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What role will Africa play in the future of world Christianity? Demographic trends alone suggest that the future of Christianity does not lie in the West. There, for the most part, Christianity has become a wrinkled, impotent vestige of its former self. Insofar as God's declared preference has been to work through the weak, the poor, and the dispossessed, transforming societies from their margins, a complacent and privileged Christianity cannot survive.

Africans, on the other hand, with all of their daunting challenges—perhaps in some ways because of them—will continue to give central place to God. Where else can they turn? Like Simon Peter, their instinctively rhetorical question is, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."

Our fate as Western Christians is tied to the church in Africa because there is really no such thing as an independent church. Our Scriptures speak only of our utter dependence upon God and of our mutual interdependence upon each other. Independence, it should be remembered, is the great and original expression of pride. Perhaps the church in Africa will be a reminder to us all. It is a reminder that—harking back to the deepest sureties—in God's moral universe the kingdom belongs to the poor, the humble will be exalted, rulers will be brought down from their thrones, the proud will be scattered, and the rich will be sent away empty.

So it is natural that beleaguered Western Christianity, troubled by signs that the curtain is about to drop, clearing the stage for the next act in God's redemptive drama, should wonder about the unlikely continent waiting in the wings: "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?" And to this query the enigmatic response of Jesus must suffice: "Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the Good News is preached to the poor. Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me."

Jonathan J. Bonk is executive director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center, editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, and project director for the Dictionary of African Christian Biography.

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More on Africa is available in our full coverage area.

Jonathan Bonk earlier reviewed Whose Religion is Christianity? and interviewed its author, Lamin Sanneh, for Christianity Today.

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November 2007, Vol. 51, No. 11, Page 46