While English-speaking African churches have often been viewed as representing global South Christianity and influencing the North, Francophone African nations, especially the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), are playing a role in religion far beyond their borders.
Philip Jenkins writes in the Christian Century (June 16) that the DRC could be placed alongside the evangelical powerhouses of Nigeria and Uganda (with their impact on global Anglicanism) because of its numbers alone: it claims 33 million Catholics, 14 million Protestants and several million indigenous Christians.
With one of the world’s highest fertility rates, the DRC’s population and the percentage of Christians will expand to among the world’s largest. Just as Nigeria has become a prominent diasporic community throughout the English-speaking world, the Congolese now play a large role in Francophone countries.
Jenkins concludes that in both “France and Belgium, the Catholic priesthood maintains its depleted ranks by drawing on recruits from the global South— from Vietnam, but also from the Congo and Cameroon … Congolese-founded Protestant and Pentecostal churches abound in Paris, London and Brussels, and these are some of Europe’s largest and most fervent megachurches.”