For centuries, Christianity has been primarily a white, European and
North American religion. But the explosive growth of Africa and Asia,
combined with the success of evangelization there, will change that
forever.

By 2050, it's expected that only one in five Christians worldwide
will be white. And places like St. Joseph's a regular parish in an
unremarkable Nigerian town ? will be the Christian mainstream.

"I'm sure it will be an adjustment for Americans they are used to
being in charge," Father Ani said during a brief break between
services, scarfing down bread before facing thousands more
parishioners. "But I hope we can all realize we are one brotherhood
before God."

There is, of course, a rich history of missionary efforts in Africa
and Asia, and those efforts have been overwhelmingly successful. But
even if missionaries had no further success if not another soul
were converted to Christianity the sheer fact of high birth rates
in the developing world would produce some startling numbers:

In 1900, 82 percent of the world's Christians were in Europe or North
America. By 2025, that will drop below 30 percent.

Nigeria had 50 million Christians in 2000; by 2050, it's projected to
have 123 million ? more than Germany and France combined. The Congo's Christian community is expected to more than triple, to 121 million. There will be more Christians in Ethiopia than England, more in India than Italy.

"There is this very strong idea that Christianity is a Western
religion that has been on loan to other parts of the world," said
Philip Jenkins, a Penn State professor whose book, The Next
Christendom, is the central text of those projecting the faith's
demographic future. "Of course, it's a Near-Eastern and North African
religion that has been traveling for the last 2,000 years."

Take this part of southeastern Nigeria, known as Igboland today and
Biafra during the disastrous Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s.
It's perhaps the most heavily Catholic spot on the continent, with
about 90 percent of its people belonging to the church.

St. Joseph's will draw up to 9,000 people to services on a busy
Sunday. (As a point of comparison, in the nine-county, 67-parish
Diocese of Dallas, only the downtown cathedral attracts more weekly
worshippers.)

Churches in Igboland are always trying to find ways to deal with
overflow crowds. Some evangelical preachers can pull millions to a
multiday healing event. Having tens of thousands of Nigerians at a
prayer meeting is considered unremarkable.

Some say that sort of spirituality can be a forceful counterpoint to
the increasing secularism of the West.

"Here we take religiousness for granted," said Godfrey Odigbo,
director of the Spiritan International School of Theology in
Enugu. "In Europe, people think that if you need God, you can just
call him. If you don't need him, you can ignore him. God is not part
of everyday life. But deep inside, there's a yearning."

The Catholic Church's growth in the developing world was greatly
aided by the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, which allowed Mass
in native languages and permitted other localized variations in
church rituals.

The travels of Pope John Paul II the first non-Italian pope in more
than four centuries reflected the church's global growth. He
visited more than 40 African nations during his papacy. Dr. Jenkins
argues that one reason John Paul was successful as a doctrinally
conservative pope was that he knew the church's millions of new
adherents in Africa and Asia were similarly minded.

The new pontiff, Benedict XVI, recognizes that he oversees an
increasingly diverse church. Last Sunday, at a Vatican ordination
ceremony for 21 priests, he said the church "must open up the
frontiers between peoples and break down barriers between classes and
races." The men he ordained embodied that message: While most were
Italians, the group included priests from Nigeria, Kenya and Angola.

The worldwide demographic shift leads to questions that go to the
heart of the faith. What will it mean to Christianity when,
numerically, the version of the faith practiced in Kampala and
Kinshasa becomes "the norm" and places like Rome and Canterbury move to the margins?

Many Westerners got their first look at African religious power in
2003, during the debate over the consecration of Gene Robinson as the
Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire. Bishop Robinson is openly gay, and
his election was controversial within the Episcopal Church, the
American branch of the world Anglican Communion.

But some of the most vigorous opposition came from a surprising
source: Anglican bishops in Africa. Africans are typically
conservative on issues of sexual morality and, led by Archbishop
Peter Akinola of Nigeria, they vigorously protested Bishop Robinson's
consecration.

Other Anglicans, up to and including the archbishop of Canterbury,
were forced to listen. The Anglican Communion began as the Church of
England, but today most of its bishops are African or Asian, and they
have clout within the church. In 1998, when Anglican leaders gathered
to consider a statement supporting gay rights, African and Asian
bishops formed a bloc large enough to defeat it. This enraged some
American church leaders, including one bishop who labeled African
Anglicanism "a very superstitious kind of Christianity" barely
removed from animism.

Jacob Olupona, a religion scholar at the University of California at
Davis, said racism fueled some of the Western response. "These are
people who think that they own the church," said Dr. Olupona, whose
father was an Anglican priest in Nigeria. "They suddenly discovered
they were not going to be calling the shots. They used to get away
with anything. The African church prevented that from happening."

The disputes have led to some unusual realignments within the church,
as conservative Americans have sought allies in the global South. In
2000, two American men, Chuck Murphy and John Rodgers, were ordained as Anglican bishops not by the American church, but by the
archbishops of Rwanda and Singapore. The men set up what has become known as the Anglican Mission in America, an attempt by African and Asian churches to "reform" the Episcopal church and push it to the right on issues of morality.

Last month, Archbishop Akinola announced the formation of a new
Convocation of Anglican Nigerian Churches in America, a group aimed
at Nigerian emigrants who disagree with the Episcopal Church's stance
on gay issues.

He told Nigerians that leaders of the American church have "torn the
fabric of our common life and have jeopardized your lives and
ministries. This is a tragic reality that cannot be ignored."

Last month's Vatican conclave was the first in modern times in which
leaders from developing countries were considered strong candidates
for pope. Cardinal Francis Arinze of Nigeria was viewed as one of the
favorites, and Latin America produced a number of serious contenders.

Dr. Jenkins said that while the College of Cardinals ended up
selecting another European, the conclave "really broke down any
residual resistance people might have had" to a non-white pope. Today
about two-thirds of Catholics are in the developing world, along with
about 40 percent of the cardinals.

In 10 or 20 years, he said, the cardinals will be overwhelmingly from
poor nations.

What will a more Afrocentric church bring? Generalizing about 300
million people is risky, but African churches are known for a greater
emphasis on the supernatural as well as for their more conservative
stances on moral issues.

Pentecostal and charismatic churches flourish, even more than
mainline Protestant and Catholic churches do although some Africans
are comfortable mixing and matching elements from different Christian
faiths and even indigenous beliefs.

"We have people who come to Mass on Sunday, go to a Protestant healer on Wednesday, and see the witch doctor on Saturday," said Father Ani, who proudly points out that his last name is the name of the earth goddess in traditional Igbo religion.

In the worldwide Christian community, it's likely that African
voices, along with Asian and Latin American ones, will grow louder in
the coming decades. It remains to be seen how Western Christians will
react to being subject to theological decisions often driven by
people traditionally viewed as souls to be saved by missionaries.

"From a point of view of an American, we'll be humbled," said the
Rev. Michael Duca, rector of the Catholic Holy Trinity Seminary in
Irving. "There will be changes. We don't know what they are.

"We know that the church may not always find its roots in Rome. That
has been the symbol of the center of the faith, where the Holy Father
lives. But he doesn't have to live there, I guess."

END