Christian Mission in a Five Hundred Year Context

The twentieth century was an extraordinary period in human history because a vast movement of population, the Great European Migration, that had shaped world history ended. In the twentieth century this movement of population reached its peak, then came to a halt and went into reverse.
The Great European Migration lasted from about the beginning of the sixteenth century until the middle of the twentieth. The strangest religious aspect of the Migration was in the position of Christianity. When the Great European began in the sixteenth century, Christianity was the religion of Europe and a largely European religion. By the end of the twentieth a massive recession in the West, especially in Europe, and a massive accession in the rest of the world, and especially Africa, had transformed the cultural and demographic distribution of Christianity. The majority of those who profess the Christian faith are now Africans, Asians, Latin Americans and Pacific Islanders; and they substantially outnumber the professed Christians of Europe, the old Christendom, and its North American outcrop. Christianity is now a predominantly non-western religion, the profession principally of African and Asian and Latin American people. Christianity had once more become, as in its beginnings, a non-Western religion and it has reverted to type.
The balance of the Church has shifted and the idea of a come base in Europe and North America is no longer an operating concept. There are now an infinite number of segments of partially converted social reality within the Church. They are not simply many races, but many lifestyles, many cultures. Each is a building block in a new temple that is in precess of building and an organ in a functioning body of which Christ is the brain. Only together will they reach the fullness of Christ which is the completion and the perfection of humanity.