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Migration, Diaspora Communities, and the New Missionary Encounter with Western Society

The biblical record—from the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in Genesis (3:23) to the magnificent vision of the Apostle John, who is exiled on the Island of Patmos in Revelation (1:9)—reveals a profound interconnection between human mobility or dispersion and the unfolding of salvation history. The same link is manifest throughout the history of Christian missions. As a prominent case in point, the Western missionary movement, from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, was shaped by international migrations. European missionaries not only benefited from the projection of Western political power, but they also formed a segment of the massive tide of European movement that dominated international migrations. By 1915, twenty-one percent of Europeans resided outside Europe, and Europeans effectively occupied or settled in over one-third of the inhabited world.¹

Global Migrations from 1960
With the end of European colonialism, or from the 1960s, international migrations have escalated in volume, velocity, and complexity, and have transformed into a truly global phenomenon.

The earlier flows, which were mostly defined by European initiatives and economic priorities, have given way to a far more complex pattern of migration involving vastly greater non-European or non-white migrations from the developing and under-developed, non-Western world to the Western world—generally considered South-to-North flows.

By the 1980s, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia had become net exporters of millions of people to Western countries, initially as labor migrants, subsequently as asylum seekers, but increasingly and predominantly as economic migrants. By 2000, non-Western migrants accounted for seventy percent of immigrants into most wealthy developed nations in Europe and North America.

The Religious Divide
It is often overlooked that the global South-North divide is as religious as it is economic. In Western societies, the process of modernization has produced distinctive cultural changes associated with the secular ideal of liberal democracy, including: stronger individualism; a greater push for gender equality; sexual permissiveness; greater tolerance of divorce, abortion, and homosexuality; and a massive erosion of institutional religion. Non-Western societies are not static, but they remain resistant to secularization (at least Western forms of the phenomenon) and retain strong allegiance to religious systems and traditional values.

Perhaps the most conspicuous testimony to this trend is the phenomenal growth of Christianity in the non-Western world accompanied by a corresponding decline in the West over the last half a century or so. This “shift” has seen the emergence of Africa and Latin America as the main Christian heartlands in the twenty-first century.