Place, Space, and Authority. The Mission and Reversed Mission of the Ghanaian Seventh-day Adventist Church in Amsterdam

African churches in diaspora frequently use mission discourses in which they seek to reach out not only to Africans but to 'native' populations as well. However, though such discourses are sometimes followed up by praxis and incidental 'success,' there often appears a gap between so called 'reversed mission' discourse and its accompanying praxis. This article explores why this gap may exist, through a space and place related understanding of mission and a case study of the Ghanaian Seventh-day Adventists in Amsterdam. It is argued that ethnicised forms of place making, reversed mission as an identity discourse, and asymmetrical and ambivalent authority relations may account for the breach between reversed mission discourse and praxis among Ghanaian Adventists in Amsterdam and possibly the larger African Christian diaspora.