The Next Great-Awakening Will Likely Begin in Immigrant Churches

Church-Decline in the West is Not the Crisis It’s Made Out To Be

“Human migration and the reality of a globalized world is also short circuiting the secularist myth.” Says Australian sociologist and pastor, Mark Sayers, “Religion may be declining in pockets of the West, but it is booming globally, growing in Africa, South America, Oceania, and Asia. Declining birth rates in the West are generating policies of large-scale immigration, which brings migrants into the West, who arrive with their cultures and also their religious faiths.” (Mark Sayers – Reappearing Church)

You’ve heard it all before. It has become the tired mantra of our beleaguered western church: “We’re a Post-Christian society!”, “The Church is dying!”, “Young people are abandoning the pews!”. While the narrative of church-decline can be compelling, especially to those who see friends and colleagues abandoning the faith, or “reinterpreting” faith beyond recognition, it’s time we applied a more critical eye on our church-crisis rhetoric. Before you absorb another frightening post or article about the “dying church in the west”, consider what kind of church is dying.

The stats and stories people draw upon for today’s church-decline narratives tend to use obsolete metrics borrowed from a different chapter in modern church history. They extrapolate a faulty model of today’s broader Church from: mainline denomination membership, Sunday morning attendance in church facilities, religious voting blocks, and almost always with a squarely western demographic. What is often left out are variables like: the house-church movement, illegal and non-voting Christian populations, and socially disconnected immigrants. On top of this faulty metric is the disastrous assumption that the surface-level mainstream church institution we see in the west is the benchmark for health and aliveness! 

Our globalized and highly mobile modern world is more complicated than this kind of one-dimensional number-crunching allows for. While pockets of Post-Christian decay exist among the western 1%, there is a world of vibrant faith knocking at our door. While some conservative Christians have chosen to see immigration as a threat to the church, I believe it could be the catalyst we need to see revival. While new arrivals do increase the amount of non-Christian religions in places like the UK, U.S., and Australia, they also bring a new type of Christian, one the west desperately needs. Reformed author and scholar, Wesley Granberg-michaelson says: 

Immigration to the U.S. is having its most dramatic religious effects on America’s Christian population: an estimated 60 percent of all present immigrants arriving in the U.S. are Christian. Much has been written about the way that growing numbers of “millennials” are walking away from the church. Yet while millennials are walking out the front door of U.S. congregations, immigrant Christian communities are appearing right around the corner, and sometimes knocking at the back door. And they may hold the key to vitality for American Christianity. (1)

Immigration has only increased since this quote was written back in 2013. Today, the percentage of foreign-born immigrants in the U.S. has not been higher since 1890, making up 13.7% of the total population (2). That’s not even including second-generation immigrants! But how does all this affect us as native-born Christians? Because immigrant Christians have something the western church hasn’t had for centuries. 

The Next Great-Awakening Will Likely Begin in Immigrant Churches

Recently, I was working with an African congregation in St. Paul Minnesota, a geographic hub for many African immigrants to the U.S.. Through my conversations and interactions with the pastor and his congregants, I began to see first-hand the kind of faith and church community many American pastors only dream of seeing in their own spiritually paralyzed churches. 

While no church is perfect, regardless of the culture, I found it impossible to ignore how this small African congregation nestled in a modest Minnesota suburb excelled in places where wealthy American churches struggle. Here are just a few things I noticed flourishing in their church: Community involvement, welcoming outsiders, consistent reverence and application of Scripture, pastoral involvement in individual’s lives, strong belief in the supernatural, mingling of old and young generations, and the regular practice of spiritual disciplines corporately and individually. 

Above all these healthy qualities, the one most powerful to me was how they prayed. They really wanted to pray. The passion and desperation in their voices when they began to shout to God hit me heavy in the chest every time. I remember, every day they had a “prayer line” which they would call to join the church in prayer together, even while they were apart. If uninterrupted, they could literally pray without ceasing, eager not only to talk to their Father in heaven, but for Him to come and act. There was always an expectation for God to answer, and always a Psalms-like ease with expressing passionate emotion and praise to God. Intercessory prayer, fasting, and vigils were second nature to them, and came not as novelties, but as necessities to the Christian life.

It reminded me of things I had heard pastor and evangelist Leonard Ravenhill preach about. Ravenhill believed that the only thing keeping the west from experiencing another awakening was our tacit disbelief in the power of prayer. Few can pray as zealously and ceaselessly as those who have experienced the trials of displacement and reintegration. This is a resource we must not ignore in the west, because it’s one we lack on a pandemic level. We need immigrant leaders, not just to teach us how to better structure our churches, but to teach us how to pray again.

There is a pattern to revivals. Be it the Great Awakening, the Welsh Revival, or the Azusa Street Revival, every movement of God begins with a Christian minority desperately seeking God in prayer. There are few today quite so overlooked as the Christian immigrant, and like any resilient plant left overlooked, it will flourish and spread. 

Don’t Be Fooled. God Has Always Done It This Way.

When we look at our church-growth schemes, leadership paradigms, or even when we review church history, most Christians today blow right past a cornerstone principle in what Jesus taught. It’s a principle present in all His teachings, with His choice of the disciples, with His parables about the Kingdom of God, and even with His incarnation as a whole. It’s the principle of the first being last and the last being first (Matt. 20:16). 

Those God uses to reshape history for the purposes of His Kingdom are exactly those who the world sees as weak, fringe, obscure, and lowly. A church of Syrian refugees led by a pastor who works at an Amazon warehouse may appear to worldly eyes as the most insignificant and non-influential kind of church—but Scripture tells us over and again that God uses exactly these kinds of people. From Abraham to Joseph to Moses to David to the prophets, to Peter, God has always used those with the least resources and the most faith to bring His Kingdom down to earth. Why would it be any different now? 

So don’t buy into the fear-driven narrative of church-decline. If we believe the Church has to be the same as it was twenty years ago or it’s “dead”, then we haven’t really learned what the church is yet. The church is not a place, and it’s not even limited to being a body of individuals. It is Christ’s eternal body, a manifestation on earth of His presence among humankind, and He tells us not even the gates of hell can stand against it (Col. 1:18; Matt. 16:18). “If we look at history, every generation brings another group or government, or philosophy that attempts to control, destroy or dismiss the church – but all have failed. Jesus promised that the church, although severely tested at times, would always prevail.” (3)

There have always been faithful remnants who have not bended the knee to Babylon, but right now we need to change where we’re looking to see this remnant in the west. It may be our western-dominated church structure is doomed to deteriorate, but this is not the end of the church, it is time for us to adapt to the new environment God is calling us all into, one where we cannot ignore our neighbor and the “foreigner dwelling among you” (Lev. 19:34). 

If your megachurch closes its doors next week, I guarantee there’s a small Nigerian congregation just a block down eager to take you in. Instead of scraping our knuckles bare to try to keep secularized Americans in the seats, why not turn to the African, South-American, and Polynesian immigrants who actually want to be there? The west needs Christians dedicated to prayer, community, and sacrifice if we are ever to rise above survival amid the tide of secularism—and I have a hopeful suspicion that faithful Christian immigrants are the key.