Evangelizing the ‘dark continent’: Investigating postcolonial Christian missions to Europe

At the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh North American delegates pushed to have Europe added to the map as a Christian mission field, but met with resistance. A century later, there can be no doubt that Europe is a mission field. Since the early 1980s, the phenomenon of ‘reverse mission’ has been documented within Europe, that is Christians from former colonial mission fields travelling to evangelize what once was regarded as a mission-sending centre but has now polemically been described by some African missionaries as ‘the dark continent’.

This paper investigates this historical shift through analysis of fieldwork conducted with respondents from a range of countries of origin and denominational backgrounds undertaking missions to Britain. These data are compared findings from across Europe. A common picture emerges, with missionaries reporting shock upon arrival at the absence of Christianity in the society and the challenge of the mission field; regarding European Christianity as staid and in decline, and explanations for this in terms of the Enlightenment and consumer culture. Their presence and activities in Europe simultaneously destabilize and reinscribe categories such as ‘the global North’ and ‘the global South’. Europe may well be the ‘exceptional case’ in terms of its high degree of secularity. However, in this era of shifting global power relations and increasing interconnectedness, it, no less than other regions, cannot be treated as a monolith.