This post continues my series on nine critical challenges on the changing landscape of world Christian missions. In the first post I named three realities (rankings 9, 8, and 7), in the second post three more (rankings 6, 5, and 4). This post is what I consider the third most important critical challenge (to be followed by the top two).

There has been much recent buzz about Christian decline in the U.S.  But an overlooked reality on the world missions landscape indicates the New York Times is right in saying any collapse is overstated. Here is the prevailing narrative of Christian mission decline, via a 2018 Atlantic magazine article:

In 1970, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, there were 240,000 foreign Christian missionaries worldwide. In 2000, that number had grown to 440,000. And by 2013, the center was discussing in a report the trend of ‘reverse mission, where younger churches in the Global South are sending missionaries to Europe,’ even as the numbers being sent from the Global North were ‘declining significantly.’ The report noted that nearly half of the top 20 mission-sending countries in 2010 were in the Global South, including Brazil, India, the Philippines, and Mexico.

But here is another reality: Forbes’ 2018 list of the top 25 largest U.S. charities includes many U.S. Christian nonprofits working internationally. Furthermore, six of those Christian nonprofits together received $5.6 billion dollars of income from U.S. donors: Habitat for Humanity ($2 billion), Compassion International ($891 million), Samaritans Purse ($759 million), World Vision ($729 million from the U.S. alone), MAP International ($596 million), and Cru ($598 million). Today Cru alone employs 25,000 missionaries in 190 countries. And World Vision is often considered one of the world’s five most powerful development NGOs, with 40,000 staff and income of $2.76 billion dollars world-wide.

As Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow puts it about the dominant narrative of U.S. mission decline, “Sometimes what everybody knows is wrong.” The real story is not decline but the replacement of shrinking traditional U.S. denomination-based missionary “sending” (Methodist, Presbyterian, etc.) by enormous international Christian nonprofits which operate independently of denominations. The new face of American global missions powers is post-denominational, led not by pastor-types but by CEO-types (the president of World Vision had executive roles at Google Motorola, Sky TV, and other digital businesses).

Perhaps the best account of the global power of U.S.-based Christian nonprofits is the book Beyond the Congregation: The World of Christian Nonprofits by sociologist Christopher Scheitle. In contrast to what he calls the “inefficient nature of churches,” Scheitle says Christian non-profits have developed a “highly rationalized business model” which “allows parachurch organizations to produce more goods and services faster, more efficiently, and more predictably.” According to Scheitle, the old age of the inefficient U.S. missionary church movement has been replaced by the vast global results of “the bureaucratic model.”

But are these trends good news? In his book Playing God Andy Crouch warns that Christian charity and development work has become “one of the great god-playing benevolent enterprises of our time.” And church historian Mark Noll has contended that “No body of Christians has been as capable at exercising power as American believers, though few have been more reluctant to address questions of power head on.” But for better or worse, U.S.-based global Christian nonprofits are redefining “mission” and “missionary.”