Treasures in Tension: Immigrant Churches and Opportunities for Mission

Abstract

Western Christians today are confronted with two highly impacting movements. One is the rapid movement of Christianity’s center of gravity to the non-Western world. The largest Christian communities today can be found in Africa and Latin America, and increasingly in Asia. Philip Jenkins predicts that in 2050, only one in every five Christians will be a nonHispanic white person. He observes that a “typical” contemporary Christian should be imagined as a “woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela” (Jenkins 2002:2). The second important movement is the large-scale migration of non-Western Christians to the West. Social, political, economic, and cultural immigrants have flocked to Western countries and have transformed the face of Western churches. These realities raise the question of their implications for a globally organized denomination like the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church. In particular, we may wonder what the two movements mean for the mission of the SDA Church. In other words, with the abundant presence of non-Western Christian immigrants in the West, 1 what are the challenges and opportunities for the SDA mission? To answer this question, I will draw on an intensive study of immigrant churches in the Netherlands. 2 For this article, I will illustrate the various dynamics by particularly focusing on one specific case from the larger study: the Ghanaian SDA Church in Amsterdam. I will start with a brief introduction to this case, and then move on to an analysis of this church’s four central fields of mission. My central argument will be that immigrant churches are treasures in terms of their potential and actual contribution to the SDA mission, but that they are in tension in the sense that they operate in highly challenging contexts and need to be properly supported in order to come to full bloom.