For centuries, the dominant image of Christian missionary work was remarkably consistent: European or North American missionaries travelling to Africa, Asia and other parts of the world to preach the gospel, establish churches and build schools and hospitals.
That picture is changing.
Increasingly, African Christians are travelling in the opposite direction—not simply as migrants seeking new lives, but as pastors, evangelists, church planters and missionaries carrying a distinctly African expression of Christianity into Europe, North America and beyond.
Few recent events illustrate the shift as dramatically as Nigerian pastor Jerry Eze’s prayer gathering at Twickenham Stadium in London in August 2024.
Twickenham, famous as the home of English rugby, has a capacity of about 82,000. On August 10, 2024, the stadium hosted Eze’s New Season Prophetic Prayers and Declarations (NSPPD) conference, with reports indicating that the venue was filled for the gathering.
Instead of a rugby match, thousands gathered for hours of prayer, worship and preaching led by a Nigerian pastor whose ministry had first developed a massive audience online.
The significance of the event went beyond the size of the crowd.
It offered a striking picture of how the geography of global Christianity has changed.
Christianity’s centre of gravity is moving south
The demographic evidence behind this transformation is substantial.
According to a 2025 analysis by the Pew Research Center, sub-Saharan Africa overtook Europe between 2010 and 2020 as the region with the world’s largest Christian population.
The number of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa rose by 31% during that period, reaching about 697 million in 2020. The region accounted for approximately 31% of the world’s Christians, compared with about 22% in Europe.
The change is even more striking when viewed over a longer historical period.
At the beginning of the 20th century, sub-Saharan Africa contained only a small fraction of the world’s Christian population, while Europe was overwhelmingly central to global Christianity. Today, Africa has become one of the principal engines of Christian demographic growth.
That transformation is being accompanied by a second development: African Christians are increasingly participating in Christian mission outside the continent.
A 2024 report by the Lausanne Movement, drawing on World Christian Database information, estimated that Nigeria alone sent about 20,000 missionaries abroad in 2020. Earlier estimates had put the number of African missionaries serving outside the continent at roughly 18,400 in 2008.
The figures are not directly comparable because they come from different periods and methodologies, but together they illustrate the emergence of Africa as a significant source of global missionary activity.
Nigeria’s growing missionary influence
Nigeria is particularly important to this transformation.
The country has one of the largest Christian populations in Africa and is home to influential Pentecostal and evangelical movements whose churches and ministries now operate internationally.
Organisations such as CAPRO, a Nigerian missionary movement, report hundreds of missionaries working across dozens of countries. Its work has extended beyond traditional mission destinations to places such as Canada, where its teams have engaged communities including Indigenous populations.
The Nigerian missionary model is also increasingly visible through digital platforms.
Jerry Eze’s NSPPD ministry is an example of how the internet has changed the traditional boundaries of Christian evangelism. Instead of requiring a preacher to establish a physical church before reaching an international audience, livestreaming and social media allow sermons, prayers and worship services to cross borders instantly.
That digital reach can then translate into physical gatherings.
Twickenham was one example. Eze’s next major UK gathering is scheduled for September 26, 2026, at Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium. The event is being promoted as an international prayer conference and is listed as sold out on Eventbrite.
The movement from an online prayer broadcast to a stadium filled with worshippers demonstrates how digital Christianity and migration are increasingly reinforcing each other.
A different kind of missionary
The African missionary arriving in Europe today does not necessarily resemble the missionary of the colonial era.
Many are members of African churches who have themselves migrated to Europe or North America. Others deliberately relocate for ministry. Still others maintain churches across several countries while travelling periodically for conferences, evangelistic campaigns and prayer meetings.
Migration has played an important role in this process.
Research published jointly by the Churches’ Commission for Migrants in Europe and the World Council of Churches found that migration has contributed to the growth of minority churches in some European countries. The study also documented the increasingly diverse Christian presence created by migration across Europe.
In this sense, the African Christian diaspora is not merely a community receiving pastoral care overseas. It can also become a missionary force in its new environment.
African-founded congregations have appeared in cities across Britain and continental Europe, often beginning among migrants before developing relationships with the wider population.
The result is a more complicated religious landscape in which the distinction between “missionary” and “migrant” is increasingly difficult to maintain.
Europe’s Christian decline creates a new mission field
The growing African presence comes at a time when Christianity is losing demographic ground across much of Europe.
Pew’s 2025 analysis found that the number of Christians in Europe fell by 9% between 2010 and 2020, to approximately 505 million. During the same period, the religiously unaffiliated population increased by 37%, reaching about 190 million.
By 2020, Christians represented 67% of Europe’s population, down eight percentage points from 2010, while the religiously unaffiliated accounted for about 25%.
Britain is part of that wider transformation.
The decline is not necessarily the same everywhere, nor does it mean that European Christianity has disappeared. Europe remains home to hundreds of millions of Christians and many large churches.
But traditional patterns of church attendance and religious identification have weakened considerably in several countries.
This creates an unusual historical situation.
Africa, once described largely as a mission field, increasingly finds itself sending Christians into regions that were once regarded as the heartlands of Christianity.
That is one reason some scholars and church leaders have used the phrase “reverse mission” to describe the phenomenon.
But not everyone accepts the terminology.
Some African Christian leaders argue that calling it “reverse mission” implies that mission originally belonged to Europe and is now simply travelling backwards.
Their preferred interpretation is that Christian mission is inherently global and that Africa’s expanding role is part of Christianity’s wider geographical transformation.
The diaspora is often the first destination
There is, however, an important qualification.
African churches in Europe do not automatically translate into mass conversions among indigenous European populations.
In many cases, their strongest initial growth occurs within African migrant communities.
That distinction matters.
A Nigerian church in London, for example, may attract Nigerians, Ghanaians and other Africans who already share elements of language, culture and Christian experience. Similar patterns can be found elsewhere in Europe.
The World Council of Churches has noted the role migration plays in the emergence and growth of minority churches in Europe.
Researchers have also debated how far African Christian churches have succeeded in attracting people outside their ethnic and migrant communities.
Some see these churches as potentially contributing to a wider Christian renewal. Others argue that their influence remains largely concentrated within African diaspora populations.
The distinction is important because filling a stadium with African Christians living in Britain is not the same as demonstrating a broad religious revival among Britain’s non-African population.
Yet the two phenomena should not be treated as mutually exclusive.
Diaspora communities can provide the social networks, financial resources and institutional foundations from which churches eventually reach wider communities.
What African Christianity brings
African Christianity is not a single tradition.
The continent contains Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, evangelical, mainline Protestant and numerous Pentecostal and African Independent churches. Their theology and worship styles vary enormously.
Nevertheless, some features associated particularly with African Pentecostalism have become highly visible internationally.
These include extended prayer, energetic worship, testimonies, fasting, expectations of divine intervention and an emphasis on healing and spiritual warfare.
For ministries such as NSPPD, prayer is not simply one part of a church service. It is the central organising activity around which a global community can form.
The approach has proved especially suited to digital media.
A person in Lagos, London, Toronto or Johannesburg can participate in the same prayer broadcast at the same time, hear the same message and share testimonies through social media.
Technology has therefore allowed African Christian ministries to build international communities without first establishing conventional overseas institutions.
The politics of Christian values
The movement also has an ideological dimension.
Some African Christian leaders believe the West has become increasingly secular and that African churches can remind Western societies of traditional Christian teachings concerning Scripture, family, sexuality, personal morality and the supernatural.
This position can be particularly pronounced within conservative Pentecostal movements.
But it would be misleading to portray African Christianity as uniformly conservative or as a single bloc attempting to “re-Christianise” Europe.
African churches themselves are diverse, and African Christians living in Western societies inevitably encounter new cultural, political and theological environments.
The result can be adaptation as much as confrontation.
Churches may retain African worship styles while adopting local languages. They may maintain traditional teachings while navigating Western legal and social systems. And younger African Christians raised in Europe may combine African and European religious identities in ways that do not fit neatly into either category.
Colonial history still casts a shadow
There is another complication.
For many Africans, the history of Christian mission cannot be separated from colonialism.
European missionaries sometimes worked alongside colonial administrations, and the relationship between evangelisation, political power and European expansion remains an important part of the historical memory of many African societies.
That history makes the changing direction of mission symbolically significant.
The African preacher travelling to Europe today is not necessarily arriving as a subordinate of a colonial power. In many cases, he or she is travelling from a country where Christianity has become a powerful indigenous institution with its own universities, seminaries, denominations, media networks and financial resources.
The relationship can therefore become one of partnership rather than dependence.
That does not erase the difficult history.
Instead, it raises the possibility of a new model in which African and Western churches learn from each other.
A genuinely global Christianity
The most important story may therefore not be that Africans are replacing Western missionaries. It is that Christianity itself has become increasingly global.
Pew’s latest global analysis shows that Christians remain the world’s largest religious group, numbering approximately 2.3 billion in 2020. But Christians represented a smaller share of the global population than they did a decade earlier.
At the same time, Christianity’s geographical centre has shifted decisively toward the Global South, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.
That shift changes who is perceived as a religious authority, who sends missionaries and where Christian ideas travel from.
The old map – with Europe and North America sending Christianity to Africa – no longer tells the whole story.
There is now a network running in several directions.
African churches send missionaries to Europe. European churches continue sending missionaries abroad. African migrants establish congregations in Western cities. Western Christians participate in African-led conferences. Digital ministries connect believers across continents without requiring them to relocate at all.
The result is less a reversal of Christian mission than its globalisation.
From Twickenham to Old Trafford
That is what makes Jerry Eze’s return to Britain significant.
His 2024 gathering at Twickenham demonstrated the ability of an African Christian ministry to mobilise a huge audience in one of Europe’s most recognisable sporting venues. Two years later, his ministry is preparing for another major UK gathering at Old Trafford in Manchester on September 26, 2026.
Whether these events constitute evidence of a Christian revival in Britain remains a matter of interpretation.
Large religious gatherings can demonstrate extraordinary enthusiasm without necessarily reversing long-term patterns of secularisation.
But they do demonstrate something that would have been difficult to imagine generations ago: Africa is no longer simply a destination for Christian missionaries.
It is one of the places from which the future of global Christianity is increasingly being shaped. The missionary map has changed.
And perhaps the clearest symbol of that change is not an empty European church or a crowded African congregation, but an African preacher standing before thousands in a British stadium, speaking to a faith that now travels in more than one direction.
● Additional reporting from Nimi Princewill’s CNN report titled: Missionaries are still going to Africa. But for African Christian leaders, it is the West that needs help