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When Stephen Kasamba came to the United States last October, he brought a spiritual legacy full circle. Kasamba, a young Anglican evangelist and worship leader, was part of a Ugandan ministry team invited to help foster renewal within Episcopal churches in several American dioceses. The team's charge was to be a spiritual encouragement to flagging U.S. churches. In Uganda, the Anglican Church has been growing phenomenally: there are 5 million Anglicans in 21,000 churches, compared to the United States where Episcopalian membership has dwindled to about 2.5 million in 7,360 churches.

For Kasamba, the task held deep personal meaning. Decades earlier, an American missionary working in northern Uganda had told Kasamba's grandfather, "Today, we are coming to you to preach the gospel, but tomorrow, you shall bring the gospel to us." That day had finally come.

Kasamba's story is a living illustration of dramatic changes occurring within the global evangelical movement—shifts that are forcing new interpretations of missions and ministry.

As recently as 1960, evangelicalism was largely a movement concentrated in Western Europe and North America. Today it has become a global movement with startling new dimensions. Of the world's estimated 400 million evangelicals, 70 percent are non-Western, living in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Latin America. As the new millennium grows nearer, church leaders from around the world agree that such an enormous demographic transformation has significant implications for theology, for missions, and for the future of evangelicalism.

In Abbotsford, British Columbia, evangelical leaders representing 115 nations and 110 organizations in early May will convene the tenth General Assembly of World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF), the international umbrella group for national and regional evangelical alliances.

WEF International Director Agustin B. Vencer, Jr., says the meeting in suburban Vancouver was planned to "celebrate the globalization of Christianity." For the opening ceremony, delegates are to enter the convention site carrying their national flags in a vivid display of a WEF theme Bible verse: "My name will be great among the nations" (Mal. 1:11).

"Our world is becoming a smaller village each passing day," says Vencer, a Filipino lawyer and pastor and WEF's first non-Western leader. "This has an impact on the church because we are aware that we are part of a global body, that the point of reference is no longer defined simply by missions but by the reality of what God is doing in other parts of the world as well."

Delegates to the general assembly are expected to commemorate the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the founding of WEF's predecessor, the Evangelical Alliance. But much has happened since the 1846 London meeting when Christians from ten nations sat down to form a new international evangelical organization. And in setting global evangelical priorities for the twenty-first century, WEF delegates will have new strategies to consider.

GROWTH SPURTs SOUTH AND EAST: According to veteran researchers Patrick Johnstone and David Barrett, who have been tracking global church trends for nearly three decades, as late as 1960 more than half of all professing Christians still lived in North America and Europe. But, says Johnstone, by the early 1970s, the "center of gravity of Christianity" began moving toward the Eastern and Southern Hemispheres. By 1990, only 38 percent of all Christians lived in Western nations, and by 2000, Johnstone estimates the figure will be down to 31 percent.

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May 19 1997, Vol. 41, No. 6