In 1910, Protestant leaders gathered in Edinburgh for the World Missionary Conference, the meeting that would shape a century of global evangelism. Africa sent only one delegate.The continent was understood as a destination for Christianity and a place to receive the gospel. Africa was not seen as a source of the gospel, nor was it seen as capable of reshaping it.
A little over a century later, Africa is home to more than 630 million Christians and rising. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is projected to overtake the United States as the country with the most Christians on earth. The continent is the only place where the number of Catholic seminarians is increasing. The largest single province in the Anglican Communion is not in England. It is in Nigeria. And African-founded churches now operate in more than 190 countries, including outposts in the former colonial capitals that once dispatched missionaries to the continent.
The shift might sound like a future trend, but it is a present day reality. It is already reshaping every major branch of Christianity in measurable ways and, in some cases, provoking deep divisions.
The Numbers That Changed Everything
The scale of Africa’s Christian growth is difficult to overstate. In 1900, there were roughly 10 million Christians on the continent. Today, that number exceeds 630 million. By mid-century, projections from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity suggest sub-Saharan Africa will be home to more Christians than any other region on earth.
Driving this is a combination of high fertility rates and sustained religious commitment. In surveys, African nations consistently report some of the highest rates of religious observance anywhere in the world. Countries like Ethiopia, Malawi, and Niger have all recorded rates of 99 percent. As Philip Jenkins, the historian of global Christianity, has argued, high fertility is characterised by high faith. The parts of the world where populations are growing fastest are also the parts where Christianity is most fervently practised.
Africa’s demographic weight is translating directly into institutional power. In the 2025 papal conclave that followed the death of Pope Francis, eighteen African cardinals were among the electors, representing roughly 13 percent of the cardinal electors, even though Africa accounts for 20 percent of the global Catholic population. Several African cardinals, including Fridolin Ambongo Besungu of the DRC and Peter Turkson of Ghana, were considered serious contenders for the papacy. The conclave ultimately elected an American, Robert Francis Prevost, as Pope Leo XIV, but the conversation about when, not whether, an African will lead the Catholic Church has permanently shifted.
Anglicanism: Africa’s Reformation
Nowhere is African influence more dramatic or more disruptive than in the Anglican Communion. A theological disagreement has evolved into something closer to a constitutional crisis, with African churches at its centre.
The fault line is sexuality. When the Episcopal Church in the United States consecrated Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, conservative Anglican leaders, predominantly from Africa and Asia, declared it a departure from biblical teaching. The formation of GAFCON (the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans) in Jerusalem in 2008 formalised their opposition. Over time, the movement grew beyond its original role as a pressure group.
In October 2025, GAFCON’s chairman, Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda, declared that the movement was renaming itself the Global Anglican Communion and would no longer recognise the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The trigger was the appointment of Sarah Mullally as Canterbury’s first female archbishop, a figure GAFCON opposed not primarily on grounds of gender, but because of her support for blessing same-sex couples. Member churches were instructed not to participate in any meetings convened by Canterbury, not to contribute financially to the Anglican Consultative Council, and to strip their constitutional documents of any reference to communion with the Church of England.
In March 2026, GAFCON convened in Abuja, Nigeria. It was hosted by the Church of Nigeria, the largest Anglican province in the world with approximately 25 million baptised members. About 500 delegates from conservative provinces across Africa, Asia, and South America attended what organisers called a “kairos moment.” The assembly ultimately declined to elect a formal rival to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It did, however, establish a new Global Anglican Council and publish the Abuja Affirmation, cementing its institutional independence.
The scale of the influence is evident in the numbers. GAFCON claims to represent 85 percent of the world’s practising Anglicans, though peer-reviewed research places closer to 45 to 54 percent. Even so, it represents an enormous share. The Church of Nigeria alone has more active members than the Church of England. The Church of Uganda sent 52 delegates to Abuja, including 41 bishops.
Meanwhile, the historic Anglican Communion has responded with its own restructuring proposals, designed to make the communion “less Canterbury-centric” and to share leadership with primates from other nations. However, it remains unclear whether decentralisation can bridge a divide that is ultimately theological.
Catholicism: Growth, Influence, and the Long Game
Africa’s relationship with the Catholic Church is less confrontational than its relationship with Anglicanism, but no less transformative.
The most recent data from the Annuario Pontificio, released in 2026, confirms that Africa remains the Catholic Church’s fastest-growing region. The continent’s Catholic population, estimated at 288 million, now comprises more than 20 percent of the global total. More significantly, Africa is one of the few regions where the number of priests and seminarians is trending upward. In many other parts of the world, vocations are declining. This means that the future of Catholic clergy is, to a significant degree, African.
This growth is already visible in the West. In the United States, for example, African-born priests have become increasingly common in parishes across Nebraska, New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado, filling vacancies that American-born clergy cannot. Churches that once sent missionaries to Africa are now receiving clergy from the continent.
Theologically, African Catholicism tends to be conservative on questions of sexuality and family, aligning more closely with the Church’s traditional teachings than many European or North American Catholics. During the synodal processes initiated by Pope Francis, African bishops consistently pushed back against proposals to liberalise the Church’s stance on homosexuality and divorce. Cardinal Ambongo of the DRC emerged as one of the most influential conservative voices in the global Church, openly expressing disappointment that the 2025 conclave did not produce an African pope while simultaneously urging African Catholics to engage the new papacy constructively.
The structural demands from African Catholic leadership extend beyond symbolic recognition. They include greater representation in Vatican appointments, more investment in African seminaries, educational institutions, and healthcare systems, and a larger role in doctrinal debates and global synods.
Methodism: The Schism Africa Forced
The United Methodist Church’s split over LGBTQ inclusion is one of the most dramatic denominational ruptures of the twenty-first century. African Methodists were central to making it happen.
For decades, the UMC’s global membership gave conservative voices, particularly from Africa and the Philippines, sufficient votes to block liberalisation. At the 2019 Special General Conference, African delegates joined American conservatives to pass the “Traditional Plan,” which reinforced bans on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ordination. When the pandemic delayed subsequent conferences, conservative frustration intensified. The Global Methodist Church was launched in 2022 as a breakaway denomination committed to theological orthodoxy on sexuality.
By early 2024, more than 7,600 American congregations, a quarter of all US United Methodist churches, had disaffiliated. Then, at the 2024 General Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, the remaining UMC voted overwhelmingly to lift its LGBTQ bans. The response from Africa was swift, and the Ivory Coast conference, the largest African unit, with over a million members, voted to leave the UMC entirely. Four Nigerian conferences followed, joining the Global Methodist Church. By February 2026, the GMC had surpassed 7,000 congregations worldwide, with much of its recent growth coming from Africa.
The consequences have been severe. In Nigeria, the schism turned violent in late 2024, with a United Methodist member fatally shot and two children killed when homes were set ablaze in confrontations between the two factions. The UMC has since ratified a regionalization plan, approved by 91.6 percent of delegates. The plan divides the denomination into four equal regions of Africa, Europe, the Philippines, and the United States, each with the authority to set its own standards on ordination and marriage. It is an explicit acknowledgment that the denomination can only survive if African churches are free to maintain traditional positions that American Methodists have abandoned.
Pentecostalism: Africa’s Export Engine
As the mainline denominations negotiate their internal fractures, African Pentecostalism has been building a global missionary movement of its own.
Nigeria’s Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded in 1952 and transformed under the leadership of Pastor Enoch Adeboye, now operates in more than 190 countries with over 40,000 branches worldwide. Its stated mission is to plant a church within a five-minute walk or drive of every person on earth. In the United Kingdom alone, RCCG has more than 800 parishes and is expanding into small towns like Knebworth, a village north of London with fewer than 5,000 residents. Winners’ Chapel, founded by Bishop David Oyedepo, has similarly spread across five continents.
This expansion represents what scholars call “reverse mission”, the sending of missionaries from the formerly evangelised world back to the countries that once evangelised it. As one researcher at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary has noted, Africa now has the largest concentration of Christians in the world. In 1880, the West African preacher Edward Blyden predicted that Africa would one day become “the spiritual conservatory of the world ” , a prediction that is now materialising.
Even so, the cultural translation remains imperfect. African megachurch models, characterised by charismatic celebrity pastors, prosperity theology, intense worship, and hierarchical leadership, do not always transfer smoothly to secularised Western contexts. As Andrew Davies of the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion has observed, the African “big man” model of church leadership can be a barrier in settings that expect more egalitarian structures. But the ambition is clear, and churches such as RCCG and Winners' Chapel continue to expand their international presence.
What Comes Next: The African Century of Christianity
By 2050, at least six of the world's twenty most populous countries are expected to be in sub-Saharan Africa. They include Nigeria, the DRC, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya, countries marked by high fertility and high levels of faith. Research projections to 2075, published in the International Bulletin of Mission Research in January 2026, confirm the continuation of Christianity’s shift to the Global South, with the DRC eventually replacing the United States as the country with the most Christians anywhere on earth.
In practice, this means that beyond demographics, African Christians will also increasingly determine the character of global Christianity. The theological conservatism of African churches on questions of sexuality, gender, and family will continue to collide with the liberalising tendencies of Western denominations. The institutional structures inherited from the colonial and missionary era, which placed London, Rome, and New York at the centre of Christian authority, will continue to be challenged by churches whose memberships now far exceed those of many Western counterparts.
But African Christianity’s influence goes beyond the culture wars. The continent’s churches are increasingly shaping conversations about economic justice, climate, migration, and post-colonial reparation. The African Bible Impact Summit, held in Kigali in February 2025, explicitly called for an “African hermeneutic”, a way of reading Scripture through the lens of African experiences and worldviews while remaining grounded in biblical theology. Bishop Goodwill Shana, the then president of the Association of Evangelicals in Africa, told the 2025 General Assembly in Nairobi that African churches have a responsibility to shape the future of global Christianity. “We cannot inherit the centre of global Christianity and repeat the same colonial patterns, the same compromises with power, or the same neglect of the poor.”
That call for transformation may be the most consequential contribution African Christianity makes in the coming decades. The continent has the numbers and is steadily building the institutions. The remaining question is whether the global Church will adapt to the reality that many of the conversations shaping its future are increasingly taking place in Africa.
In 1910, Africa sent one delegate to Edinburgh. Today, African churches are among the most influential forces shaping global Christianity.
