"It is an excellent primer for those seeking a better understanding of migrant faith, as well as an encouragement to the Western church, showing the positive impact of a theology of welcome towards those displaced."— Will Cumbia, Vienna, in: Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 21.2 (2021).This book contributes to a theoretical enrichment of the myriad intersections between religion and forced migration. Hitherto, the forced migration field witnessed a dearth of research on religious imaginaries in refugees and migrants’ journeys. The author, located in diaspora missiology, and utilizing research triangulation and a multi-layered analysis, provides a rich longitudinal study that constructs complex narratives of travel, conversion and faith of refugees and migrants, but also role of migrant organizations in Athens. This book fills an important lacuna by privileging migrants’ agency, voices, profoundly formative Christian experiences and religious imaginaries in transitional, liminal contexts of displacement, journeys and sojourning. — Afe Adogame, Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Religion and Society, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA.Darren Carlson has broken new ground with his portraits of migrant Christian communities in Athens. There have been studies of churches formed by immigrants in places like London, but this is the first analysis of churches composed of migrants from Africa and the Middle East in transit to a final destination in Europe. — Dr Mark Beaumont, Research Associate, London School of Theology Christianity and Conversion among Migrants is a theoretically robust ethnographic account of immigrants, refugees, and the Christian ministries which serve them in Athens. Carlson provides a wealth of moving stories, interviews, and analysis to show how testimony to the life of Jesus is at work amongst these people on the move. For confessing Christians, Carlson also provides powerful stories for how the biblical practice of hospitality to strangers is being embodied in migrants, refugees, and others in the 21st century in Athens. — Joshua W. Jipp, Associate Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity SchoolThe migrants’ conversion to Christianity is one of several ‘responses’ to crises people on the move face. Whilst there are fine works on conversion to Christianity, this ethnographic analysis goes further. i. it rigorously maintains a distinction between Iranian, Afghan, Eritrean and Ghanaian migrants into Greece and offers an empirically supported and unexpectedly complex reasons for their conversion; ii. It underlines converts’ agency in conversion without over simplifying it by excluding the agency of the Christian workers; and iii. it highlights the crucial sense in which the context where this occurs is significantly different from other analyses of conversion stories; in that Greece, where all this unfolds, merely serves as a transit station in the converts’ stories. This book is an excellent resource for both missiologist and conversion specialists; it is also a must read for those starting their research in these fields. — David Emmanuel Singh, The Oxford Centre for Mission Studies
