Once evangelicals went from the U.S. to Asia, Africa and Latin America to spread the gospel. Now, reverse missionaries from the developing world are importing their own brand of Christianity.

Inside a small stone church on New York’s windswept Roosevelt Island, the voice of Pastor Olu Obed, a Nigerian immigrant, booms over the rapt audience of Caribbean Americans, whites and Hispanics.
During the nearly three-hour service, Obed dances, swoons, roams the aisles and embraces congregants. When the church band strikes up, children and adults help make the music by shaking their own tambourines and maracas.
“Nigerian people are quite spiritual—and very aggressive,” Obed said after the service. “Our belief is absolute, and that brings a level of vibrancy and commitment.”
Originally, Obed and his wife, Elsie, came to the U.S. as pastors for Nigeria’s Redeemed Christian Church of God, which caters primarily to members of the Nigerian diaspora. But a desire to share his style of worship with Americans from other backgrounds inspired him to found Day Spring Church in 2003.
Watch a lively worship service by Pastor Olu Obed at Nigerian-led Day Spring Church.Obed’s path is similar to the one being followed by thousands of “reverse missionaries,” an eclectic group of immigrant preachers from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe who are bringing their own brand of Christianity into the U.S.
Although Catholics, mainline Protestants and members of indigenous African religions are part of the movement, experts agree that the practitioners are predominantly evangelicals, especially Pentecostals.
While no one has tallied exactly how many preachers from the Southern Hemisphere are currently working in the U.S., at the very least they number in the thousands.
According to Dale Irvin, a professor at the New York Theological Seminary, the group is filling a void left by preachers from Western Europe, who are no longer coming to the U.S. in the numbers that they once did.
Over the last few years, the movement has been “growing exponentially, and it will continue to do so,” explained Scott Temple, the national director of intercultural ministers for the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal organization. He cites his church as an example: in 1990, only one African pastor led an Assembly of God church in the U.S; in 2002, there were three; and in 2004, there were 20. Today, there are over 70.
“They are themselves the products of missionaries, and they’re often very conscious of that,” said Tony Carnes, president of the Values Research Institute, who has studied churches in New York since 1985.
Carnes’s 2007 survey found 17 percent of all English-speaking New York pastors are foreign-born. “It’s the 19th-century movement coming back,” he said. At the forefront are preachers from Nigeria, Brazil, Ghana and Korea.
Nigeria’s Redeemed Christian Church of God includes over 200 U.S. churches and is currently constructing a complex on more than 500 acres of land in Texas. Brazil’s Universal Kingdom Church of God initially reached out to the Brazilian diaspora and Portuguese-speaking world, but now is seeking multiethnic congregants at churches in the U.S. and Britain.
Worldwide, South Korea ranks as the world’s second most prolific source of missionaries, trailing only the U.S., according to Edith Blumhofer, director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College.

Entrepreneurs in the Making
Reverse missionaries are following a different pattern than the one followed by the old north-to-south missionaries. However, according to Irvin, they are “creating the same effect.”
Unlike traditional Western missionaries, few of today’s immigrant pastors travel on the orders or funding of a formal church organization. And while they arrive in the U.S. as immigrants with the intention to preach, they often must first establish themselves financially by opening small businesses. Once they have a bit of economic security, they typically start by founding part-time ministries, some of which eventually grow into full-time churches.
And like many leading white evangelicals, they are often highly entrepreneurial and drawn to the independent, mega-church model.
Reverse missionaries are typically motivated by a desire to help fellow immigrants keep up cultural traditions and stay faithful to the gospel as they understood it in their home countries.
In practice, this translates into conservative interpretations of scripture and a greater focus on human rights problems in the developing world as key issues of Christian morality.
“We see ourselves as missionaries trying not necessarily to invent but to bring back spirituality,” said Rev. Jonathan Owhe, a Nigerian immigrant who in 2000 founded Brooklyn’s multiethnic Christ the Rock World Restoration International Church.
In our interactive rollover graphic, pastors from countries as diverse as Ghana and the Ukraine speak about the challenges of leading congregations in America.Many of these missionaries’ congregations grow increasingly multiethnic, primarily through intermarriage. Meanwhile, the churches often expand beyond immigrants from their pastor’s homeland by bringing in other worshipers from the same continent, creating groups that are pan-Asian or pan-African.
Some pastors, like Obed, expand their reach by aggressively courting diverse congregations. At Chicago’s Faith Tabernacle Church, a Filipino pastor leads a congregation that is mostly white and black. And at an Assembly of God in Minnesota, Kenyan immigrant Steven Siaji is “reaching Hispanics, Africans and rednecks,” Temple explained.
American-born worshippers who join these churches are often drawn to the lively qualities associated with Christianity in the developing world. And along with this characteristic energy and enthusiasm, reverse missionaries also bring a new emphasis on the literal truth of the Bible.
“There’s sort of an emotional feeling here that is good,” said Mike Hostetler, who attends Astoria Community Church in Queens, N.Y.
The congregation was created a few years ago through the collaboration of Brazilian pastor Darcy Caires and American-born pastor David Ellis. Sometimes, Hostetler said, “the fact that the pastors are from two cultures certainly enhances” the ability of congregants to find a leader they can relate to.
As their immigrant communities grow more established in the U.S., many reverse missionaries are now wondering, “what can we do next? What’s the next level?,” Carnes said.

For some immigrant pastors, that means reaching out to new groups of people; more typically, however, immigrant pastors are focused on institution building within their own ethnic communities.
Faith Bible Church, a Chinese church founded in Flushing, N.Y. in 1995, is one example.
In recent years, it has expanded to include a seminary and six additional churches serving Chinese in other parts of New York, as well as in Taiwan and Brazil. But collaboration between foreign- and American-born pastors is also growing. For example, Assemblies of God recently hired Nigerian-immigrant Samuel Asiedu to serve on its national leadership board.
And, a few immigrants, such as Oregon-based, Argentine-born Luis Palau have ascended to become stars on evangelical Christianity’s national scene.
The full impact of the growing number and strength of immigrant ministers is yet to be determined.
At least one expert believes that the biggest obstacle that might limit the influence of reverse missionaries on the evangelical establishment is not differences in theology, music style or culture.
Instead, according to Daniels, “it’s race, and it’s habits.”