The Mission Field Has Moved

For centuries, mission meant, in practice, a one-way movement: from Europe and North America to the rest of the world. That image still shapes the imagination of many Brazilian Christians, who continue to think of missions as something outsiders do for insiders. But the map has changed, and changed so thoroughly that the church needs to grasp this shift, lest it remain bound to a geography that no longer exists.

The turning point began with the great revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The awakenings that arose in England under Whitefield and Wesley produced more than religious fervor. They awakened Christian leaders and laypeople alike to their personal responsibility for world evangelism and helped spiritually sustain the missionary expansion that would follow in the decades ahead. At the start of the twentieth century, a second, even deeper transformation came with the Pentecostal movement. It radically widened the pool of those who could be sent and, above all, fostered the rise of indigenous mission: churches planted by people from their own region, rather than depending on structures imported from outside. Mission ceased to be something simply exported and began to be born within the very communities being reached. This double movement, made up of revival and indigenization, gradually shifted the center of gravity of world Christianity toward the Global South. Fields that had once only received missionaries also began to become sending centers.

The twentieth century also brought tools, milestones, and strategies that transformed the way mission is carried out. The technological revolution, and more recently the digital revolution, opened up possibilities for outreach and discipleship that had simply never existed before. Great waves of migration and the tentmaking model — professionals who carry the gospel wherever their work takes them — also became important paths of contemporary mission. Events such as the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 and the Lausanne Congress in 1974 helped consolidate a global missionary consciousness shared among churches from different parts of the world. Organizations such as OM and YWAM demonstrated, in practice, that mission is the responsibility of the whole church, not an activity reserved for specialists. Throughout this period, methods changed, but the message remained intact. Mission no longer meant only going to distant places; it also came to mean reaching the world that had come closer, through migration and technology.

Today's challenges are directly tied to these historical shifts. The World Wars, the end of colonialism, great waves of migration, and the advance of secularism have redrawn the map of mission once again. One of the most striking aspects of this change can be seen in the numbers: four of the five largest missionary-sending nations today belong to what used to be called the Third World — China, India, South Korea, and Nigeria — while the United States holds just one of the top five spots. This reality is known as reverse mission, and it asks something of the Western church that is not always comfortable: building genuine partnerships, rather than reproducing the old dependency of a relationship in which one side saw itself as solely responsible for giving while the other only received.

South Korea, Brazil, the persecuted church in various countries, urban peripheries, and the so-called 10/40 Window — the band of the globe that holds the greatest concentration of unreached peoples — are among the contexts that help define this new missionary reality. Amid all these transformations, however, one truth runs through the whole of history: God sustains his church in times of crisis as much as in times of expansion, and he sovereignly directs mission, even when the map changes faster than the church can keep up with.

For the Brazilian church, this history is not something distant. To a great extent, it is part of our own country's recent story. That is why we need to ask honestly: does our church still see itself as a passive recipient of a faith that once came from outside, or does it already recognize itself as a sent church, an active participant in this shift of the missionary center toward the Global South?

One concrete step is to identify and commit in prayer, this very week, to a church or missionary from the Global South, whether Korean, African, or Latin American, recognizing that mission today moves from everywhere to everywhere. Another step is to deliberately seek to receive and learn from workers coming from outside the traditional missionary axis, not only to send. Practically supporting a missionary partnership from the Global South is a concrete way of recognizing that the map really has changed.