According to Harvey Kwiyani it is second generation migrant kids:

From where I stand, it is very plausible that the future of Christianity and mission in Europe will depend, to a fair extent, on the faith and ministries of children of migrant Christians from around the world who are currently living in Europe. Thus, ministry to what has come to be called the “second-generation diaspora” is critical. The question is, “who is discipling the younger generation diaspora?”

Emphasis oringal

This is more or less the argument I make when explaining the current structure of Grace Church. I’m fairly regularly asked why Neema, our Congolese refugee group meet separately and the answer takes a bit of unpacking. There are significant language obstacles to overcome, there are some significant differences in how we conduct services, how we preach, how we worship and to be honest a mish-mash of the two would, at this stage, please no one and upset more or less everyone.

My observation is that this group of people experience life in Sweden as both so much better that they would never dream of going back and at the same time incredibly hard and stressful. There is then a great sense of relief & blessing for them to come together once a week to pray, worship, experience their faith in ways that are familiar to them, this is natural and we all do it. But in this sense their church is a ‘migrant sanctuary’.

As Kwiyani says elsewhere,

Africans are planting and growing African churches in the West and that their churches are shaped by the migration of Africans to the West, with many of them being quite tribal in nature. Babatunde Adedibu calls their churches migrant sanctuaries. While their presence strengthens Christianity and their overnight prayers keep a lot of evil at bay in many Western cities—and all this is greatly appreciated—very few of them are able to minister cross-culturally, not even among fellow Africans of other nationalities apart from their own.

Can Black Missionaries Serve in a White World?

This is what we have observed both with our community which is full of relatively new arrivals (5 years or less) and also in other more established African churches in Stockholm. In fact I would argue some of the least cross-cultural churches in Stockholm are not Swedish ones but African.

So how can the two things be reconciled? Can Kwiyani be right both about the future of mission in Europe and right in observing that many (most) African churches are currently operating only within defined tribal limits? The key of course is how his question about discipling the second generation gets answered.

This is what might happen if we fail.

If Stockholm is anything to go by (it might not be) migrants will for cultural and linguistic reasons have a strong preference to worship in their own communities and the established churches are happy to let them. The effect of this is highly religious silos amongst a highly irreligious culture and never the twain shall meet. As a result the church may well die while all the while ignoring the medicine necessary to keep it alive.

Is the future of Europe African?

And right now this is what we’re mostly heading for but I think there are alternatives and that’s what we’re holding out for. I’ve told our church one of the main reasons for our partnership with immigrant communities (Congolese and Sudanese) is about the church of the next generation. Will the culture secularize all their children or will they grow up to retain the passionate faith of their parents and acquire the cultural & language skills of their new country that their parents lack? If it’s the latter then we have a chance, God willing.

The church we need to be focused on is not so much the one we see now each Sunday but the one that their kids and my kids will lead together. How we get there is a road mostly unknown but travel it we must.