Toward a Missiology of Migration and Transnationality

I write this introduction sitting in the living room of a Mennonite pastor’s home in the small village of Somanya, Ghana, forty-five minutes outside of Accra, the capital. The pastor, two friends, and I spent the morning in lively discussion about the church in its local context and its place in the world. The realities of migration and youth were a significant part of our conversation. We noticed the abundance of children and youth in Africa, where the median age is 19.7 years.¹ And beyond Africa, of the 70.8 million displaced people around the world (including 25.9 million refugees), over half are under the age of eighteen.² Transnationality, religion, migration, and youth: how might these realities inform and transform missiology?

One of the paramount needs of missiology in the twenty-first century is to articulate the missio dei in a world where, more than ever before, people are on the move. The largest Anabaptist communions in the world—in Congo and Ethiopia—are engaged in culture-crossing missions at the same time as many of their members live in North America and Europe. These Anabaptists from the Global South are planting churches, engaging in missional activities wherever they find themselves, and joining Mennonite church bodies. LMC—a fellowship of Anabaptist churches—for instance, has member congregations whose members are part of African, Caribbean, and Latino diasporas. What missiology will guide us toward this reality of a transnational church of Christ-followers fulfilling Christ’s radical call to love God and neighbor?

For typical white North American Anabaptists, a reflection on their history of migration read through the lens of growing transnationalism may help us develop such a missiology relevant for our time. In this vein, Matthew Krabill and Allison Norton call for missiology to “move beyond strategies that privilege western agency and action to engage with the complexities of changing global processes, acknowledging that Christianity in the west will be increasingly associated with diaspora populations.”³

The challenges and opportunities presented by migration and transnationality—issues that touch all the nations of the world—affect youth disproportionately. Those of us meeting in the pastor’s home knew of such stories firsthand. We noted, for instance, the story of one young man from the village of Somanya who acquired a tourist visa against the community’s counsel and went to North America to attempt to find work, only to realize that without papers he could not succeed. Eventually, the church raised money to fly him home. He was one of the “fortunate” ones. Oppressive conditions of injustice and hopelessness cause some youth to risk all—for example, entering rubber rafts to cross the Mediterranean for an uncertain future in Europe. These realities have not yet received adequate attention from missiologists.

Jehu Hanciles lays the groundwork for a missiological look at migration and its potential to impact Western churches.⁴ And Matthew Krabill’s dissertation, “Menno Was a Migrant with No Headquarters: The Polycentric Ecclesial Existence of African Immigrant Mennonite Congregations in LA,” describes African immigrant churches within the North American Mennonite church.⁵ But by and large, the impact and changing realities of migration and transnationalism remain under-researched within missiology, with only a limited number of journal articles or monographs addressing these issues. The current context demands a fresh missiology informed by the wealth of material available in anthropological studies and the realities of a transnational world—a missiology that equips the church to fulfill Jesus’s commission to make disciples.

In this article, I hope to contribute to research on such a missiology—focusing particularly on youth, who are disproportionately affected by migration and whose value is often overlooked—by refining the conceptualizations of “youth” and “transnationalism” and reviewing a selection of relevant literature. Conceptualizing youth and their religious commitments in a globalized world where migration and transnationality are the experience of increasingly more significant portions of society is an important lens for missiology. This review focuses on African youth who, following multi-reasoned dreams, migrate to North America and Europe. It includes selected journal articles and chapters of edited volumes between 1996 and 2012 related to globalization, migration, religion in migration, transnational religious groups, conceptualizations of youth, youth in Africa, generations, intergenerational relations, diaspora, gender, and transformation of public spaces. The literature review divides into two major sections—youth and transnational religion—with many cross-linkages, since youth are the ones contesting the transnational religious space.

Youth

Positionality of Youth

The position of African young people, whether in Africa or in the diaspora, is full of complexities, contradictions, and exceptions. The majority live in societies where the interaction of global and local pressures leads to the fragmentation, dissolution, and loss of local culture and memory in societies undergoing demographic, political, media, cultural, and religious transformations.⁶ African young people are described as victims, marginalized, excluded, powerless, violent and subjected to violence,⁷ positioning themselves in society,⁸ leading counter-discourses,⁹ using their bodies as weapon and text,¹⁰ having escaped the control of government, familial, and social structures, and living in a new “geography.”¹¹ This characterization of living in a new geography is particularly appropriate for many African youth in the diaspora who are elites, many with newly earned college degrees, well positioned to influence their transnational communities.¹²

Defining “Youth”

Common simplistic usage of the word “youth” must be called into question, beginning by asking, Who or what is “youth”? Because of social and cultural complexities, the term defies universal definition.¹³ According to Jon Abbink, “the socially and culturally accepted initiation of the young into adult society—that in many societies used to be ritually marked by rites of transition and a period of seclusion and training—can no longer be properly accomplished in Africa.”¹⁴ Filip De Boeck and Alcinda Honwana say that childhood and youth are best understood as socially situated and culturally constructed.¹⁵ And Catrine Christiansen et al. state that the “common anthropological . . . definition of youth . . . [as] a developmental phase in a life course . . . anchored in the idea of life stages in which youth is defined in relation to the correspondence between social and physical developmental thresholds” is flawed. This definition, they point out, too simply “conflat[es] psychological, physical, and social maturation and the idea that lives can be compartmentalized into discrete stages.”¹⁶ Turning to biological age, Abbink “pragmatically limit[s] the category of ‘youth’ in Africa to the 14–35 age bracket. Under 14, they are children, usually dependent on older people and not accepted as adults, while over thirty-five they are, or were, more or less expected to be socially independent, have a family and have acquired some social status of their own.”¹⁷

Concepts of youth in the literature are closely interrelated with generational and intergenerational conflict and cooperation.¹⁸ Yet as Karl Mannheim points out in his seminal paper “The Problem of Generations,” the concept of “generation” is problematic, potentially referring to social location, biological age group (very hard to define), or a cohort shaped by a shared historical event.¹⁹ Muriel Gomez-Perez and Marie Nathalie LeBlanc critique the tendency to define youth in opposition to elders, saying other forces at work (political, social, economic) require strategies of cooperation, not only on the macro- but also on the micro-scale, the intimate relations within families. They call for renewed intergenerational research that concentrates on the relationships between generations. Abbink describes a struggle between “younger” and “older” generations (while cognizant of the complication of the terms), where traditional African societal systems for defining generations and expectations have broken down and seem only to be adhered to in the “breach rather than the keeping,”²⁰ where children are valued and youth are considered a menace.

Modern conceptions of youth seem to be inherently bipolar; on the one hand, youth signify “exclusion, impossibility, emasculation, denigration, and futility,” and, on the other hand, they are considered “a constant source of creativity, ingenuity, possibility, empowerment,” and “a source of alternative, yet-to-be-imagined futures.”²¹ The young are simultaneously portrayed as “the terrors of the present, the errors of the past, the prospect of the future.”²² African societies increasingly look to young people as instruments of change uniquely positioned to speak in a changing world, yet at the same time construe them as a threat.²³ Are youth “makers” or “breakers” of society? An emerging influence or submerged by power? Combatants or healers? Onlookers or activists?²⁴

Perspectives on Youth

Within the literature, there are five major perspectives from which to analyze youth: 1) “lost generation,” 2) street culture, 3) agency, 4) integrated, and
5) social shifters. I explore each of these perspectives below. In the end, I find the idea of youth as “social shifters” most helpful for understanding youth in transnational diaspora communities.

1. Lost Generation

In my research in Harlem among the youth of the Senegalese diaspora, I have heard the term “lost youth” in a variety of formulations, from both older and younger persons. Deborah Durham states that “claims to the position of youth, claims about the nature of youth, and moral claims about youth are centrally involved in the reinvention of political and social space.”²⁵ This helps me understand what is going on when the elders in the community are characterizing the youth hanging out on 116th street as “lost,” getting into trouble, fighting, and so on. And the protestation of those same youth saying they are true Muslims. The fact that both younger and older members of the community talk about the “lost youth” must be interrogated. According to Durham:

In the wake of World War I, the discourse of youth, and of the “lost generation” (a term also often used for youth in Africa at the end of the twentieth century, see Cruise O’Brien 1996), was part of the grounds of fascism, communism, and the political struggles leading to the second world war. The discourse of youth is just as critical across Africa today—indeed the recurrence of the term ‘‘lost generation’’ is not insignificant—and the consequences just as great. Youth enter political space as saboteurs—as political actors whose politics is to open up discourses on the nature of society in its broadest and most specific terms.²⁶

In Uganda, the Balokole (the “born again”) construction of the world represents an opposition between generations—the “born again” youth and the “lost” elders. The past is presented in this vision as the age of darkness and contrasted with the idea of a moral revolution that will guarantee a shining future for Uganda.²⁷ In the social situation of four “power inversions,” or jihads, where youth took control in Northern Nigeria, at certain junctures “the old are considered to have failed the societies they led. Hence the failure of the old can be as significant an issue as the success of the young.”²⁸ The idea of a “lost generation” is commonplace in discourse about youth, but these examples from Ugandan Pentecostals and Nigerian Muslims question who is lost—the youth or their elders?

2. Street Culture

The emergence of street cultures among postcolonial youth living on the margins of urban society has prompted some to look at the phenomenon from the perspective of youth cultures.²⁹ From this viewpoint, African youth create their own, often violent, culture on the street as a result of an epistemological rupture they live within and the appearance of the localized global that they negotiate by cultural borrowing.³⁰ Youth culture is “uniquely able to link locals across transnational space”³¹ and creatively engage the margins, finding new opportunities. However, this perspective is challenged by those who consider studies focused on “youth culture” as subcultures to be in error in their projection of youth as an entity detached from the surrounding world.³² Another critique against focusing on “youth culture” is the reality that in some settings youth are so dominated and marginalized that they are unable to participate in the creation of youth cultures, even to the point of speaking of “non-place.”³³

3. Agency

In their review of literature from 1990 to 2000,³⁴ Gomez-Perez and LeBlanc identify a focus on roles and conditions of life—the misery, violence, and dysfunctionality of society. After 2000, however, they see a shift toward understanding youth to have significant agency. They connect this to keen interest in globalization and the idea that youth had privileged access to new cultural products. They note that research on music gave proof of this agency³⁵ as did the strategic use of violence in some contexts. However, others³⁶ note that this was critiqued by those who saw that agency varies greatly by context, remaining an aspiration of youth, most of whom are excluded from opportunity to exercise their agency.³⁷ The “agency” perspective shows that youth are neither universally manipulated nor passive actors but individuals attempting to chart their course.³⁸

4. Calls for Integrated Perspectives

Additional perspectives also exist, such as the “interventionist” response, which calls for remedial programs; “rights discourse,” which develops normative approaches, yet conditions on the ground are unfavorable; and “descriptive-analytic” reactions, which develop historical and sociologically grounded explanations.³⁹

In the midst of all the perspectives, there are general calls for more integrated proposals. For example, Abbink states that “three perspectives . . . —the agency, the interventionist and the analytic—must come together in a realist understanding of the experiences of youth in Africa,”⁴⁰ and Christiansen et al. focus on the “intersection between agency and social forces.”⁴¹

5. Social Shifters

In my review of this literature, the perspective on youth that seems most directly relevant to how I view the Senegalese youth in Harlem is the idea of youth as “shifters” or “social shifters.”

A shifter is a special kind of deictic or indexical term, a term that works not through absolute referentiality to a fixed context, but one that relates the speaker to a relational, or indexical, context (‘‘here’’ or ‘‘us’’ are such terms). A shifter has the capability of sometimes going further and bringing into discursive awareness the metalinguistic features of the conversation—that is, it can go beyond immediate relationships being negotiated and draw attention to the structure and its categories that produce or enable the encounter. As people bring the concept of youth to bear on situations, they situate themselves in a social landscape of power, rights, expectations, and relationships—indexing both themselves and the topology of that social landscape. They do so not necessarily . . . in a static manner, but in a dynamic, contestive, and imaginative way. Shifters work metalinguistically, drawing attention to specific relations within a structure of relations, to the structure itself. This seems to be particularly the case with the mobilization of the idea of ‘‘youth’’ in social life.⁴²

Considering the goals, vision, and discourse of Senegalese youth in Harlem, the concept of shifters fits. These youth are aware of the power difference between themselves and older members of their community, between themselves and religious leaders, and with regard to the larger American society. And they are creating ways to tip that imbalance a bit in their favor. By being the best Muslims in their community and by serving within their community more than others, they win agency. Their youth movement has gained enough momentum that they draw attention from rival religious leaders, thus moving from undesirable to desired members of the community. Their uniforms, worn at public events, have moved them from invisible to visible. As Durham observes, this “situates them in the social landscape,”⁴³ and the community must now reckon with them.

Researchers in the field have also adopted this idea of youth as social shifters. The term is understood to denote the relational concept of youth as situated in a dynamic context. “Social shifters” describes the way youth are positioned and are positioning themselves within society, with the capacity to create social configurations.⁴⁴ Rejecting all simplistic definitions of children and youth, we should regard them as “beings-in-the-present and as social actors.”⁴⁵

Regardless of how African youth are defined, however, they are marginalized and excluded, liminal and interstitial subjects. Their ability to cross boundaries and inhabit multiple worlds often is both vulnerable and violent. On the flip side, young people’s ability to mediate these contradictions in African society places them “squarely in the centre and generates tremendous power.”⁴⁶

Youth as Transnational Religious Actors

Discourse about morality and youth is essential for understanding youth. The conversion of large numbers of Ugandan youth to Pentecostalism, for example, has modified the understandings and practices surrounding intergenerational relations in the country⁴⁷ “by assigning to the youth the role of moral revolution guides.”⁴⁸ Youth use language of deliverance and sexual abstinence as tools for liberation from the past, finding in the Pentecostal message the possibility of distancing themselves from the moral and economic obligations of their families. There is also evidence of Sufi Muslim youth who describe conversion experiences in ways similar to Pentecostal use of the term “born-again” as they speak of being made clean and “the counter being set to zero.”⁴⁹

Summary of Learnings about Youth

All conceptualizations of youth are socially and culturally constructed, influenced by historical, geographical, political, religious, and educational contexts. Inherent in these conceptualizations, whether imposed or appropriated, are dynamics of power and control, rights, worldview, access to resources, and means of communication. The idea of youth as social shifters—pointing out imbalances and bringing into awareness hidden things; socially situated in a dynamic context; and able to see opportunity in the margins, cross boundaries, and mediate contradictions—offers a powerful analytical tool to interrogate the ways Africans in the diaspora conceptualize youth.

Religion in Migration, Diaspora, Transnationalism

Issues of religion and migration are neither new nor modern.⁵⁰ Christian faith has been from its inception multilingual and transnational. Consider the Old Testament Daniel, a young Hebrew elite taken into slavery in Babylon, where he rose to a high position in government yet still prayed three times a day in front of a window facing Jerusalem.⁵¹ He also—along with his three friends Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael—negotiated not eating the king’s food because it would make them unclean.⁵² Or consider the Day of Pentecost recorded in Acts 2, where “Jews from every nation under heaven” (fifteen nations are listed) were gathered. After the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and Peter’s sermon, three thousand were baptized. As Jews, they had traveled to Jerusalem for the Feast of Pentecost and were now returning home baptized into the Way of Jesus the Messiah.

Many of the authors in this literature review, in their research of the Pentecostal movement and its transnational nature, assume the readers’ familiarity with these stories.

Defining Transnationalism

The simplest definition of religious transnationalism is, when “people move, they take their religions with them.”⁵³ Bertrand Badie and Mane-Claude Smouts provide a more formal definition: “Any relation which, deliberately or by its nature, constructs itself within a global space beyond the context of the nation-state, and which escapes, at least partially, the control or mediating action of States.”⁵⁴ Bruno Riccio defines the term from a person-centered perspective, stating, “Migrants, it is argued, now tend to live their lives simultaneously across different nation-states, being both ‘here’ and ‘there,’ crossing geographical and political boundaries. ‘Transnationalism’ is the term commonly used to contextualize and define such migrants’ cultural, economic, political and social experience.”⁵⁵

Numerous authors criticize the older Ellis Island straight-line model of immigration and assimilation⁵⁶ and propose new patterns of religious transnationalism, such as religious bi-localism,⁵⁷ religious cacophony,⁵⁸ reverse missions,⁵⁹ South-South religious trade,⁶⁰ transnational organization theory, and deterritorialized religious identity.⁶¹

Factors Driving Religious Transnationalism

Religion is becoming increasingly important in a globalized world, where it is difficult to separate the local from the global. The rebirth of religion⁶² is attributed to many factors, including changing demographics,⁶³ “the crisis in the old mechanisms of identification [giving] back to the ‘sacred realm’ an importance and a social function,”⁶⁴ and, similarly, the “disenchantment” of the West producing powerful religious movements expressing a strong desire to “globalize” by taking advantage of spaces opened by globalization.⁶⁵

The main factors in transnationalism are the mass media explosion and the movements of people leading to deterritorialization of culture and the delocalization of identity and community.⁶⁶ The forces and factors of globalization and the concomitant need to emphasize difference lead to a search for identity⁶⁷ that takes on new “significance in the context where nation-states and nationalism no longer necessarily constitute the primary physical and ideological contexts in which identity and community are imagined and political allegiance expressed.”⁶⁸Other factors include the desire to escape or exit one’s situation to embrace opportunity elsewhere.⁶⁹

Political and socioeconomic discourses on migration and diaspora often ignore religious factors driving transnationalism, but religion can be viewed as the “motor” of African diaspora formation and identity construction.⁷⁰ The rise of “reverse-mission” religious movements, both Christian and Islamic, engaged in transmitting their tradition beyond their “geo-ethnic” contexts, illustrates how Africans have instrumentalized globalization for religious purposes.⁷¹ Four themes emerge for the study of religion in African migration:⁷² 1) the globalizing effects of local religious units in the migration process,⁷³  2) the religious motives for migration,⁷⁴ 3) religious vitality as a result of migration,⁷⁵ and 4) the dynamics of religious networking in the diaspora.⁷⁶ African transnational religious actors rely on diverse social structures and networks operating on both local and global scales.⁷⁷

A Shift toward Religious Identities

Africans face stigmatization and racism in the cities of Europe and America. Religious communities, churches and mosques, dahiras,⁷⁸ and small group meetings offer places of refuge, consolation, and belonging.⁷⁹ Many African youths find recourse in Pentecostal and other Christian and Islamic revivalism, all of which often share a repulsion for “traditional African culture.” The youth are “attracted by the new religious movements and are joining (in large numbers) a discourse of morality and identity that holds out the promise of regeneration and collective power with transnational resonance.”⁸⁰

These religious networks offer frameworks for youth to create new networks promoting joint economic action and new work ethics, creating what Abbink calls networks of opportunity. Transnational Africans carry with them their sensitivity to spiritual power dynamics and a worldview influenced by African Traditional Religion; Muslims and Christians find ways, from within their respective traditions, to respond to and capitalize on the fears, needs, and understandings related to spiritual powers (good and evil) that make sense from within their perspective.⁸¹

The Pentecostal “Fit”

Pentecostalism has benefited from and adapted to globalization. Instead of attempting to reduce the religious to the nonreligious by explaining the rapid growth of Pentecostalism in terms of social theory, we may do better to link its success to its “fit” with globalization.⁸² Common characteristics of global Pentecostalism include the presence of the Holy Spirit (evidenced by speaking in tongues), a conversion experience, the Prosperity Gospel, and a dualistic worldview; these facilitate access to a “message adapted to the global scale and experienced at the recognizable level of the human body.”⁸³ Pentecostals appropriate the objects, signs, and discourses of salvation and transformation expressed in a global war on Satan, where personal suffering is linked to global conversion. This universal framework helps Pentecostals respond to the transnational problematic, aiding their movements between the individual and the collective, the sacred and the profane, the particular and the general.⁸⁴

Pentecostalism offers an ethical framework that fits the challenges of the global and the local; it also offers ways to creatively balance outside forces with local knowledge.⁸⁵ Pentecostal churches help migrants process one of the great paradoxes of migration—that of living in two status systems, where “the gaining of status in one context is achieved by a loss of status in the other context.”⁸⁶ In Pentecostalism, migrants find solutions to this paradox in two ways: 1) the church provides a social space for performing positive social status, and 2) “the essential embodied experience of charismatic religious experience is empowerment, with which migrants hope to overcome all obstacles hindering” them.⁸⁷ Young Muslims in the diaspora seek similar solutions.

Muslim Religious Identities

“Contemporary transnational migration can create people who find themselves unconnected with particular places, states or ethnic groups, but still faced with a burning question of who they are.”⁸⁸ These deterrritorialized migrants may create “transnational imagined communities” united by religious identities. Muslims in the diaspora, for example, find and negotiate new ways of being Muslim.⁸⁹ Groups like the Muriddiya have learned to inhabit new local space in a way that results in a local rooting of the transnational network.⁹⁰ The Sufi experience of the dahira offers Muslims a communal space of belonging and solidarity, a place to perform social status, similar to what the church offers Pentecostals.⁹¹ The dahira and other Muslim experiences of a close, ethnic diaspora community are contested.

Strategies and Paradigms of Pre-migrants

A critique of existing research on transnationalism and religion reveals studies to be a bit lopsided, concerned only with the way migrants use religion after they have migrated. But the way would-be migrants instrumentalize religion only makes sense if that principle is already part of their everyday social relations. This critique looks at how transnational migration is imagined and treated as a spiritual phenomenon before people migrate.⁹² This helps explain the intense spiritual activity of pre-migrants who consult African traditional practitioners, participate in Pentecostal visa prayer camps,⁹³ or seek the aid of a marabout or Muslim saint.⁹⁴

In the Senegalese context, the social community is partly responsible for creating bias toward transnational networks and migration, where travel becomes a rite of passage and a social norm. Pre-migrants grow up with an imaginaire migratoire anchored in a transnational migration process where a culture of migration is maintained and constructed by observing the experience of migrants—a culture that permits entire generations to find meaning in a translocal experience. These patterns of migration can be viewed from two perspectives: 1) as a rite of passage, a transition from young person to adult; and 2) as a phenomenon that is redefining intergenerational relations linked to a growing individualization on the part of the youth.⁹⁵

Cautions about Oversimplifying Transnationalism

Ricco believes it is vital to “dis-aggregate the so-called ‘transnational community’ by recognizing and analyzing its internal tensions and the plurality of trajectories emerging from the transnational spaces.”⁹⁶ He is concerned that older conceptualizations of “ethnic group” not be substituted by “transnational community.” He describes Senegalese transnational migration as people engaging in economic transactions across borders and living for extended periods away from their place of origin yet returning frequently as they seek to create a whole life economically, spiritually, and socially. “Transmigrants,” Riccio observes, interact with the new society in complex ways, with multiple trajectories in the diaspora. Some transmigrants participate in the host culture and seek a place for themselves in the structure of society, while others primarily identify with the dahira life, emphasizing solidarity with other co-transmigrants even as some members secretly pursue autonomy and individuality.⁹⁷

Additionally, researchers need to avoid homogenizing transmigrants and transnationality, to pay attention to gender and sexuality.⁹⁸ Consideration must also be paid to conflicts between diaspora groups—such as the conflict between various Islamic expressions—and how transmigrant Muslims view each other.⁹⁹

Summary of Learnings about Transnationalism

Transnationalism is neither binational nor bipolar but an imagined translocal space inhabited in the local, with a constant awareness of the global.¹⁰⁰ People find ways to “write” this transnational community into the spaces wherever they live.¹⁰¹ They take their religion with them when they move, adapting to the new location yet tightly connected to their community of origin. The back-and-forth flow of information, ideas, and relationships that happens as they adapt to the new local creates a translocal space that invigorates and renews religious communities at the same time as the participants are empowered and sustained. The new translocal space is neither completely here nor there; it inhabits an alternative space in between. This is not new in the history of people’s experience of religious communities; what is new is the growing pace and pervasiveness of this experience for more and more people in the world.

Conclusion

One of the central issues of our time is the ever-increasing number of displaced people and refugees, a significant number of whom are youth. Conceptualizing these youth and their religious commitments in a globalized world—where migration and transnationality are the experience of increasingly greater portions of society—is an important lens for missiology. Young transmigrants have gifts for the communities where they settle. But will those communities receive the gifts? Can churches embrace these “social shifters,” who may point out imbalances and bring hidden things into awareness? Could it be that God has “summoned from the margin”¹⁰² these people to renew the church and to achieve his purposes in the world?

Churches and communities who are willing to have their eyes opened may find that the transnational vision of newcomers enables them to see opportunity in the margins, cross boundaries, and mediate contradictions. The flow of information, ideas, and relationships that happens in the creation of new translocal spaces has potential to invigorate and renew religious communities.

This potential warrants a call for further study of transnationality and missiology, including a review of the literature from 2012 to 2020 and additional analyses of migration patterns, taking into account the global refugee crisis that continues to reshape populations and the global church. Future research might also pair analysis of increased global migration with evidence¹⁰³ that in the United States, and potentially other locations, geographic mobility has declined for economic reasons and may be part of emerging rural-urban cultural and political divides.

Jonathan Bornman, research scholar at Oxford Centre for Mission Studies and PhD candidate at Middlesex University, researches Sufi commitments to nonviolence in the American immigrant context. Jonathan served with his family in Senegal as a Bible teacher and, prior to that, in Burkina Faso developing water resources. Jonathan is a consultant for Christian-Muslim relations at Eastern Mennonite Missions and has traveled extensively, equipping Christ followers to better relate to their Muslim neighbors.