In a text exchange just last year with a non-Anglican friend, I mentioned that the associate priest at our small, suburban parish church was a missionary sent to us from Nigeria.
Right. LOL, my friend responded.
No, really, I texted back, the Anglican Church is huge and growing in Nigeria.
His response: What? I really don't know if you're joking.
I understood his surprise. The Christian Church—and the Anglican Church in particular—is growing in a way that baffles many Westerners. Today's growth of the global Church seems to be a reversal of the way Christianity has spread throughout history, and it's hard for most of us to keep up. In a world that seems increasingly chaotic, God's order is upending our expectations.
It's not an exaggeration to say that Christianity turned the world upside-down from its beginnings, as Jesus preached new and radical ways to live—and then as his miraculous death and resurrection sent shockwaves through time that forever changed history.
The past 60 or so years have seen a new upside-down phase in the spread of the Gospel. As Christianity fades and falters in Europe, it flourishes in previously unreached areas. We are witnessing God's plan unfurl as his message reaches the ends of the Earth.
Christianity is now growing most quickly among the young, the people of the global south and Asia, the disenfranchised, and the downtrodden. As the third- largest body of Christians in the world, following the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, Anglicanism is an important force in this global surge. "Today the 'average' Anglican is a young woman from Sub-Saharan Africa," notes the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) website.
And Anglican Christianity, once a religion introduced to colonized people by their colonizers ("the incredible and sacrificial missionary ministry of faithful British followers of Jesus," as Archbishop Foley Beach put it in a recent letter), is now a path which those faced with many options choose to take after being convinced of its truth through its beauty.
This strikes me even in my small North American parish. Most of the people in our pews came to be seated there after long searches and much thought. Their presence is very purposeful. They are Anglican (or Anglican-curious) not by birth, by habit, or by duty, but by decision.
Of course, in the Western world, any social pressure to attend church has completely disappeared, which also winnows the numbers of casual attendees. Our parish numbers are small, but our devotion is strong.
It is difficult, of course, for the average American (Christian or not) without an extraordinary knowledge of history to grasp how drastically Christianity's global reach and distribution have recently grown and changed. Stuck on stereotypes and caricatures that have nothing to do with the experiences of the vast majority of the world's Christians, many are sadly myopic.
One Twitter trope is a drawing of dark-skinned, Middle-Eastern-appearing Jesus accompanied by a "provocative" comment along the lines of: "Your Jesus probably looked like this! He didn't have long blond hair like in all those Sunday school pictures! And he wasn't a Christian!" We may laugh at the depth of misunderstanding and ignorance in such a statement. (Do people really think that Christians don't know that Christ was a Middle Eastern Jew? And how could someone not understand that "Christian" is a term for a follower of Christ?) But its misguided attempt to inform shows the extent to which many people hostile to the faith are misinformed about Christianity's global reach (setting aside the gross underestimation of Christians' understanding of our own religion).
As the old Sunday school song "Some Children See Him" by Wihla Hutson reminds us, people around the world see Jesus as one of them—fittingly, because he is a Savior for people everywhere. One verse says, "The children in each different place/will see the baby Jesus' face/like theirs, but bright with heavenly grace/and filled with holy light."
We all of necessity concentrate on our immediate surroundings, taking our environment for granted as a fish does the water that surrounds it. We naturally find comfort in the familiar. It would be unnatural and tiring to be continually monitoring how our place in the world and our view of it compare to other places and views.
But if we take time to expand our view, we see that our tiny, Midwestern ACNA church—which just last year achieved the status of a parish after beginning as a mission in a home only 10 years ago—is just as much a part of the global Church as is the cathedral in Canterbury or the basement congregation in China.
New Christians may suffer persecution and even martyrdom as the faith grows in many parts of the world previously unreached by the Gospel, after many years of relative safety for the majority of believers. To the poor, the persecuted, the uneducated, and the overlooked—as well as to the comfortable and privileged whose position is now shaken in the chaos of the modern world—the message is coming. The Anglican Church continues its march in the global Church Militant toward the heavenly Church Triumphant.
About the author
Susan Olmstead is a writer and editor who has been a member of St. Anselm since 2017. She is the mother of two adult sons and lives in Rocky River.