For five years, Dr. Harvey Kwiyani taught an introduction to Christian theology course to first-year university students in Liverpool. On the first day of each term, he would ask his class of fifty students a simple question: “How many of you are religious?”Â
Consistently, only about 10% would raise their hands.
But when he asked, “Do you know any Christians?” the response was striking – almost every student mentioned Nigerians, Ghanaians, Koreans, or other Christians from the Global South.
“Some students would tell me, ‘I don’t know any Christians in my generation, my parents’ generation, or even my grandparents’ generation. I am a fourth-generation pagan,'” Harvey recalls. “If you had told the missionaries 50 years ago that this would be our challenge – that Africans would come to Europe to keep their children in the faith because of secularization – they wouldn’t have believed it.”
This story reflects a profound shift in Western Christianity, one that challenges everything many in the mainline churches think they know about evangelism and mission. As director of the Centre for Global Witness and Human Migration, Harvey is documenting how African Christians are breathing new life into Western Christianity—and doing it in ways that transcend old colonial patterns.
Prayer and Transformation as the Foundation of Mission
While many Western churches struggle to maintain regular prayer meetings, African congregations commonly hold monthly all-night prayer vigils for their cities. “I’ve been around for more than 20 years,” Harvey shares. “I’ve met many, many African churches in Germany, in Switzerland, in the UK, in the US. And almost all those churches will have a night of prayer once a month. It’s almost impossible to find a white British church that has a night of prayer.”
For African Christians, evangelism isn’t about socializing people into church membership or winning philosophical arguments. “To convert anybody to Christianity, at least in the way Africans understand it,” Harvey explains, “is actually to lead them to a place of spiritual transformation. You can’t socialize people into the kingdom of God. You cannot use philosophy to get people into the kingdom of God. It has to be a spiritual encounter.”
Reaching the “Unreachable” Secular West
Perhaps most remarkably, African Christians are successfully reaching people that Western churches have struggled to engage. His university students, many from thoroughly secular backgrounds, were encountering authentic Christian faith through their African, Asian, and Brazilian neighbors.
“Africans are not going to identify with the traditional missionary identity,” Harvey explains. “But they have something in them that they can use to evangelize and disciple people wherever they go.” While many Western churches struggle with declining attendance and aging congregations, African congregations in the UK are growing rapidly. In Liverpool alone, Harvey notes that his three Zimbabwean pastor friends have seen their churches double in size, even during COVID.
The growth isn’t limited to immigrant communities. Through food banks, homeless shelters, and other practical ministries, African churches are building bridges to their white British neighbors. “They know that they cannot share the gospel verbally sometimes,” Harvey says, “but they will do something that will communicate that there’s something happening here.”
This combination of spiritual vitality and practical service is proving effective in contexts where traditional Western approaches to evangelism have fallen flat, such as door-to-door visitation programs, mass mailings, seeker-sensitive worship services, and complex outreach strategies that rely on professional staff and large budgets.
Reimagining Leadership for a New Era
African approaches to leadership offer fresh insights for Western churches. “If you want to learn this from African Christianity,” Harvey notes, “the first thing you will hear is that leadership is a spiritual endeavor. You don’t lead without engaging the Spirit. It’s not the knowledge that you can get in books. Talking to African pastors, they’ll tell you that it’s more important to spend time with God and spend time with the Holy Spirit than it is to do anything else.”
The church’s future in the West may depend on our ability to learn from these insights. As Harvey prepares to release his new book, Decolonising Mission, he challenges us to imagine what mission looks like in a post-colonial world – one where the growth of Christianity comes not from institutional power but from the margins, through migrants and ordinary believers sharing their faith with authenticity and spiritual vitality.
For Western clergy uncomfortable with evangelism’s colonial past, African Christians are showing us a different way forward – one grounded in prayer, spiritual transformation, and genuine relationships rather than programs and power structures. The question isn’t whether we should engage in mission, but how we can learn from our global siblings who are already doing it effectively in our midst.
