The landscape of world missions is changing dramatically. I testify to this from my past 12 years of work in the Great Lakes region of East Africa and in Northeast Asia, including the past 4 years living in and traveling throughout Asia with an international Christian agency. The challenges I see are a sharp contrast to what I experienced growing up in South Korea as a child of Presbyterian missionaries.

In upcoming posts I will name nine critical challenges facing world missions today, ranked in importance, with an accent on implications for the church in the U.S. I chose this list after reviewing the past year of articles in the magazines Christianity Today and Christian Century and the journals International Bulletin of Mission Research and Missiology. Much that I will name has been overlooked or underreported. If some seem like impressions from the margins, then if missiologist Andrew Walls is right, watching for new vitality in Christianity is to watch for shifting “heartlands” of Christian witness, where the margins become the new centers.

Following is part one – critical challenges #9, #8, and #7.

#9 The new global reach and power of China

About ten years ago in airports in Africa, I began noticing as many people from China as Americans in short-term church mission groups. The Chinese were on mission too – to build highways, buildings, infrastructure, and extend China’s global reach. These days, when I am with colleagues doing church or NGO work in Africa or Asia, they testify that Chinese presence and power is a major contextual influence and is becoming more visible and visceral than the current American version. Right alongside “Make America Great Again” has come “Make China Great Again.” This new Chinese power is a mixed reality. Expansive power invariably brings a value system with it, and there are disturbing trends of social control and repression in China. World mission will increasingly have to wrestle with the unique dynamics of China’s extensive global reach.

#8 Influential Christian mission from South Korea and China to Asia and to Africa

The demographic shift of Christianity’s center from Global North to Global South may be old news, but the signs of that change coming from South Korea and China are dramatic. Growing up in South Korea, there was no such thing as a “Korean MK” (missionary kid), and I remember my surprise a couple years ago when I first saw a photo of African children surrounding a missionary who was not from the U.S., but Korea. The growth is astounding: Today over 20,000 South Korean Christian missionaries serve in over 150 countries. They are dedicated, their numbers are increasing, and their children populate international schools in many developing countries and are even subjects of research. In Uganda I have met Koreans on mission trips and in Tanzania I walked past a Korean Methodist Church being planted. Our small Korean church helps support a missionary in Laos, and last year members went on a short-term mission trip there.

While growing government pressure on the church in China is alarming, by 2020 China is projected to have the world’s third-largest Christian population (following the U.S. and Brazil). I see signs of the trends of the increased Chinese mission engagement in countries closed to Westerners where Chinese Christians who go there to serve quietly and faithfully.

One driver of increased missions from South Korea and China– a major difference from East Africa – is growing wealth in this part of Asia (three consecutive Olympics will be Pyeongchang 2018, Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022). Airports throughout Asia are filled with Chinese and Koreans busy with tourism and business. And consider this astounding fact: World Vision is one of the world’s largest Christian organizations (annual budget over $3 billion), and South Korea — a country of only 50 million — raises the second-most money in the world after the U.S. (the CEO of World Vision Korea was a top executive at one of the country’s largest business conglomerates).

#7 Warning Sign: The decline of the South Korean church success story and the challenge of individual enrichment

There is another side to what missiologists have long regarded as a South Korean success story of exploding Christian vitality and growth. As a restaurant owner put it to me once, “In the old days the church here asked ‘what is wrong with society?’ Today society asks ‘what is wrong with the church?’” Pastoral and church scandals over money, power, and sex have gained headlines and eroded moral and ethical trust. Perhaps the greatest decline is among younger Koreans, with campus ministries facing fewer and fewer participants. Major problems I hear named include mainstream church prosperity, hierarchical power, and lack of attention to social injustices (one reason there is a growing ear for Anabaptist theology focused on simplicity, deep discipleship, lay leadership, and peacemaking). There is a warning sign here: South Korean Christianity has moved from small minority to exploding growth and social influence to decline – all in one generation. Was growth too fast and too shallow and, if so, what can be learned from this? Is this decline a sign of what Brian Stanley (in his acclaimed 2018 book Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History) contends will be the greatest challenge that will face the 21^st century church, namely, the vulnerability of sections of church in both North and South “to accommodate the faith to ideologies of individual enrichment”?