Here’s a quiz? What are the three countries in the world with the largest number of professing Christians?

Yes, the United States is still number one. Number two is Brazil and number three is China. Yes, China.

The number of Chinese Christians is now in excess of 100 million. The church there is growing so rapidly that China will probably be number one within 20 years.

We Americans don’t usually think of Christianity as being anything other than a white man’s religion. But the new reality is that Caucasians are now a minority. 60% of Christians live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Since North America is the only continent in the world where Christianity is not growing, it’s easy to see that the future of our faith is multi-colored and multi-cultural.

The Asia Times columnist “Spengler” recently wrote that China may soon occupy the role that the United States has occupied for the past 200 years: “the natural ground for mass evangelization.” He adds that “if this occurs, the world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it.”

The most ambitious Chinese Christians have now formulated what they call the Back To Jerusalem Movement. This group is training thousands of Chinese believers to take the gospel of Christ to the Muslim world following the path of the ancient Silk Road. They believe God has uniquely gifted and prepared them for this task.

South Korea is now the number two missionary sending nation in the world, just behind the United States. The recent capture of a group of South Korean missionaries in Afghanistan brought Korean Christians into the spotlight for a few weeks. But in the past couple of decades, these dedicated believers have quietly penetrated some of the most far flung places in the globe.

In Europe, traditional cathedrals stand empty while thousands of house churches and storefronts ring with the eclectic sounds of tattooed and pierced young people worshipping God with distortion guitars and a radical form of faith.

Many of these churches are led by African Christians who have migrated to Europe in search of jobs but succeeded in re-establishing true Christianity in many areas where it had all but disappeared.

As American Christians, we can either resist the flow of what God is obviously doing around the world, or we can embrace this new reality and seek to help it flourish.

The most striking movement to come to American Christianity in recent decades is the phenomenon of ordinary believers traveling to foreign countries to assist in the growth of God’s work. Every year, hundreds of thousands of American Christians fan out around the globe teaching children’s classes, digging wells in remote villages, building schools and churches and preaching the gospel in places where it is needed the most.

The role of American Christianity is rapidly shifting from leading to helping and supporting. We should gladly accept this new role. It bodes well for the future of our faith.