Two thousand years ago, the center of gravity of the Christian faith sat in Jerusalem. Centuries later, the Mediterranean world. Then Europe. Then west across the Atlantic. The church historian Andrew Walls called this Christianity’s serial expansion — the faith never stays where we found it. It keeps migrating to new peoples, new languages, new continents.
That should sober us. Every generation has assumed the gospel’s future would look like its present — that how we do mission today is how it will always be done. Mission history says otherwise. Roland Allen saw it a century ago: the church expands spontaneously, not through our machinery but through ordinary believers carrying the gospel where the Spirit leads. David Bosch traced the paradigm shifts — the apostolic age, Christendom, the missionary movement, the post-colonial world — and showed that every era forced the church to unlearn as much as it learned.
Jesus gave us the pattern: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). Death and resurrection — not preservation — is the engine of mission. At Antioch the church fasted, listened, and sent: “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them” (Acts 13:2). Paul and Barnabas planted churches, “committed them to the Lord” (Acts 14:23), and moved on — trusting the gospel to take root in new soil.
Today 3.58 billion people still live in unreached people groups (Joshua Project, Feb 2026). The center is still moving.
So here is the question: is your church clinging to where Christianity was — or being formed for where God is taking it?
