Rev. Samuel Kobia. (Photo by Peter Williams, WCC)

Athens — The Rev. Samuel Kobia, general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), is urging churches to rethink their ideas about mission in the face of a global shift in Christianity from the northern to the southern hemisphere.

“Forms of expressing our faith that grew out of European culture are no longer normative,” Kobia, a Methodist from Kenya, told about 500 participants in a WCC‑organized Conference on World Mission and Evangelism on the outskirts of the Greek capital.

“We are being called to rethink our assumptions concerning the geography of mission,” Kobia said, noting a southward shift of Christianity’s “demographic center” — the point on the globe where the numbers of Christians living to the north, south, east and west are equal.

“In the middle of the first century, this center was in or near Jerusalem; in the following centuries it shifted to Europe, where it long remained,” said Kobia. “But statisticians now locate Christianity’s center of gravity near Timbuktu in the Sahara desert, and it continues to migrate southward.”

Africa is one of Christianity’s fastest-growing regions. Researchers have predicted that by 2100, the vast majority of Christians — almost 80 per cent — will live in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania.

Kobia noted the rapid growth throughout the world in Pentecostal and charismatic spirituality.

He asked, “Are we open to mission from directions we have not anticipated, borne by brothers and sisters who have received gifts of the Spirit that were never monopolized by European or American missionaries?”

The meeting in Athens is the latest in a series of world mission conferences that started in 1910. It is the first to be held in a country where most Christians belong to the Eastern Orthodox church. Kobia urged “a new sense of unity” between Christians from Eastern and Western traditions.