Saving the Soviets
Whenever I speak on global Christianity, I can count on getting at least one question along the lines of “So do you think Africans might start sending missionaries to convert Europe or America someday?” My response usually begins with the story of Sunday Adelaja, which is so radically counterintuitive for anyone brought up during the cold war as to sound like the start of a bad joke: “Did you hear about the African who tried to start a church in the Soviet Union?”
The reality, though, is anything but trivial. Though he has gone through some recent difficulties, Sunday Adelaja remains a startling personification of worldwide shifts in Christianity.
His story begins with a very different kind of global evangelism, namely the efforts of the Soviet Union to support anti-imperialist causes worldwide. In pursuit of its mission, it recruited thousands of young people from what used to be called the Third World, educating them at Soviet universities in order to send them back to their home countries as faithful adherents of communism.
