historian Andrew Walls (1928–2021) as “an important person you don’t know.” Among his best achievements was helping turn the eye of Western scholars to the remarkable growth of Christianity within the Global South. Walls’s work on what he then called “non-Western Christianity” was amplified by the efforts of David B. Barrett (1927–2011), whose groundbreaking research on global religious statistics produced the World Christian Encyclopedia, coedited by Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo.
We now know that the demographic center of Christianity shifted to the Global South in the course of the twentieth century in dramatic fashion, and we also know quite a bit more about the way it actually happened. Evangelicalism, as considered one of the fastest-growing demographic blocs inside global Christianity, has contributed significantly to those transformations.
Today, greater than 77 percent of the world’s evangelicals are Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. Even if a big variety of American evangelicals may favor some type of Christian nationalism (though the numbers are likely exaggerated), and even when a majority of white American evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, what often goes unspoken is that the overwhelming majority of the world’s evangelicals are neither white nor American. Evangelicals around the globe will not be united on matters of politics and race, but they lay great stress on the Bible, the central message of the Cross, and man’s need for conversion.
Evangelicalism, then, is plainly not an American movement. The overwhelming majority of the world’s evangelicals live within the Global South, and so they are actively engaged in sending missionaries to the ends of the earth. The World Council of Churches began using the language of “witness in six continents” within the early Nineteen Sixties to explain how latest mission centers were now established on every continent on the planet.
When evangelicals gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, for the First International Congress on World Evangelization, they observed that the dominant role of Western missions was fast disappearing. In the Eighties, Luis Bush, an unassuming evangelical from Argentina who became an influential mission leader, coined the expression “the ten/40 Window.” The name referred to the regions of North Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, concentrated in a single geographic rectangle between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator.
Bush hoped to mobilize evangelical missionary movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America into places Western missionaries found it harder to achieve. He made it clear throughout the Nineteen Nineties that these missionary efforts could be led not by Americans but by Christian leaders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Americans popularized “10/40 Window” language in mission circles, but Bush was holding massive gatherings in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to mobilize missionaries from the Global South. Today, nearly half of the world’s full-time cross-cultural missionaries are being sent out from the Global South, with countries like Brazil, South Korea, and India figuring among the many top senders.
Rare access
Adriana Carranca describes a few of these global transformations in her latest book Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims. Carranca is a Brazilian author who has worked as a war correspondent and investigative journalist in a few of the most difficult places on the planet.
Educated at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, she has traveled widely in Africa and the Middle East, covering events just like the American-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Peshawar church bombing in Pakistan, the Lord’s Resistance Army rebellion in northern Uganda, the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the Arab Spring in Egypt. While Carranca was working in conflict zones and refugee camps, she began meeting evangelicals looking to achieve Muslims with the gospel.
As a secular journalist who had frolicked in American contexts, Carranca knew something about American evangelicalism. But what she discovered while working in Africa and the Middle East surprised her. Most of the evangelical missionaries she met weren’t from the United States. Instead, they were being sent out to the Muslim world from places like Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, South Africa, China, and South Korea. The evangelical mission to Muslims, she learned, was emanating from the Global South.
In 2008, Carranca was in Kabul covering the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. Here, she first heard about significant numbers of Muslims who were converting to Christianity. This evangelistic endeavor, she discovered, was being led by an evangelical, Luiz, who hailed from her home country of Brazil. He was a part of a network of other evangelicals from the Global South.
Eventually, Carranca convinced Luiz and his wife, Gis, to share their personal stories and to introduce her to other evangelical missionaries working in several parts of the Muslim world. To higher understand the growing variety of evangelicals she was meeting in Africa and the Middle East, she began reading works on global Christianity by historians like Philip Jenkins, Mark Noll, Dana Robert, Lamin Sanneh, Brian Stanley, and the aforementioned Andrew Walls.
Through her friendship with Luiz and Gis, Carranca grew more aware of the world of evangelical missionaries who were serving on the bottom in places like Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria. She met the occasional American or European, however the overwhelming majority of missionaries she encountered were from Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, China, Romania, and South Korea.
During her travels, Carranca gained rare access to what she called the “secret world” of Christian missionaries evangelizing Muslims. She also learned concerning the influence of Luis Bush and traveled to fulfill him in Indonesia, where he was mobilizing 1000’s of missionaries from Asia to evangelise the gospel to Muslims.
Carranca’s long-form journalism is serious, intimate, and gripping. Though not a believer, she confesses that she got here to admire the evangelicals who became her friends. The book introduces readers to Luiz and Gis and their coworkers from South Africa, Brazil, China, and South Korea, and talks about their each day lives, their love for soccer, and the enjoyment they find in spending time with Muslim friends.
Carranca’s narrative includes riveting eyewitness accounts of terrorist attacks, drone strikes, police inquiries, church bombings, and the martyrdom of local Christians in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In one powerful anecdote, she talks concerning the murder of a missionary family she befriended in Afghanistan, killed by the Taliban in a brutal shooting. She flew to Pretoria, in South Africa, to attend their funeral services, where their graves were marked with a well-liked refrain echoing Tertullian’s words concerning the blood of martyrs: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”
Polycentric Christianity
Soul by Soul introduces readers to a few of the latest faces of evangelicalism—and so they are almost nothing like Barbara Kingsolver’s unflattering caricature of a failed missionary to the Congo in her popular novel The Poisonwood Bible. Rather than fictional white Southern Baptists from Georgia who’re more misanthropes than missionaries, Carranca gives us real people, unmarked by what she calls the “arrogance and triumphalism” that has sometimes been related to Western missionaries.
Her book does have some potentially misleading elements. It begins with a concise history of Christian missions, which is essentially confined to the history of American evangelical missions. This tends to provide an impression of an American-led movement that runs counter to the book’s broader thrust.
Relatedly, Carranca seems to carry the view, sometimes stated subtly, that Americans are still someway clandestinely leading the brand new missionary efforts now rising within the Global South. This is a highly contested interpretation. It misunderstands the polycentric nature of Christianity and it diminishes the vital latest role being played by rapidly growing evangelical movements outside the West. American evangelicals proceed to support global missions from in all places to everyone, but evangelicals within the Global South are sometimes those leading the way in which.
Carranca’s work concludes by observing that American evangelicals have been among the many strongest supporters of military intervention within the Middle East, though these wars often complicate the lives of Christians in Africa and Asia and hamper the work of evangelical missionaries there. She also points out the stress between American evangelical support of Trump’s efforts to suppress migration from certain Muslim-majority nations and a simultaneous support of efforts to evangelize Muslims.
In these and other ways, Soul by Soul offers a prophetic challenge for American evangelicals who’re enamored of an “America first” mindset. “Ultimately,” she writes, “American Protestant evangelicals might want to select whether to be residents of a nation or a part of the worldwide, diverse, and borderless kingdom of God.”
F. Lionel Young III is a senior research associate on the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. He is the creator of World Christianity and the Unfinished Task: A Very Short Introduction.
