Mission and Migration: Epistemological Tension in Two Research Fields

Abstract

In this article, I argue that the research fields of migration and mission navigate similar tensions between normative interests and descriptive categories. With its biblical legacy, mission is actualized in a variety of ways within the contemporary paradigm of mission everywhere and for every Christian. In the field of mission, a history of colonialization and de-colonialization has resulted in disciplinary struggles over the content and inclusiveness of mission as a scientific category. In the field of migration, political interests related to nation-state regimes often influence research, resulting in several migration scholars pushing back and placing their analytical object—the migrant—as a suffering subject in need of protection. However, tensions between the notions of prescriptive/descriptive and political/ethical produce interesting concepts, and one of them is reverse mission. Applying reverse mission to the case study of the Catholic Church in the Philippines and Denmark, I conclude that different forms of mission (missionary discipleship and domestic mission) are a powerful leit motif for global church work.

1. Introduction

This article is part of the Special Issue “Transgressing Boundaries: Biblical and Social Scientific Studies of Migration” edited by Alexiana Fry, Ida Hartmann and Frederik Poulsen. The editors have invited scholars from biblical studies to join forces with social scientists in search of new perspectives on migration and the Bible. My contribution discusses the biblical concept of mission as an example of the inherent—and fruitful—epistemological tension within the disciplines of missiology and migration studies, pointing to similarities between theology and the social sciences. I draw on discussions of epistemology because the tensions surrounding different uses of concepts such as mission are often the result of conflicting ideas of legitimate knowledge. In the last part of the article, I analyze Catholic notions of reverse mission in the Philippines and Denmark to illustrate how one type of mission has developed into a performative discourse that Christian migrants can rely on as a strategy of empowerment in difficult situations abroad.

2. Materials and Methods

As mentioned in the Introduction, this article is part of a Special Issue called “Transgressing Boundaries: Biblical and Social Scientific Studies of Migration”. My contribution is to discuss how studies of migration and mission balance similar forms of tension between the notions of descriptive/prescriptive and political/ethical, related to different epistemologies. As a sociologist of religion with an interest in migration studies, I am placed within the social sciences. Therefore, my perspective on the case study of reverse mission is one of curious exploration, not grounded in an engaged epistemology of either faith or politics—at least this is my intention. My material primarily consists of published research articles and books on migration and mission together with empirical examples drawn from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ online archive and a documentary portraying the Filipino community in Denmark from the beginning of the 1990s. In terms of methods, the article applies text analysis.

3. Mission: Balancing Descriptive and Prescriptive Concepts

In the gospel of Matthew, we find the great commission from Jesus to his disciples “Go therefore and make disciples of all Nations” (Matthew 28:19). Although the missionary endeavor has been instrumentalized in dark ways historically (Cronshaw 2016), the core idea of winning people’s hearts for Jesus is central for many Christians as they move across national borders and into new geographical terrains. Etymologically, mission is derived from the Latin word “missio” which means to send. Although the word mission is not mentioned in the Bible, mission has always been closely related to Christianity and the spread of Christianity globally, formed by the Jesuits’ fourth vow, to mission by travelling overseas (Kavunkal 2004, p. 58). Mission is one of those concepts that creates analytical opacity, as it can be applied as a descriptive or a prescriptive term depending on the perspective. From a theological perspective “Mission is the longing to see all things renewed—human relationships with God, with our societies, with one another as well as with our environment and our species. It is the healing and redemption of all things under the lordship of Christ” (Butler et al. 2024). This definition speaks to the Christian vision of salvation and harmony and seeks to transform the social world as we know it. Emphasizing mission as a means towards a better future gives this definition a prescriptive character that does not fit easily with the descriptive use of mission in the social sciences. In the scientific journal Social Sciences and Missions, mission is studied “not (as) a theological category, but rather a type of social action and a modality of religious intervention in social space…as a social fact, which throws light on the relations between religion and society at both local and global scales” (SSM 2025). In this view, to keep mission as an analytical category in the social sciences, mission should be seen as a sort of action, a social intervention that can be harnessed by a variety of actors. In fact, the newest development within descriptive mission studies is to broaden the concept to include mission within other religious traditions than Christian as well as mission as social engagement in non-religious organizations such as NGOs (Sharkey 2024, pp. 10–11). These two ways of applying mission as a prescriptive and a descriptive concept are also informed by different epistemologies. The renowned missiologist David Bosch clearly stated in his examination of mission paradigms through history that missiology “as a branch of the discipline of Christian theology, is not a disinterested or neutral enterprise; rather, it seeks to look at the world from the perspective of commitment to the Christian faith” (Bosch 1991, p. 9). Missiology as a discipline, then, values knowledge about the world that is grounded in the realization of God’s presence. The epistemic concepts of theology are based on scripture, reason, tradition, experience and revelation together with more general concepts such as wisdom, virtue and understanding, to name a few (Abraham and Aquino 2017, p. 1). These concepts communicate what counts as appropriate epistemic evaluation in theology (Ibid., p. 2). In the same manner, epistemic evaluation in the social sciences, or more specifically, in migration studies, is often based on nation-state categories or a transnational research paradigm that aims to transcend methodological nationalism (Fischer 2021, p. 47). Legitimate knowledge about migration is thereby located in descriptive categories that are politically situated. In the next section, I will discuss the politically potent field of migration studies as an engaged science similar to missiology, but first I will return to how mission bridges church practice and academia.

Historically, mission as a concept has developed in different ways in the practiced theology of the churches and academia. With the imperial expansions beginning in the late 15th century Europe, Christian mission went hand in hand with territorial conquest. This is the empire way of understanding mission as the need to expand Christianity to the ends of the earth as we know it. Andrew Walls calls this period the age of the great European migration, where expansion was tied to Christendom as the unity of land, laws and customs (Walls 2014; 2023, p. 23). The empire way of understanding mission changed in the 1900s as former colonies became independent nation-states, and the Christian churches in these countries sought a more equal relationship with the churches of the global North. In 1963, The World Council of Churches decided to abolish the distinction between Christendom and the non-Christian world (Mourier-Genoud 2018, p. 177). This move meant that mission was to take place everywhere and in every community. Mission was thereby not limited to evangelization from the global North to the global South. In 1971, several church leaders from former colonies explicitly communicated that Western missionaries should leave. In the Philippines, the president of Union Theological Seminary, Emérito Nacpil, stated that missionaries were a symbol of Western imperialism and that they should go home (Ibid., p. 177). With this post-colonial reading of the situation, mission had gone from an empire to an anti-empire reading, resulting in a more elastic understanding of the missionary endeavor. In the aftermath of Vatican II, mission lies at the heart of Catholic Christianity as well as of most Protestant churches. Today, every Christian should be viewed as a missionary according to the late pope Francis, who thereby underlined mission as a personal undertaking that can take multiple forms. In the Catholic Church, the initial Great Commission has transformed into missionary discipleship, with a greater emphasis on mutual respect and cooperation. In the final document of the Catholic Church’s Synod 2021–2024 “For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission” (Vatican 2025), mission is mentioned as something that each baptized person should incorporate into their everyday lives and in their different contexts: “…all the Baptized are enriched with gifts to share, each according to his or her vocation and way or condition in life” (paragraph 57). Throughout the document, the bishops call for further engagement from women (60), children (61), young people (62) and people with disabilities (63), thereby reorienting mission as something that takes place in diverse social groups. As Andrew Recepción frames it, missionary discipleship is rethought in multiple (and circulatory) territorial and existential geographies today (Recepción 2023, p. 218). These newest developments in mission practice are the results of a post-Vatican II reflexive approach to mission that incorporates cultural difference. This sensitivity towards difference in evangelization is known as inculturation, indigenization or contextualization (Ballano 2024; Bevans 1999).

In the academic field of mission studies, the transition from empire over postcolonial thinking to a broad and inclusive notion of mission is mirrored in different research paradigms throughout the 1900s. The years 1880–1930 marked a prolific period of writing about missions in colonial contexts—and often as something positive (Sharkey 2024, p. 11). After 1930, the rise of colonial critique from nationalist movements parred with the global economic depression and a shift of attitude among mission supporters left the study of missions with less political momentum (Ibid.). This situation did not improve with the decolonizing movements of the 1950s and 1960s following the end of WWII, resulting in postcolonial readings of missionary history and the subsequent invisibility of colonial mission studies in the 1980s (Ibid., p. 13). However, the field slowly became reestablished in the 1990s with a more sober and scientific approach to mission and with more room for diverse mission narratives such as women’s history of mission, short-term and volunteer missionary endeavors and new geographies of social intervention (Sharkey 2024, pp. 18–20). Summing up, the field of mission is both an academic discipline and a Christian practice. Sometimes, mission is used as a descriptive term; however, missiology as such is an engaged science working from an epistemology where God’s presence is part of an appropriate evaluation of knowledge. The ongoing tension between prescriptive and descriptive categories should not be dismissed as bad science. Rather, the different uses of and approaches to mission can drive rich ideas forward.

4. Migration: Balancing Political Pressure and Ethical Obligation

In this section, I will draw the contours of the research field of migration emphasizing how many studies of contemporary migration are in an ongoing conversation with political interests of different kinds. Migration is defined as human movement from one place to another, here in the words of sociologist of religion James Beckford:

“The meaning of migration refers to changes in human residence that involve crossing regional, national or international boundaries. Migration is both a reversible process and an outcome that can vary from temporary to permanent, from voluntary to forced, and from individual to collective on a massive scale. It can also be associated with the formation of diasporas, with asylum-seeking, with internally displaced persons and with refugees. In this context it does not include nomadism, transhumance or pilgrimage”.

(Beckford 2019)

Migration, then, is a very broad practice but often carries political and geographical transformations in its trail. In a critical research piece from the beginning of the 2000s, anthropologist Nina Glick Schiller and sociologist Andreas Wimmer argued that the field of migration studies was embedded in methodological nationalism (Schiller and Wimmer 2003) where the borders of the nation-state had become the primary analytical container for any study of migrants. Returning to my point about epistemology, the authors were critical towards the epistemic underpinnings of the field. If nation-state interests dictate what is legitimate knowledge related to migrants and migration, then scholars and communities loose rich insights that are invisible or uninteresting for political actors embedded in a nation-state regime. Schiller and Wimmer found that studies of migrants would benefit from cross-national and global perspectives that would not limit migration to the logics of national territories. Despite this early insight, recent attempts to map the migration field still find that it is dominated by Western and nation-state-centered perspectives (Dahinden et al. 2022). This is little wonder, as the political context enabling migration has always been important. Studies of borders, citizenship, migrant rights, and legal vulnerability are all related to nation-state regimes and their policies of social cohesion. In this way, current migration studies are mixed up with a presentist agenda where the political interests of today channel funding towards research projects that light up specific aspects of migration (Furseth 2008). However, many migration scholars seem to protest this political interest by conducting studies that are invested in individual migrants or migrant groups. In this respect, migration studies are close to Robbins’ (2013) analysis of how the suffering subject has become the main theme in anthropology as a reaction to the colonial underpinnings of the field from its very beginning. In migration studies, the migrant has become the suffering subject in need of protection in response—I think—to the intensified political interest, critique and suspicion from different national actors towards immigrant groups.

As an example, one of the top journals in the migration field, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies describes its content as “all forms of migration and its consequences, together with articles on ethnic conflict, discrimination, racism, nationalism, citizenship and policies of integration” (JEMS 2025). Reading through the last five years of publications from JEMS gives a unified picture of a journal—and a field—that is invested in uncovering unequal power relations between minoritized groups and their surroundings. Recurring themes are concepts such as vulnerability, exclusion, resilience, hierarchy, restriction, resistance, support, illegality, precarity, exploitation, etc. These terms all convey a concern for the minoritized, and this concern points towards the ethical obligation of the researcher to help individual migrants or migrant groups. The will to do good is exemplified in a research article from (Heindlmaier and Kobler 2023). The title of this research piece tells the reader beforehand that the EU worker experiences unequal treatment and that we should understand the worker as a suffering subject in need of protection and policy change. Where the epistemic concepts in theology could be tradition and revelation, the epistemic concepts in recent migration studies seem to be based on minoritized experiences such as resilience and precarity.

Summing up, my argument is that contemporary migration studies are often haunted by the will to do good—to lay bare the difficult life conditions attached to life as migrants and create better political and social conditions for minoritized groups. If missiology is an engaged discipline that seeks to do God’s work, migration studies could also be viewed as an engaged science framed by an ethical obligation to protect research participants (migrants) and projects from political pressure and nation-state categories. In migration studies, political (state) interest is balanced by ethical scholarship. Although the two fields of mission and migration abide by different epistemologies, both draw on the productive tension between prescriptive and descriptive approaches to the same concepts as an affective strategy to promote social change. From a biblical and pre-nation-state perspective, migration becomes something different, but it is still essential for political, religious and social transformation.

5. Reverse Mission

The two research fields of mission and migration are both related to the concept of reverse mission, which I see as a rich idea that speaks to different levels of migration. From the mission field, the tension between prescriptive and descriptive is directly imported into reverse mission that is more of a global mindset than an empirical reality. From the field of migration, migrant vulnerability and the will to empower the minoritized also run as an undercurrent in reverse mission.

In a clear-sighted article on reverse mission, Eric Mourier-Genoud traces the history and use of the term as it became fashionable in the late 1990s (Mourier-Genoud 2018, p. 169). He finds two different strands of meaning shaped by different contexts. The first and arguably most common notion of reverse mission refers to the missionizing efforts of preachers and churches from former colonized countries to Europe and the United States today. This idea of a mission in reverse (from the south to the north) was developed in the aftermath of three social transformations: (1) the deepening secularization in northern societies; (2) large groups of migrants from Asia and Africa arriving in the USA and Europe from the 1880s onwards; (3) transnational African, Asian and Latin American churches opening branches in the USA and Europe in the 1980s and 1990s (Mourier-Genoud 2018, pp. 178–79). This range of events have also shaped the research field of migration studies related to religion as the influx of religious migrants to the global North spurred a renewed interest in how religion influenced nation-state coherence and job markets (Ebaugh 2010).

The second version of reverse mission emerged in the 1970s and refers to the idea that European and American missionaries working in South and Central America ought to influence their home publics to help financially and politically in the missionary areas (Mourier-Genoud 2018, p. 172). Mourier-Genoud finds that both meanings of reverse mission are intentional and programmatic, keeping with Bosch’s notion of engaged missiology and a prescriptive approach to mission. They should be analyzed as performative discourses that help migrants and their churches to valorize their work and sometimes difficult situation (Ibid., p. 182). Understanding that this version of mission should be viewed more as a legitimizing discourse than as a social reality does not make it less interesting. In fact, different notions of reverse mission run through migrants’ everyday lives in powerful ways. I will return to reverse mission in my analysis. First, I will focus on the Philippines as a case study for mission and migration leading up to the case of reverse mission.

6. The Philippines: A Case Study

In the following, I analyze the Philippines as an example of how the disciplinary tensions in the field of mission and migration have created rich ideas both within academia and in Christian practice. The Philippines is a majority Catholic country in Asia with a colonial history. The country was a Spanish colony from 1556 to 1898, then occupied by the Americans from 1898 to 1946, before gaining independence in 1946. Today, the Philippines is known for its global presence through great numbers of migrant workers, the so-called OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers). Since the 1980s, the Philippines has been a main supplier of work migrants into international work chains. According to Gemma Cruz, 70% of the population of the Philippines are affected by migration, with more than 10 million Filipinos living and working overseas (Cruz 2023, p. 3). In her words, the Philippines is a powerhouse of global migration. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, the 2020 Census of Population and Housing showed that 79% of the population are Roman Catholic, 6% are Muslim, and the remaining part of the population belong to a variety of Protestant and independent churches (Philippine Statistics Authority 2025). In addition, 99.6% of the population in the Philippines believe in God (WVS 2019).

In terms of mission concepts, theologian Andrew Gimenez Recepción has described how the Philippines has gone through three mission paradigms. The first relates to the empire period from the 1500s to the 1800s, which Recepción refers to as “baptize then teach” (Recepción 2023, p. 211). Mexican friars were sent to the Philippines to evangelize, applying the idea of territorial expansion. For Recepción, the “baptize then teach” paradigm meant that mission was aimed at numbers and less at content. With the transition from Spanish colonization to American occupation, the second mission paradigm became “teach then baptize” (Ibid., p. 212). The Spanish clergy was confined to Manila by the Americans, and therefore, the very diverse Philippine terrain of 7000-plus islands became an area of religious competition between incoming Catholic missionaries and American Protestant missionary movements. This situation is still reflected in the religious demography of today, where Protestant Christianity is influential in different parts of the country, despite the Catholic majority structure. Recepción names the third paradigm “the new age of mission” where the Philippine churches send missionaries overseas, and especially charismatic groups aim for making disciples of all nations (Ibid., p. 213). Here, the large number of overseas workers are key in a new strategy to evangelize people outside the Philippines. In the words of Recepción “…not only are OFWs the new missionaries of the Philippines to all peoples (ad gentes); their experience also provides clues in reimagining missiology in general, and Filipino missiology in particular” (Recepción 2023, p. 214). The global presence of Christian Filipinos working in a wide range of environments poses a new missionary situation where OFWs can potentially influence their surroundings to become Christian. For Recepción, this is already happening through Filipina care workers in overseas households where OFWs instill Christianity in the children and the elderly who they care for. Filipinas thereby become “a channel of gospel-oriented values, and a witness of Christ’s love to all peoples across borders in all situations and seasons of life” (Ibid., p. 219). Although Recepción is clearly invested in a prescriptive notion of mission, his take on the development of mission paradigms mirrors global developments and gives us clues to how the performative discourse of mission—or reverse mission, to be more precise—acts as an empowering strategy that individual actors can tap into, in a global market economy.

Other studies on Filipino/a migration have highlighted how migrant workers understand their sojourn through a Christian logic where hardships are legitimized as religiously meaningful. For anthropologist Julius Bautista, Filipino/a migration is framed by a Roman Catholic governmentality positioning OFWs as de facto missionaries of faith (Bautista 2015, p. 433), what he calls export quality martyrs. The Philippine state and the Roman Catholic Church both build an institutionalized image of the Filipino/a hero/martyr sacrificing him- or herself for the nation and family. The sacrificial emphasis has also been found in studies of Filipina migrants in Israel (Liebelt 2011) and Rome (Magat 2007). Anthropologist Claudia Liebelt has argued that Filipina care workers in Israel hope to convert the Jewish elderly to Christianity, thereby also reading their own migratory difficulties into a tale of evangelizing empowerment (Liebelt 2011, p. 81). In a study of Filipinas in Rome, folklorist Margaret Magat found that migration was connected to evangelization through notions of servitude and sacrifice cultivated in the Roman Catholic tradition (Magat 2007, p. 604). These ideas of mission through migration also circulate in studies of global Christianity in general (Cruz 2016; Kahl 2014; Hanciles 2021).

Summing up, the special position of the Philippines as a majority Catholic country with a religiously invested population parred with massive global migration makes a fertile soil for theories of mission through migration. Reverse mission becomes an inner logic that individual work migrants can draw on in times of difficulty. In the following, I will analyze the missionary performative discourse from two different perspectives: the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of the Philippines and a local Catholic parish in Denmark with Filipino work migrants.

7. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines

In 2021, the Philippines celebrated the 500th anniversary of Christianity on the islands. This celebration was not uncontested. Scholars such as Brazal et al. have described Christianity as a mixed gift to the Philippines (Brazal et al. 2024, p. 14), accusing Filipinos of having a colonial mentality where anything American is deemed superior (Ibid., p. 11). However, the Catholic Church did celebrate this event, and the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of the Philippines sent out a pastoral letter for the 2021 year of mission ad gentes named “Becoming Jesus’ Missionary Disciples” (CBCP 2021). In the letter, addressed to the beloved people of God, the bishops highlight the missionary discipleship advocated for by pope Francis, but by way of territorial expansion:

“The Christian faith arrived and prospered in our land through the dedication and heroic sacrifices of thousands of men and women missionaries from various parts of the world. They treasured the gift of faith they had received and desired to share this gift with others. As the theme chosen by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) for this fifth centennial notes: all Christians are “gifted to give”. This “giftedness” motivated generous missionaries over the centuries; it must also enflame the hearts of all of us today to engage in mission here at home and in other countries (missio ad gentes). Indeed, this is part of Jesus’ mission mandate to his disciples: “What you have received as a gift, give as a gift” (Mt 10:8). We pray for a missionary renewal of our Church—both at home (ad intra) and beyond our borders (ad extra) during our celebration of the 500 years—and into the future!”.

(CBCP)

In a postcolonial lens, the letter from the Filipino bishops can be read as transforming the initial empire-based missio ad gentes to a movement reaching beyond the north/south divide and initiated from the Philippines. In this sense, the performative discourse of reverse mission lies between the lines, shaping the outlook of the CBCP and prescribing a certain type of social action into the concept of mission. On the other hand, the letter from the bishops could also be framed within a colonial thinking where the many missionaries arriving in the Philippines are praised for their heroism and sacrifice. In this version of history, Christianity was a gift to the islands, and the people of the Philippines remain gifted today where they are obliged to share their Christianity with people of all nations as they are “gifted to give”. The CBCP seems to be addressing the sacrificial logic of the many Filipinos working abroad or their families back home in their framing of mission as sacrifice and servitude. Applying Recepción’s three paradigms of mission, the pastoral letter speaks to the first paradigm where mission is tied to territorial expansion (“mission in other countries”) and the last paradigm, the new age of mission, where mission is free to take place everywhere (“at home … and beyond”).

In conclusion, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines integrates the idea of mission as central for any Christian in the Philippines. Not because the Philippines is a former colony, but because foreign missionaries sacrificed themselves in giving Christianity to the Philippine people, a gift that Filipinos/as now must multiply in evangelizing home and abroad. Running through this version of mission is the notion of reverse mission that acts as a performative discourse because it has a prescriptive value. The bishops’ letter is aimed at Filipino Christians with the intent of reminding them of their missionary obligations, especially in countries in the global North.

8. Domestic Mission Abroad

My other example of mission and migration comes from Denmark, where a small community of Filipinos/as has established a vibrant church environment in the Catholic Church. Filipino migration to Denmark began in the 1960s and 1970s, when several Filipinas were invited as guest workers (Andersen 2013, 2017). In the following period, migration to Denmark was mainly possible through marriage and family reunion with Filipinos already living in the country, and in 2000, the au pair scheme made it possible for citizens from the Philippines to work on a two-year basis as au pairs. The different modes of migration have resulted in a feminine profile for this migrant group in Denmark. In 2021, 11,471 Filipinos were registered in Denmark, and 81% of these were female (Statistics Denmark 2021). An additional 6367 Danish citizens had one Filipino parent in 2020, 91 per cent of whom were their mothers (Statistics Denmark 2020, p. 159). The Filipino migrant group in Denmark, then, is dominated by women, many of whom live with a Danish partner. This profile has shaped the way that mission as a performative discourse is applied by individual Filipinas and their Catholic clergy. The Catholic Church in Denmark is a minority church, with about 2% of the Danish population as registered members. Although there is a large, unregistered member group of Catholic work migrants from, especially, Poland, the Danish religious profile is dominated by Lutheran majority church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark (folkekirken), which 71% of the population belonged to in 2024 (Statistics Denmark 2024). In overall terms though, Denmark is also understood as one of the most secular countries in the world (Zuckerman 2020), with 45% of the population stating that they were either atheist or non-religious in 2024—regardless of their official membership in the majority church (FUV 2024).

Below is a statement from the former chaplain for the Filipinos in Denmark, Fr. Patrick Sheils, where he explains the mission strategy of Catholic Filipinas married to secular Danes. Fr. Sheils was an Irish Redemptorist priest who had lived for several years in the Philippines before travelling to Denmark as the clergyman responsible for the Catholic Filipino community in Copenhagen. The quote is taken from a documentary about the Filipino community in Denmark, “Invisible among Invisibles” (Usynlig blandt usynlige), by Filomenita Mongaya Høgsholm, from the beginning of the 1990s. I have chosen this documentary as it is still referred to in the Filipino environment among the first generations of work migrants. Fr. Sheils died in 2012, but his theological direction is still influential in the Filipino Catholic environment in Copenhagen. In the documentary, Fr. Sheils is sitting in the empty pews of Saint Anne’s Church, a Catholic church in the area of Amager, Copenhagen, in the daytime, between masses. He talks about the Filipinos in Denmark and how he sees their presence in this secular country as a new form of mission:

“I like to call it sometimes a mission in reverse because of the people now coming to Europe and having an impact in various ways in the different countries. So it’s good to see them spreading out like that and bringing the message to countries where it’s very much needed today. … For us, from our point of view with the spiritual thing it’s so important. I think that they are one of the greatest blessings that has been brought to Denmark. What they are doing is what we as missionaries could never do because they become little mini missionaries in their own home, and I think that’s wonderful, yeah (smiles). I was in Sacraments [Church] this Wednesday, and I saw this young Filipina with her child. The child was about seven or eight, and they went over to one of the side altars like you see here to light a candle. And the child went to move away, then the mother caught the child by the sleeve and brought her back again and taught her how to light the candle. And on the other side was her Danish husband, and he was hooked in as well, and he was very happy, so there were the three of them together making their little prayer. So I complimented her, I said; you’re training your little one very well, and you’re training the big one too, I notice (laughs). And he was very happy about it too”.

The quote from Fr. Sheils echoes the performative discourse of reverse mission. Set in the beginning of the 1990s, this documentary and its influential priest communicate the strategy of the migration/mission paradigm of “the new age of mission”, Recepción’s third mission paradigm, at an early stage. However, the form of this version of mission is not dependent on church seeding and preachers from the global South. Rather, mission is lived out in the domestic sphere, at home in the families of the Filipina migrants. Their task is to evangelize their secular husbands and baptize their children into the Catholic faith. Although Fr. Sheils frames this missionary endeavor in terms of devoted Filipinos spreading the gospel in the religious desert of Denmark, the domestic mission seems to be more of an empowering discourse than a social fact in terms of Catholic conversion of the secular husbands. Although some Danish spouses convert, the membership rate for the Catholic Church has not been rising due to domestic mission.

Just as with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, Fr. Sheils in the Catholic Church in Denmark has a prescriptive understanding of mission as something that should transform social reality. This clerical wish is shared by many Filipinos who find the Danish way of not caring about religion dissatisfying. Here, I will not include quotes from interviews with Filipina work migrants in Denmark, as I have published them elsewhere (Trolle 2023, 2025). Suffice it to say that reverse mission is applied in a variety of ways as a performative discourse shaping the social reality of individual migrants and their churches.

9. Conclusions

In this article, I have argued that the research fields of migration and mission navigate similar tensions between prescriptive interests and descriptive categories, reflecting different epistemologies of engaged faith (missiology) and political context (migration). With its biblical legacy, mission is actualized in a variety of ways within the contemporary paradigm of mission everywhere and for every Christian. In the field of mission, a history of colonialization and de-colonialization has resulted in disciplinary struggles over the content and inclusiveness of mission as a scientific category. In the field of migration, political interests related to nation-state regimes often influence research, resulting in several migration scholars pushing back and placing their analytical object—the migrant—as a suffering subject in need of protection. However, tensions between the notions of prescriptive/descriptive and political/ethical produce interesting concepts, and one of them is reverse mission. Applying reverse mission to the case study of the Catholic Church in the Philippines and Denmark, I conclude that different forms of mission (missionary discipleship and domestic mission) are a powerful leit motif for global church work. The Catholic Bishop’s Conference in the Philippines celebrated the 500th anniversary of Christianity in the Philippines in 2021 by reminding the Christian population of the sacrifices that the early missionaries made to bring the Christian faith to the islands. This idea is echoed among Filipinas and their Catholic priest in Denmark, where mission takes a domestic turn. Reverse mission can be a productive performative discourse for Christian migrants and their churches placed in new and demanding situations abroad.