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A global Protestant body should move its headquarters out of Geneva to cuts costs and to follow the global shift of Christianity to the Southern Hemisphere, says a U.S. Reformed church leader.

Addressing the founding meeting of the World Communion of Reformed Churches in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on June 24, Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, described Geneva as one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Demography drives religious change. That bald comment is too obvious to be worth making, but it’s surprising how little attention demographic factors receive in most histories of religion, particularly of Christianity. That neglect means we miss a very large part of the story.

Given a sufficiently high birth rate, a minority religious community can rapidly be come a dominant majority, with all that implies for distributing social power and shaping conflict. Alterna tively, migration can transform the religious economy of a hitherto static society.