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Over the past 30 years, the missionary work of Christians around the world has changed dramatically. Michael Pocock, professor at Dallas Theological Seminary and coauthor of The Changing Face of World Missions, says missions work is now leaving from nearly every country in the world and going to nearly every country in the world.

Many other issues characterize modern missions changes, including growth of interest in spiritual forces, rapid technological advances, and globalization. But perhaps the most important development is the increase of non-Western missionaries.

Majority-world missionaries could also have the most impact on world evangelization. Not only are majority-world missionaries often closer geographically and culturally to their fields, but they are also nearly equal in number to their Western counterparts, who number more than 112,000.

Ironically, the times have changed for some of the denominations that planted those churches in the majority world that are now sending missionaries.

As the Anglican Communion began debating homosexuality and the Episcopal Church elected V. Gene Robinson bishop of New Hampshire, the leading orthodox voice was Nigerian. It turned out that the 70 million-strong Nigerian church had a deafening roar that the 2 million-member Church of England couldn't ignore.

Another prime example is the Presbyterian church of South Korea. When Horace Underwood arrived on the Korean peninsula in 1886, Protestant missionaries had only served in the country for two years. But soon they saw astounding growth. They expanded from 265 church members in 1890 to 167,352 in 1910. Today, Korean Presbyterians gain three or four times as many members as their counterparts in America lose every year.

The early Korean missionaries combined evangelism with social concern as the country faced desperate poverty and the crush of foreign oppression. But Samuel Hugh Moffett, born in Korea as the son of Presbyterian missionaries, points out that later generations lost their two-fold missionary approach.

"Instead of emphasizing eternal life after death," Moffett says, "[some missionaries] wanted a theology that redeemed the millions upon millions living in misery and filth by providing the life abundant that Jesus came to give them. The challenge became to create a future in, not beyond, history, without hunger and without hate, without sickness and without tears; where men and women were all brothers and sisters together, justice rolled down like the waters, and the nations studied war no more."

It's a biblical vision, according to Moffett. It's just that the missionaries practicing it tried to build the kingdom without the King. And when they couldn't stop revolutions, holocausts, brutalities, and scandals, these missionaries couldn't help but lose their way.

Part of the problem is the church itself. Lesslie Newbigin, former missionary to India who now pastors in England, says the church has become syncretistic. "Every church is tempted to do this in its own culture, tempted to become the domestic chaplain to the nation instead of being the troublesome, prophetic, missionary voice to the nation," he says. This is true, he says, of both conservative and liberal versions of Christianity.

Despite problems with some missionary efforts, the popular image of being the chaplains to 19th-century imperialism is largely incorrect. Mark Noll writes, "Missionaries as anthropologically challenged stooges for Western imperialist expansion, commercial exploitations, and environmental destruction figure large in the type of postcolonial discourse that is too intense to pause for actual historical research."

Such research, Noll says, would show that "during the period when European powers scrambled to construct empires in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, British Protestant missionaries could be found enlisting God for the cause of imperial expansion but also employing historic Christian teaching to chastise the builders of empire; even at the height of British expansion, many missionaries (though more in the field than at home in agency headquarters) gained a strong sense of Christianity as an international force breaking free from strict European definition."

Embedded in that historic period of missionary activity were the seeds of today's majority-world missionary movement. As one missiologist tells CT in a forthcoming article, it's not that Western missions have died (newer agencies have picked up the slack of older ones), but that the majority world has caught on.

In 1997, 2,200 people gathered for the Second Ibero-American Missionary Congress (COMIBAM), a Latin American missions conference, in Acapulco, Mexico. "There has been a notable growth in the missionary consciousness of the church," Guatemalan Rudy Girn, COMIBAM '97 president, told CT. "I remember 10 years ago, it was quite rare to hear of a theological institution or local church in my city that was having a missions conference. Today in Guatemala you can find 10 conferences going on simultaneously. The church is waking up."

In 10 years between 1987 and 1997, the number of Latin American missionaries grew from 2,500 to 4,000. And church leaders say they must do better. Brazil sends more than half of the region's cross-cultural missionaries. And the country also receives missionaries who work among tribal people in the Amazon basin.

Of course, with missionaries coming and going to countries around the world, there is more potential for controversy. At a 1999 missions conference in Brazil, Peruvian missiologist Samuel Escobar said that North Americans have "yielded to the spirit of the age" in their practice of "managerial missiology."

Focusing on tasks in order to achieve quantifiable goals offers "no theological or pastoral resources to cope with the suffering and persecution involved … because it is geared to provide … guaranteed success."

Others criticized the Western approach that has "tended to turn … communication [of the gospel] into a technique where we market a product called 'salvation.' The consumer is the sinner and the marketer is the missionary."

Yet, as the missionary enterprise encompasses new perspectives, Christians can pray for and support the work of the gospel for all people.

Rob Moll is online associate editor of Christianity Today.