Importing God: The Mission of the Ghanaian Adventist Church and Other Immigrant Churches in the Netherlands

Abstract

Considering global trends of secularization and religious resurgence, it is unmistakable that the center of Christianity is moving from Europe and North America to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This shift affects not only the nature of church life, but also the nature of mission and missionaries. A young, large, and zealous mission force is emerging that flows from ‘the South’ all over the world. Koreans evangelize in Russia, Nigerians in the Philippines, and Brazilians in Mozambique. A noteworthy segment of this flow is the mission work of non-Western Christians in the West. This phenomenon has sparked the (not undisputed) term ‘reversed mission’, which expresses the idea that the ones who used to be conceptualized as the senders of mission are now conceptualized as the receivers of mission. Few studies however have investigated the realities that this term refers to. This study is intended as a contribution to fill this void. In this study, non-Western immigrant churches in the country of the Netherlands were taken as a particular case by which to understand ‘reversed mission’. On a population of nearly 17 million residents, the Netherlands has more than half a million non-Western Christians and about 1,000 immigrant churches. They add colour to the already complex religious landscape of this country, where high levels of secularization are