The thousand-year church: Trustee missiology from Africa to the Universal Church

This article develops trustee missiology as a reframing of Catholic mission oriented toward intergenerational endurance rather than expansion alone. Whereas expansionist missiology emphasizes geographic proclamation and contextual missiology focuses on cultural intelligibility, trustee missiology asks under what conditions faith is transmitted and sustained across generations. Using African Catholicism as a primary analytical lens, where churches have moved from mission territory to mature local church within living memory, the article identifies a persistent blind spot in contemporary missiology: the under-theorization of transmission. Through comparative historical analysis of ecclesial persistence and collapse, including the disappearance of North African Christianity, the study argues that missionary credibility depends not only on proclamation or inculturation but on the formation of durable infrastructures of memory and responsibility. It concludes that African Catholic experience offers critical resources for conceptualizing mission as trusteeship within contexts of accelerated social and institutional change.