Sharing the Gospel in the UK: A Nigerian's perspective

Reverend Israel Olofinjana, is a Nigerian and an ordained and accredited Baptist minister who has pastored at Catford Community Church in London since September 2011. He speaks about some of the challenges of being a missionary from the Global South

CT: Your book Turning the Tables on Mission looks at the increasing phenomenon of missionaries from the Global South coming to work as missionaries to the UK. How did you come to the conclusion that such a book needed to be written?

IO: There are lots of scholars writing on this subject in universities and divinity colleges, but most of them are writing from an academic point of view, which has its place, but I felt we needed something that combined academic research and the perspective of a practitioner living the life of a missionary to this country.

The subject is still relatively new. I published a book in 2010 which is sort of an introduction to this one, called Reverse Mission, and after that book came out, conversations started and people asked questions. And one of the big questions was "is this really happening?" and so I thought that I needed to write a book to answer that question.

CT: So you encountered lots of people who didn't believe that reverse mission is happening. Why do you think that was?

IO: I can understand why there are critics of reverse mission, and the reason is we have churches in the UK that are led by Nigerians whose congregation are majority Nigerian, or a Ghanaian pastor whose church is majority Ghanaian, or Jamaican or Chinese etc. So when people see things like that, they ask questions. They say how can that really be reverse mission? If a Nigerian is reaching out to Nigerians, that's not reverse mission, that's just reaching out to your own people. You're not going beyond your own culture. You're not reaching out to the white indigenous. And that is true, and I have seen cases of that, and there are many reasons for that. But there is another picture, and that picture is of pastors from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean or South America, and they are leading either white majority churches or multicultural churches. And so when you have cases like that, you can see something is going on here. Keep reading