The Shift We Missed (and the One We’re Resisting)

by Rob Wegner

Thanks for following us here at 100Movements, where we’re seeking to help shift the tracks of history toward movemental Christianity in the West.

Today, we’re honored to share a guest piece from Rob Wegner of StarfishyoU. Rob has spent years cultivating environments of Jesus-centered, disciple-making movements through decentralized, networked, and collaborative leadership. His reflections come from lived experience and have shaped many leaders who are asking what it looks like to follow Jesus more faithfully in this moment.

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The center of gravity of the Church has shifted, though you would be forgiven for missing it. There was no announcement when someone stood up and said, “It’s happening now.” It has come through the kind of movement that often does not make headlines and grows while most of us are still looking somewhere else.

Today, the majority of Christians no longer live in the West. Depending on which study you read, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the global Church now resides in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.¹ The growth in sub-Saharan Africa alone over the last century is enough to make even the most skeptical observer pause and reconsider what God might be up to. It turns out the story we assumed was central has become, at best, one chapter among many.

This changes more than geography. It reshapes imagination. The Church is now thoroughly multi-ethnic. It is often materially poor in ways that do not fit comfortably into Western categories of success. And in more places than we tend to notice, it is sustained by women whose names will never appear on a conference lineup but whose faithfulness holds entire communities together.²

If you were to picture the “average” Christian today, you might need to do a little internal recalibration. It is probably not the person most of us instinctively imagine. A more accurate picture might be an African woman rising before the sun, praying in a way that is less about discipline and more about dependence, carrying the weight of family and community, leading in spaces where no one handed her a title, living a Gospel that is not theoretical but daily, embodied, and necessary. She is not thinking about church trends. She is trusting Jesus for today.

This is not a talking point or a statistic to be deployed when it is convenient, but a wake-up call. A reminder that the future of the Church has already arrived, and it may not resemble the version we have spent so much time trying to maintain.

The Future of America Is Already Here

Here is the part many in the American Church still have not fully faced: The same shift happening globally is happening here.

According to U.S. Census projections, America is on track to become a “majority-minority” nation sometime in the 2040s, with white Americans dropping below 50% of the population.³ In fact, among younger generations, that future has already arrived—children and young adults are already more diverse than the older population.³

This is not a distant horizon. It is a present reality moving through our schools, our neighborhoods, our cities.

Growth in the United States is now being driven largely by Hispanic, Asian, multiracial, and immigrant communities.⁴ The future of the nation will be younger, more diverse, more urban, and more interconnected than anything the Church in America has previously navigated.

Which means this is not just a sociological shift, it is a missional moment.

A Distortion in Plain Sight

This is where the dissonance becomes impossible to ignore.

At the very moment when both the global Church and the future of America are becoming more diverse and more reflective of the nations gathered in Revelation 7, a loud stream of Western Christianity is moving in the opposite direction—toward ethnic nostalgia, cultural protectionism, and political domination.

What is often described as white Christian nationalism tends to get treated like a political overreach, as if the problem is simply a bit too much enthusiasm in the wrong direction. That framing lets us off easy. What we are dealing with is more than tone or strategy. It is a quiet rewriting of the Gospel itself. It takes the name of Jesus and begins to tether it to the preservation of a cultural moment that is, if we are honest, already slipping through our fingers. Somewhere along the way, the mission shifts. The Kingdom of God starts to sound a lot like maintaining influence, holding ground, keeping what used to work from fading too quickly.

There is a certain kind of humor in this, though it is the kind that makes you pause before you laugh and then weep.

The early Church had no access to power, no cultural majority, and no realistic path to controlling anything. They seemed oddly unbothered by that. Fast forward a couple thousand years and we have managed to convince ourselves that things might fall apart if we do not stay in charge. It is a strange burden to carry on behalf of a risen King.

What makes this more than a passing concern is how subtly it reshapes our imagination. The cross is still there, of course. It shows up in the songs, the statements, and as jewelry. It just does not set the pace or point to a way of living and leading. I guess control and coercion are easier to organize, and boy has it taken on such a head of steam.

Meanwhile, the actual movement of the Gospel keeps going about its business. It drifts toward the margins, crosses cultural lines without asking for permission, and gathers people who would not normally choose each other and then teaches them to live as family. It seems remarkably unconcerned with holding majority status. Ha! It has done this before, and always will.

When you hold all of that next to the reality of the global Church, and next to what is already unfolding across the United States, the contrast sharpens. Christian Nationalism is not just a slightly off-course expression of faith. It is a distortion that narrows what God is clearly expanding. Calling it an aberration may sound strong, but sometimes plain language is the most honest thing we have, especially when the alternative is already visible in communities that are quietly living a wider, deeper, and more faithful version of the story.

What This Means for Microchurch and Disciple-Makers

If the “average” Christian globally is already outside the West… and if the future of America is increasingly multi-ethnic, decentralized, and relational, then the implications for how we form the Church are enormous.

The predominant model church was shaped around attraction, stability, relevance, and systems that depend on buildings, budgets, and paid staff, therefore it often finds itself out of step and less agile in a world that requires something more relational, more adaptive, more prophetic, and more incarnational in its mission.

But the microchurch form of the church is built for this.

They are small enough to embed inside diverse relational networks.
They are flexible enough to cross cultures, languages, and socioeconomic lines.
They are simple enough to multiply among ordinary people, not just trained professionals.

Maybe most importantly, they are relational enough to hold the complexity of a changing world without needing to control it, while embodying an alternative Kingdom community in a small, rooted way that can both remain present and be readily multiplied and sent.

Disciple-makers in the United States are not preparing for a future shift, we are already living inside it. Which means the question is no longer: “How do we get people back to church?” The question is: How do we become the kind of people—and the kind of communities—through whom the Gospel can take root in every network of relationships in a radically diverse, post-majority culture?

The future Church in America will not be built around a “Saddleback Sam” prototype-thinking of the attractional church model, where one imagined person quietly shapes the agenda for everyone else.

“Saddleback Sam” was helpful for a moment (if you don’t know who that is, Google it, and yes, this picture is the one used in training hundreds of thousands of church leaders). It gave leaders a way to think about who they were trying to reach. But over time, what I think began as a missionary instinct often drifted into a marketing strategy. Instead of helping people—all of God’s people— wake up to the actual neighbors, networks, and places they had uniquely been sent to, it subtly trained us to build worship and program environments for an idealized audience. Sure, maybe our context is becoming more diverse, but we've got to keep our church focused on Saddleback Sam, Granger Gus, Chicago Chet, and whoever else we came up with.

Ugh.

The shift we are living in does not move in that direction. It moves outward, into real relationships, real complexity, real people with names and stories. It calls all of us, not just a centralized organization, to live as sent people. Not toward a demographic, but toward the actual lives already around us. It will be woven together across difference, across neighborhoods, across languages, and across increasingly diverse stories.

If we are paying attention, we will begin to see this for what it is. Not a threat to the Church, but a return to its beginnings in Acts 2, where the Spirit gathered a people from many languages and made them one, and a glimpse of where it is all headed, toward that great Wedding Feast where every tribe and tongue is welcomed in.

What This Looks Like on the Ground

Michelle and I recently moved from the suburbs into a much more diverse part of Kansas City. Not to make a point, and definitely not because we suddenly became more enlightened than our past selves. It just started to feel like, “If this is where the story is going, we should probably get a little deeper into it.” We wanted to be more present to the kind of life that is already shaping the future of our city, where cultures overlap, where languages mix, where you hear three different worldviews before lunch without trying very hard. It has been less of a grand strategy and more of a quiet nudge we kept saying yes to.

We realized we did not just want to talk about diversity as a concept. We wanted to live inside it a bit more, to experience more of Kansas City's whole story, and to join in with what God is already doing there. So we packed up, moved, and are learning, slowly and sometimes awkwardly, what it means to pay better attention.

Here’s another story of what that looks like.

During a KC Underground art retreat in our home last weekend, one of the artists began to share his story. Before Jesus, he described his life in three words: mugging, thugging, and drugging. A life shaped by survival, addiction, and cycles of incarceration.

Fresh out of jail, after meeting Jesus, he knew himself well enough to know what would happen if he went back out onto the streets. The pull would be too strong. The old patterns too familiar. He was standing on the edge of relapse.

And in that moment, he sensed Jesus speak to him in a simple, quiet prompting:

“Look in your closet.”

He did.

There, sitting forgotten in the corner of the closet, was a single piece of abandoned wood.

Again, the whisper:

“Make something.”

That moment became a turning point. Since then, he has been creating…prolifically. Woodworking pieces, typography, and more…expressions he calls Imago Dei Expressions. Art that carries the weight of his story and the beauty of redemption. Art that proclaims we are co-creators and beauty is an essential dimension of the Mission Dei.

Alongside it, his evangelistic gift has come alive. He is now making disciples among men in recovery, among those coming out of incarceration, among people who would never step foot inside a church building but recognize truth and beauty when they see it embodied. This is what mission looks like: A person, restored, sent back into the very networks where grace first found him.

Back to the retreat.

Two Muslim women came as guests of one of our disciple-makers, who is deeply embedded in that community. They arrived with a kind of quiet curiosity, a bit of caution, settling in more as observers than participants at first. Both were from India, which opened an unexpected door for Michelle and me. We have spent significant time there over the years, learning from a disciple-making movement we witnessed and participated in from its earliest days. As the conversation unfolded, we found ourselves swapping stories about places, food, and people we love, until we realized we had even been to the same hill country retreat center in Southern India. At that point, it felt like something more than a coincidence.

We had been prepared for this moment through immersive, pilgrim-like engagement in another culture. They obviously felt seen, known, welcomed, and honored.

As the aforementioned artist shared his art, his process, and his redemption story, something in the room began to shift. As the stories unfolded, as the pieces were passed around, and as the presence of Jesus filled the space without any need for announcement or agenda, they leaned forward. Literally on the edge of their seats.

At the end of the retreat, they approached us, thanking Michelle and me for hosting it in our home. Honoring the space. Expressing what they had experienced, and then one of them said something I will not forget: “I would be honored if we could host the next retreat in my home.”

A person of peace revealed in the middle of beauty, story, and presence.

Pay Attention

This is the future of the Church in America. Our future will not be sustained by cultural dominance, but through ordinary people, in unexpected places, across lines we once thought were barriers, living incarnationally, planting the Gospel in highly contextualized ways, and making disciples relationally, and letting the Gospel travel along those diverse relational networks.

The Gospel is still moving, and it always will until every tribe, tongue, and nation has been included.

The Gospel travels through artists with a past, through women of another faith leaning in, and through homes becoming places of radical hospitality.

If we are paying attention, we will see it! Right in front of us. If we let go of the center and move to the margins, we can join in!

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Footnotes / Sources

1. Pew Research Center; Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom

2. Pew Research Center, The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World

3. U.S. Census projections summarized via Brookings Institution — U.S. becomes “minority white” around 2045 ; see also youth diversity trends

4. U.S. Census Bureau population estimates showing minority groups driving growth