Opinion | By Blogger Jaalala

The speed of evangelical Christianity growth in Ethiopia is reaching  faster than almost everywhere else around the world. Last time i was chatting with a friend about the so-called "Pentay" or "Pente" churches in Ethiopia as they are nicknamed. And These churches are being built everywhere, in every town and every village. The churches and their media products have also created a growing and flourishing industry. Oromo gospel song, CDs and VCD releases have reached the high level of Amharic growth in their speed. This obviously indicates the growing demand, especially in the youth population, which is basically most of Ethiopia. The two main anti-evangelical resistant populations in Ethiopia have always been the Tigre-Ethiopians and the Somali-Ethiopians. But even these 2 groups have not stayed that way recently. Even though some preachers risk their lives by going to the dangerous Ogaden somali zone, that still has not stopped evangelical growth in the Somali community of Ethiopia. Unlike the Orthodox Christians and Suni Islam, there is no barrier for the evangelical Christians.

Check out some of these diverse communities of Ethiopian evangelicals

http://oromochurchmn.org/
http://www.oromochurchdc.com/
http://www.ecfethiopia.org/index.htm
http://etmuluwongel.org/
http://www.eecmy.org/
http://somalisforjesus.blogspot.com/
http://www.ekhc.org.et/

This is just some of the thousands of Ethiopian evangelical presense online that mirrors the explosion of evangelical church numbers in every corners of Ethiopia.

Anyway, What does all of this mean?

I really believe that Ethiopia will soon become an evangelical dominated nation. If that becomes a reality, i am not going to be celebrating too much, even though i am evangelical myself. I think the QUALITY of evangelicals' faith & devotion might become very weak when our QUANTITY increases too much. Anyway, in the 1994 census just a little below 10% of the Ethiopian population was evangelical. But only 13 years later in 2007, almost 19% of Ethiopia is now evangelical, according to the last census. This means, there is nearly 9% evangelical Christianity growth every 13 years in Ethiopia! But according to some churches, this speed is not remaining constant and it is actually growing even more faster.

Still, if we use just the 9% growth per 13 years model, this means Ethiopia will be 50 percent evangelical around the year 2042!

If we can convert more people from the other religions, evangelicals can grow even more. Using the same constant rate, Ethiopia can become 75% Evangelical Christian around 2090! This is amazing. Ofcourse, the rate is not constant and evangelicals are growing more faster the next year than they did the previous year. So the above estimations might be very conservative.

In general, if or when evangelicals become the majority in Ethiopia, it will be a big IRONY. The proud Orthodox-Ethiopians have always believed that they are the state-makers, an ancient religion and the dominant group in Ethiopia. At the same time, Muslim-Ethiopians were the first muslims in the whole African continent. Actually, muslims in northern Ethiopia town of Negash accepted Islam even before the Arabs! But strangely, all of this will not matter. After a few decades, it will not be the Orthodox or Muslims who dominate Ethiopia anymore.

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