SWEDISH MISSIOLOGICAL THEMES SVENSK MISSIONSTIDSKRIFT

500 Tormod Engelsviken
An age-old form of missionary service going back to the apostle Paul himself
is “tentmaking”. It has become increasingly important and in many cases,
it is the only possible form of mission in countries that are closed to mission
or have “restricted access”. These missionaries, who may be employed by
commercial enterprises or governments and serve in a variety of “secular”
professions, may use their natural contacts and their leisure time for
establishing and maintaining an evangelistic ministry.
A third type of “new” missionary is the “non-residential missionary” who
resides in one country and works in another moving in and out on a tourist
visa. This is also not very new but has taken on a new meaning and importance
as doors are closed to many countries for ordinary professional missionaries.
The most radical change that has happened to the global church’s total
missionary work force is without doubt the enormous move towards mission
from the non-western world to practically all parts of the world. This has to
do with the shift of the centre of gravity of the total number of Christians
from the North (Europe, North-America, Australia, New Zealand) to the
South (Asia, Africa, Latin-America) that occurred in the last third of the
twentieth century. 51 But it is not only a result of a quantitative shift; it also
has to do with the quality of the churches in the South; their missional
character and zeal, and their strong Pentecostal and charismatic features.
According to some estimates 52 that are necessarily uncertain, there were
75,000 missionaries in 1980. Eighty per cent of them came from the North. 53
In the year 2000, the number had increased to approximately 300,000 and
now only 45 per cent came from the North. This trend continues and will
eventually lead to a strong dominance by the Southern church in the mission
of the future. To phrase it as an answer to the question in the title of this
article: The missionary task of the church will in the future for the most
part be taken care of by missionaries from the South. Several important
questions may then be raised: What does this mean for the future of mission?
51 See to this e.g. the controversial book by Philip Jenkins, Jenkins 2002
52 Brierley 1997:88-89
53 I do believe this percentage is too high. Cross-cultural missionaries within countries in
the South are not a new phenomenon but have probably both accompanied missionaries
from the North from the very beginning and worked on their own. A glorious example is
the cross-cultural Ethiopian mission in the nineteenth century to the Oromo, Arén 1978:
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