White people no longer shouldering all of civilization

Exporting Christianity is no longer the "white man's burden" as Rudyard Kipling put it in 1899, according to a report in today's Washington Post. Now it is Europeans who need the spiritual uplift only foreigners seem to be able to provide, as Kevin Sullivan reports from Copenhagen:

For centuries, when Europe was the global center of Christianity, millions of European missionaries traveled to other continents to spread their faith by establishing schools and churches. Now, with European church attendance at all-time lows and a dearth of preachers in the pulpits, thousands of "reverse missionaries" are flocking back, migrating from poor countries to rich ones to preach the Gospel where it has fallen out of fashion.

The phenomenon signals a fundamental shift in the power, style and geography of Christianity, the world's largest religion. Most of its more than 2 billion adherents now live in the developing world. And as vast numbers of them migrate to Europe, as well as to the United States, they are filling pews and changing worship styles.

Churches in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, South Korea and the Philippines have sent thousands of missionaries to Europe to set up churches in homes, office buildings and storefronts. Officials from the Redeemed Christian Church of God, a Pentecostal church based in Nigeria, said they have 250 churches in Britain now and plan to create 100 more this year. Britain's largest church, run by a Nigerian pastor in London, attracts up to 12,000 people over three services every Sunday.

In Denmark, where this trend is particularly vivid, says Sullivan, preachers from Africa, Asia and Latin America, are ministering to up to a third of all Danish church-goers.

According to Sullivan, this is because these foreigners are making Christianity accessible in a way the traditional Danish church never did. As one Dane, Stendor Johansen reportedly told the reporter:

"As kids, we were not allowed to make any noise on Sundays," he said. The church seemed to him to place a higher value on order and ancient traditions than on tending to the concerns of parishioners. "The church didn't add any value to me. It gave me nothing I could use in my day-to-day life."

"These churches are a gift to our Danish Lutheran Church," [Karsten Nissen, a Lutheran bishop told the reporter]. "They open our eyes to a more human way of being Christians. It's the way we were Christians 100 years ago -- a very simple way, a good way, a more pious way and a more open and happy way of worship."

The Post continues:

"This is a Christian country, but the population has forgotten what that means," said Bess Serner-Pedersen, who runs Alpha Denmark, a private group that offers adult courses in the basics of Christianity, including how to pray and read the Bible.

Serner-Pedersen said that since the 18th-century Enlightenment, which stressed reason and science as means of understanding the divine, European religious teaching has focused more on the intellectual than on the spiritual. "We have a country where the churches are talking to the mind, but we've forgotten that spirituality is about the heart as well," she said. "Our population is looking for churches that are more alive. We need these immigrant churches because they are bringing a message that we have forgotten."

The U.S. Ambassador to Denmark, James P. Cain, said that Denmark experienced a crisis of faith in the wake of last year's Muhammad cartoons controversy. As he reportedly told the Post:

"That, for the first time in a generation, caused the Danes to realize that their loss of faith and their increasing secularism made it very difficult for them to understand, or even feel empathy for, people who felt offended by caricatures of religious images."

It seems Newton's Third Law of Motion even applies to human behavior - namely, for each action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Oops, perhaps that betrays my "enlightened" perspective. I have to say, if there is an applicable Biblical verse I wouldn't know it.