Introduction

Over the last century, the demographics of the Catholic Church have shifted toward the southern hemisphere where currently 70 percent of Catholics live. More broadly, Christianity has become a world religion of the non-West, as its regional balance continues to shift away from Europe where the shareof Christianity has dropped from 66 percent to only 25 percent in less than 100 years. But the movement of Christianity to the South also needs to be situated in the context of a massive population flow of migrant labor that travels in the opposite direction, bringing millions of Latin American, Asian, and African migrants to Europe and North America (Jenkins 2006; Sanneh 2008). Taken together, these two transformations are dramatically changing the linguistic and ethnic landscapes of national churches in western Europe and the United States, prompting Christian denominations – especially those responsible for the global expansion of Christianity in the last two centuries – to seriously think about the changing shape of their clergy and flock, and take actions that reflect the super-diversity (Vertovec 2007) of their congregations.

The decline in religious participation that had been predicted by secularization theories of the twentieth century only accurately foresaw the growing religious apathy observed amongst western Europeans (Berger 1999; Casanova 1994; Taylor 2007).