Migration

Abstract

The growth of Christianity over the last 200 years and its expansive geographical spread have come in an era of unprecedented global migration, both forced and voluntary. While the missionary movement of the eighteenth–twentieth centuries was itself one form of migration, so was the transatlantic trade in enslaved people from the African continent, the northward migration of people from Latin America to the United States and from Africa to Europe, and Middle Eastern Christians’ fleeing their homelands as asylees or refugees in the West. Additionally, there is the emergence of new international networks of churches founded in Latin America, Asia, or Africa that have spread by sending missionaries back to North America and Europe in what is often termed “reverse mission”—all of these have had important implications for thinking about how Christianity has become constituted through migration. These movements are not simply about population and demographics, but they are also about how global flows of information and populations are themselves part of how Christianity is now developing and how Christians understand themselves in global terms.