Africans Look to Revive Christianity in the West

While Christianity blossomed in Africa in the 1800s through Western missionaries, the Africans are now bringing a revival of mission back after being powerfully transformed.

|TOP|With church-going on the wane in Europe, Africa's vibrant Protestant churches are sending an array of missionaries to the West to win souls and revitalise shrinking congregations -- an ironic twist on the 19th century drive by Western missionaries to convert Africans.

According to African missionaries, Western churches are too timid when it comes to religion.

"The church in the UK has become shy about faith," said Kenyan minister Patrick Mukholi, employed by the UK-based Anglican Church Mission Society.

"Maybe as African missionaries we can encourage them to be more exuberant about knowing God," said the priest, who worked in Mombasa before moving to England, which he had never visited before.

African churchmen first started moving to Europe and the United States in the 1970s to minister to immigrants mostly from their own countries.

|AD|But in the 1980s, African evangelicals -- including some Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans and Methodists -- decided to take a more systematic approach toward reaching what they saw as an increasingly Godless West.

"We couldn't just throw up our hands and see these churches turned into nightclubs or mosques," Tokunboh Adeyemo, former general secretary of the Association of Evangelicals in Africa, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Dudley Pate, a Nairobi-based Zimbabwean who works for British organisation African Inland Mission, says African churches are obeying the biblical command to spread their faith that is too often ignored by modern Western churches.

"The African church is taking seriously Christ's command that it takes the Gospel to all nations.

Political correctness and complacency has stifled that in the West," he told Reuters.

African missionaries -- some backed by their own churches and some recruited by Western organisations -- boast of some success in Europe.

Nigerian pastor Sunday Adeleja pioneered the independent Embassy of God church in Ukraine, delivering rousing sermons and dancing in the aisles to some 25,000 mostly white members, making it one of Europe's biggest churches.

And Nigeria's Redeemed Church of God, which aims to build a congregation within five minutes' drive or walk from anywhere in the world, has a branch in almost 40 European countries.

One of Europe's biggest Evangelical churches, in eastern France, was started by Africans and draws thousands every week.