Does the spectacular growth of Christianity in Africa and Asia mean the Western world has a lot to learn from them?

I was intrigued by a statement I recently read at Eddie Arthur’s blog, where he said:

We Need Relationship Changes: Western churches and Christians have been accustomed to believe that they are the centre of the Church; the ones who call the shots in leadership and mission; this recent post highlights this. The comparative rates of growth of the Church in the West and in the Global South give the lie to this assumption. Those of us who are Westerners need to get used to the idea that we have a huge amount to learn from the church in the wider world. This means that mission agencies need to give serious attention to blessing the Church in the traditional sending countries through the things that God is doing in the erstwhile mission fields.

On the other side of the coin, we need to realise that the West still has something to contribute. Many writers from the Global South and many missionaries who have compared the growth of the Church worldwide with their home situations have written off the contribution of the Western church. They see it as needy and moribund, with little to offer. This is as much of a mistake as seeing the West as the Centre of things: in truth the body of Christ worldwide is interdependent and needs to learn how to function in this way.

So I thought: “Hmm–the comparative rates of growth. What do those tell us, if we look at them in detail?”

Because we can. We’ve noted before that church growth is not a simple number. It’s made up of a demographic component (births – deaths), a conversion component (converts – defections), and an immigration component (immigration – emigration). On pages 60 and 61 of the Atlas of Global Christianity, researchers break down the world into these components. Here’s a summary (I’m only including the continental totals here, whereas the Atlas goes into the subregions in detail):

*Note: the above stats are for Christian subsets; e.g. Births = Births to Christian homes, Immigrants = Christian immigrants, etc.

Do Africa and Asia have something to teach Europe about conversion? Yes, and no. The numbers of people converted in each continent are more or less in the same order of magnitude (excluding Oceania). Some additional light is shed by the two rate columns (C:B and C-Rate).

The first, converts per birth, illustrates the markedly high role conversion plays in both Europe and Asia. Most of the church growth in Africa is through births (6x as many as converts). (Much of the conversion in Europe is coming out of Eastern Europe.) Even if you were to take away all of Africa’s conversion growth, it would grow faster through net births-deaths alone than any other continent. In other words, births to Christian families alone in Africa is shifting the center of Christian gravity toward them. The same factor is at play in Asia and Latin America: they’re net demographic rates alone exceed the combination of demography, conversion and immigration in either Europe or North America.

The second, conversion rate, is the average annual conversion rate in 2010. It seems obvious that the “Global South” has a higher conversion rate, but this isn’t the whole story. Let’s drill down into average annual rate of growth of the church from conversion in each of the individual regions, given in the Atlas:

• Africa, 0.71: East, 0.73; Middle, 0.68; North, 0.55; South, 0.48; West, 0.84.
• Asia, 1.34: East, 2.13; South-central, 1.32; Southeast, 0.61; West, 0.4.
• Europe, 0.50: East, 0.58; North, 0.66; South, 0.45; West, 0.34.
• Latin America, 0.73: Caribbean, 0.31; Central America, 1.01; South, 0.65.
• North America, 0.47.
• Oceania, 0.35: Australia, 0.25; Melanesia, 0.55; Micronesia, 0.64; Polynesia, 0.49.

With some exceptions, the conversion rates for each region are mostly in the range of 0.4 to 0.6. There are some outliers:

• Africa’s 0.71 is skewed by West Africa’s 0.84 (=Nigeria)
• Asia’s dramatic 1.34 rate is skewed by East Asia’s rate of 2.13 (=the remarkable story of China) and south-central Asia’s rate of 1.32 (=the remarkable story of Iran)
• Latin America’s 0.73 is skewed by Central America’s rate of 1.01 (=Mexico growth).

So it’s the outlier stories that contribute to most of the conversion situations. Most of the church growth in Africa and Asia is at about the same rate as Europe and North America. And, especially in Asia, one has to ask how much the refining power of persecution has played a role in stoking the fires of church growth. Other Asian situations are not the same: for example, Turkey sees very little growth. I’m not sure the situation in China and Iran would be transferable to anywhere in the West.

However, one area where Europe really suffers is in the rate of defections. Europe’s rate of 4 million per year dramatically offsets its conversions. Defections are high in Latin America as well, but not as high as conversion, so they’re in better shape. Defections seem high in North Africa but to my mind they aren’t really that much higher than Africa/Asia.

This is an area to be explored, but I’m not sure there are any easy answers. Africa and Asia may have low rates of defection due to higher levels of persecution (or perhaps other reasons). But if the “back door” were shut in Europe, somehow, that would make the biggest difference.