Recently a friend informed me that missiology is really just “a white man’s theology.” As a student of missiology and a woman, I felt the need to counter this. Yet what is missiology? Well, my friend was right that it began with white men taking Christianity, commerce and civilisation beyond Europe. This is exactly what missiology endeavours to study. It is a critical reflection on theories of mission, research into mission and critique on how mission is done.

This may sound rather theoretical, but the current Lambeth Conference, with its theme of empowering bishops for mission, demonstrates the importance of missiology in how we live out the Gospel in our world.

Current missiological studies now identify migration as a key mission issue. One in five Europeans migrated between 1800 and 1925, the largest migration movement in history. This coincided with the high tide of the Western missionary movement as well as Empire. These movements unleashed powerful forces of change which we have felt the impact of in Europe, and in particular in England, ever since.

We are now realising the huge religious implications of this. Migrants from the Global South or Majority World (so called because in terms of geography and demography they represent the majority) are generally religiously devout. They challenge our secularised outlook and understanding of liberal democracy. Suddenly we are confronted with Muslim calls to prayer and are bewildered by an archbishop who publicly tries to make sense of Sharia. It is now widely recognised that a seismic shift has taken place in global Christianity. The heartlands of the Christian Church are no longer in the West, but in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia. The recent Gafcon (Global Anglican Future Conference) may well be an indicator of this. It reportedly represented nearly one half of the Anglican Communion with bishops and church leaders from the majority world leading the way. They claim that this conference signals a move towards a post-colonial world where the Archbishop of Canterbury is not the only arbiter of what it means to be Anglican.

This shift means that these cultures are now firmly part of what it means to be Christian in England today. What is our response as part of the Establishment Church? What can we learn from these new migrants? Can we welcome this wave of migrants whose presence has contributed to an enormous increase in the number of churches? Many of these churches display a vitality, joy and dynamism that we are not used to in the Church of England. This influx of migrants also means that the face of Christianity in England is becoming increasingly non-white — the largest the largest group of churches in the UK is Nigerian led.

Now we are truly in a situation where mission has become a multidirectional phenomenon and Christianity a polycentric faith. These new migrants engage in mission around them very differently from the days of Empire. They lack the complicated and ambiguous relationship with colonial authorities, the territorial and one-directional approach to mission, the support of parachurch structures, the perceived attitudes of cultural superiority. What they do have is a focus on spiritual power, a strong belief in the supernatural, a moral and ethical conservatism, a clear belief in the authority of the Scriptures, a sensitivity towards injustice and a communal apprehension of the Christian faith. Perhaps they may offer us fresh insights helping us to reimagine missiology from a global perspective. Perhaps they also model a joy in worship, a dependency on God and a gratitude for daily life that are lost in our corporate memory.

Christianity is not only becoming increasingly non-white; it is also becoming increasingly female. The average Anglican in our world today is black, female and in her late teens or early twenties. So, I must tell my friend that today missiology is no longer a “white man’s theology”.

Dr Cathy Ross is the J. V. Taylor Fellow in Missiology, Oxford University; she and Andrew Walls edited Mission in the 21st Century, Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission (DLT, 2008)