An article by Charles Lewis on Christianity in Africa:

It is a vision most mainstream Canadian church leaders can only dream of: Sunday mornings in which parishioners dance and sing through three-hour services. Seminaries overflowing and unable to keep up with demand for pastors as the number of the newly baptized rises.

The dream is a reality in such places as Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda, where there is an explosion in Christianity. In the past decade, this demographic surge has started to spill out of Africa, as well as Asia and Latin America, in the form of missionaries to the West, a trend influencing everything from styles of worship to doctrine.

[…..]

In the Anglican Church, the influence of African orthodoxy is being deeply felt in churches in Canada and the United States.

In this past decade, conservative Anglican parishes unhappy with the slide into liberalism of their national churches, especially over the issues of same-sex marriage and the ordination of female bishops, have formed their own province, the first to cross national boundaries. Many of those parishes found the blessings of African Anglican bishops who share those conservative views.

Indeed, half of the world’s 70 million Anglicans now live in Africa.

The reaching out to the West is part of the evolution of Christianity in Africa, said Harvard Professor Jacob Olupona, an Anglican theologian from Nigeria.

Christianity started in the form of small regional and independent churches that reflected local culture.

“At first they didn’t see mainline Christianity as Christian enough,” said Prof. Olupona.

But that has been replaced with a desire to join something that is greater than Africa, something that is global, he said.

For years Africans were ignored by the Western churches, said Prof. Olupona, but now “we have the numbers” so the West has to listen.

“A global Anglican Church based in Canterbury is almost over,” said Prof. Olupona. “There are now going to be competing centres of Anglican Christianity.”

Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, the Anglican bishop in charge of the breakaway Canadian and American parishes, was even more blunt in his assessment.

“In the year 2000 the Archbishop of Canterbury was the second most important Christian leader in the world,” Bishop Duncan said. “In a short space of time that office has utterly been diminished. It shows that the British model of Anglicanism has failed. The new Canterbury will be in Africa. It is the realignment of Anglicanism and a new Reformation of Christianity sparked by [Africa].”