Faith in Africa

A tale of joyful numbers

Many churches in North America and Western Europe have seen their membership dwindle for years. But throughout the Third World, and particularly in Africa, Christianity is undergoing the largest numerical expansion in church history. David Barrett, a Nairobi-based researcher who is completing a major multivolume work on world religious trends, estimates that more than 6 million Africans are added to Christianity every year, at an astonishing rate of 16,600 believers a day.

Much of the increase is simply the result of the rise in population, but Anglican Barrett reckons that two-fifths of the total are converts. He sees "a grassroots turning away from local tribal religions to a universal religion." Besides Christianity, of course, there is a second universal religion in Africa--Islam--and Barrett figures its continent-wide increase at 4,784,000 people a year, of whom 6% are converts from other faiths. All of the church groups are prospering, he reports: Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, "African Independent" and heterodox sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses.

The decline of colonial protection has not discouraged the growth of Christianity; neither has the existence of those hostile regimes that have often replaced colonialism. The spread "is true of the entire tropical belt of Africa from east to west," says Barrett. And southward too, except that growth is slower in South Africa. There "Christianity is still associated with white Afrikanerdom.''

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