The Brethren in Christ sent their first missionaries to Southern Rhodesia in 1898, establishing Matopo Mission in Matabeleland, and later into Northern Rhodesia and India. The African churches grew far faster than the parent body: by the late twentieth century the Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe and the church in Zambia together substantially outnumbered the United States denomination, and they operate their own schools, hospitals and theological colleges. This is the ordinary shape of Anabaptist demography now — most Mennonites are African, Asian or Latin American — but it is particularly stark for a body that began as a few hundred Pennsylvania German farmers and never had more than a few tens of thousands of North American members.