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Monday, August 7, 2006 Posted: 1346 GMT (2146 HKT)
BLACKBIRD LEYS, England (Reuters) -- Western missionaries took christianity
to Africa in the 1800s. Now Kenyan minister Patrick Mukholi is bringing it back.

When the Anglican priest decided to become a missionary he imagined preaching to remote African tribes. Instead, he lives in a poky flat above a kebab shop on one of Britain's toughest housing estates, where he shares his faith with local teenagers. "They ask me hard questions like, 'Do you have to believe in God to be a vicar?', or 'What's the point of getting married if you're just going to get divorced anyway?'," chuckled Mukholi, wearing a T-shirt, a set of African beads around his wrist.

With church-going on the wane in Europe, Africa's vibrant Protestant churches are sending scores of men like Mukholi to the West to win souls and revitalize shrinking congregations -- an ironic twist on the 19th century drive by Western missionaries to convert Africans.

Some try to attract followers with jazzed-up services and claims of dramatic healing, while others focus on helping the poor. Some have converted thousands while others, like Mukholi and his wife, have struggled to convert a single person.

Many African missionaries agree Western churches are too timid when it comes to religion.
"The church in the UK has become shy about faith," Mukholi, employed by the UK-based Anglican Church Missionary Society, told Reuters in Blackbird Leys, a deprived area on the edge of Oxford that is a world away from the city's famed university.

"Maybe as African missionaries we can encourage them to be more exuberant about knowing God," said the priest, who worked in Mombasa before moving to England, which he had never visited before. African churchmen first started moving to Europe and the United States in the 1970s to minister to immigrants mostly from their own countries. But in the 1980s, African evangelicals -- including some Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans and Methodists -- decided to take a more systematic approach toward reaching what they saw as an increasingly godless West. "We couldn't just throw up our hands and see these churches turned into nightclubs or mosques," Tokunboh Adeyemo, former general secretary of the Association of Evangelicals in Africa, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Dudley Pate, a Nairobi-based Zimbabwean who works for British organization African Inland Mission, says African churches are obeying the biblical command to spread their faith that is too often ignored by modern Western churches. "The African church is taking seriously Christ's command that it takes the Gospel to all nations. Political correctness and omplacency has stifled that in the West," he told Reuters.

African missionaries -- some backed by their own churches and some recruited by Western organizations -- boast of some success in Europe.

Nigerian pastor Sunday Adelaja pioneered the independent Embassy of God church in Ukraine, delivering rousing sermons and dancing in the aisles to some 25,000 mostly white members, making it one of Europe's biggest churches.

And Nigeria's Redeemed Church of God, which aims to build a congregation within five minutes' drive or walk from anywhere in the world, has a branch in almost 40 European countries. One of Europe's biggest Evangelical churches, in eastern France, was started by Africans and draws thousands every week.

But in Blackbird Leys, it takes more than African exuberance to win souls. In three years of working with teenagers at a youth club and in schools, Mukholi and his wife have still to chalk up their first convert to Christianity.

"In Kenya you can get very proud counting numbers of new Christians. Here you put in a lot of effort and only get little scraps back," he said. Life on the housing project -- where unemployed young people spend their days smoking marijuana on the graffiti-plastered stairs, and where most children live with only one parent -- was a culture shock for Mukholi. He said the attitude of some teenagers, who swear openly and show little respect for adults, contrasted with Kenya where young people look up to adults. And despite his perfect English, he struggled to understand the teenagers' slang and accents.

Sometimes Mukholi questions the logic of bringing Africans to work with England's streetwise teen-agers while British churches send missionaries to convert tribal Africans they barely understand.

Africans' efforts might be better concentrated closer to home since many in the world's poorest continent have never heard of Jesus Christ, some say. "Europe has already heard the Gospel. We have to accept that some people will reject it and move on," said Rufus Nyangatare, a Kenyan who spent two years working with Nigerian inter-denominational mission agency Calvary Ministries in remote areas of eastern Kenya. But Mukholi says that as an African and an outsider, he is better placed to relate to Oxford's forgotten underclass than middle-class Britons. "As Africans we are viewed as poor and weak," said Mukholi. "We don't come with a lot of power or thinking we can fix everyone's problems, so the people here accept us."

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