ShareThisPresident Ronald Reagan's secretary of education, alarmed at the erosion of religious faith in America, once remarked that we were becoming "the kind of country we used to send missionaries to."
William Bennett's prediction is being realized.
Newsweek celebrated Easter this year with a cover story lamenting "The Rise and Fall of Christian America."
Meanwhile, The New York Times served up a lengthy article, "Mission From Africa," that detailed how foreign-born missionaries are meeting with success in re-Christianizing the United States.
Andrew Rice, reporting in the Times, describes how our nation's religion revival is being led by African evangelists. Even the Catholic Church in America is sustained by importing priests and seminarians from Third World nations.
The revival is spearheaded by African Pentecostal missionaries. Ironically, the Pentecostal movement originated in the United States in 1906 in a shabby church in a Los Angeles ghetto, where a black preacher attracted a multiracial congregation to worship with high emotion. Since then, Pentecostal Christianity has grown to 600 million members, most of them in Third World nations.
Today the movement has returned in triumph to its source, with a view to reviving and restoring Christian faith here. Despite the cultural and racial makeup of the missionaries and their heavily accented sermons, they are succeeding.
Across the board, there are signs that the Christian faith thrives in Africa as nowhere else. During the 20th century, the Christian population of that continent grew from 10 million to 360 million, and could exceed 700 million by 2025.
Today there are fewer than 1 million practicing Anglicans in England, where the church was founded, but 20 million adherents in Nigeria alone.
When local congregations broke with the Episcopal Church in America over homosexuality, they retained their standing in the worldwide Anglican community by attaching themselves to dioceses as far away as Uganda.
American Catholics are already being served by priests from countries formerly evangelized by U.S. missionaries. One of six of all U.S. diocesan priests and one-third of seminarians are foreign-born. The largest Catholic seminary is in Nigeria.
Three of every four Americans still describe themselves as Christian. Perhaps half that number take their faith for granted. Most remain inclined to believe, but lack the conviction and enthusiasm to maintain practicing the faith of our fathers.
If that's the case, we don't really need to be re-converted, but only revived. And who better to restore the faith of Americans than those people to whom we sent missionaries in the first place.
(David Yount's latest book is "Celebrating the Single Life: Keys to Successful Living on Your Own" (Praeger). He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount31(at)verizon.net.)
AMAZING GRACE
