66 Sermon Illustrations on Africa

"Mama Alice" had followers attack Ugandan government. Rubbed magic potion on them to ward off bullets. Hundreds were killed. Followers were armed only with sticks and stones. Alice Lakwena is leader of Holy Spirit Movement. At least 8,500 rebels have been killed in 1987. She fled on a bicycle.

Uganda, the "pearl of Africa," has lost perhaps 800,000 to warfare. Northerner Idi Amin killed perhaps 300,000. Driven out in 1979. General Obote (ousted by Amin), also a northerner, returned and slaughtered between 200,000 and 500,000. Defeated by Yoweri Museveni. Rumors that his forces are killing untold thousands in north. Joseph Kariango, a southern farmer, lost wife, son and daughter. Their bones are still exposed (photo). "Luwero triangle" especially hard hit by Obote. Young girls tied with wire, raped, thrown from hotel roof. Bones are displayed on roadside vegetable stands.

[for more on Museveni, see #4327]

Chester Scott met a little boy named Uddy about 11 years old in 1953 in Belgian Congo (Zaire). Had lung removed in Baptist hospital, got better, studied math in America, is now a top official in Zairian government. Often attends meetings and is very supportive of missionary work.

After Mel, my husband, blessed the food, I broke off a piece of the boiled ball of pulverized igname root, swished it around with my fingers in the watery goat broth, raised it to my lips and thanked God for the incredible opportunity we had to be in Benin, west Africa.

We had just attended a church service under a mango tree near a small bush village in northern Benin. The meal was an expression of the love and warm hospitality of these Christian brothers and sisters.

Our visit to Benin began on Oct. 15. For the next 16 days we would visit every section of this west African country, from the southern coastal town of Porto Nova to the northern village of Tanguieta, and our lives would be dramatically and permanently altered.

Culturally, it was like stepping back to Bible times. Throughout the country, women still carry water pots, huge trays of fruit and just about anything else on their heads. They wash their clothes and bathe in the streams near the villages. There is no running water, heat, electricity, air conditioning ... or showers or bathrooms!

There are few cars. Most walk. "Taxi" service is mainly jimijams (motor scooters) which dart about haphazardly causing endless accidents and loss of life to riders and pedestrians. There is little industry, so people are forced to subsist on what they can grow, barter for or forage from the forest and fields around them.

Voodoo and spiritism are still prevalent, holding the people in bondage to incredible fear and superstition.

At our first stop, Porto Nova, we were warmly hosted by Bobby and Becky Couts, originally from Tennessee. Bobby is the head of the Southern Baptist mission in Benin. He and Becky have lived in this Third-World country 20 years, including a number of years under the communist regime. They endured many difficulties and much persecution. But they stayed because God had called them, and their work was not yet finished. They are now joined by 10 missionary families. Churches are sprinkled throughout the country and reaching into the remotest villages.

How encouraging it was as we went throughout the cities of Porto Nova and Cotonou, then out into remote villages in the interior, to see construction in progress at almost every location: new church buildings or meeting huts for the people to gather, hear the Word of God and fellowship together. How often we heard: "See that? That's your Lottie Moon dollars at work."

Our hearts were warmed as we realized the inestimable difference our "Lottie Moon dollars" were making. Because of the "good news" of Jesus' love and salvation our Southern Baptist missionaries brought to the people, hope has replaced hopelessness; wisdom, new meaning and a clear sense of purpose has dispelled the meaningless existence and fears of voodoo; joy sparks a new zest for living; love has overcome hatred and strife. There is peace in the hearts and peace in the homes.

We spent two days in Cotonou, then en route to Allada, we passed through the Portuguese slave trade city of Oidah. What a sobering experience it was to look upon the fort there and be reminded of the indescribable pain and agony of the human beings who had been housed there. I could only think of the prophet Jeremiah's words: "The heart is more deceitful than all else and desperately wicked. Who can understand it" (Jer. 17:9).

Allada is the "capital" of voodoo in Benin. There were fetishes and voodoo temples everywhere. Fear and superstition ruled the city -- until missionaries Jeff and Rene Hale arrived to share the "good news."

At first they were persecuted and harassed endlessly by fetishers who did not want them interfering with their control of the people. The people remained under this oppression, constantly sacrificing chickens or goats to appease the gods or worshiping wooden idols and icons sold by the fetishers. But Jeff and Rene stayed and ministered to the people, helping them with their physical, emotional and medical needs, feeding and clothing them, teaching them simple hygiene practices and sharing the love of Jesus.

Rene is an accomplished musician who left a very promising career as a concert violinist to come here. Yet, when questioned about it, Rene radiated confidence and a deep joy. "I'm where the Lord wants me, doing what he has called me to do," she said. "That's all that really matters."

At the end of the long, dusty, bumpy eight-hour trek to Tanguieta, we were greeted by the warm hospitality of Wycliffe missionaries Paula and Leon Hoover and their three children, Luke, Natalie and Nicole. Leon is a Bible translator/linguist working with the Benin government to codify the Mbelime language into written form. He showed us the long, labor-intensive process. What dedication!

It was encouraging to see how closely our Southern Baptist missionaries work with missionaries in other organizations. They put aside denominational barriers, uniting efforts for the sole purpose of obeying Christ's command to take the gospel into all the world and make disciples.

"We need each other," Leon told us. "The Baptists are great evangelists and church planters. But they don't have the time or training to do translation work. I don't have time to plant churches and disciple converts. So I work night and day to translate the Bible and your missionaries take it to the people and use it to teach and train them so they can tell others and bring even more into the kingdom of God. I think this is how God wants us to fulfill the Great Commission."

During the 20-hour journey back to the United States, I often thought about all the unfounded fears I had before I became a Christian. The thought of being sent to Africa as a missionary had been frightening. I can remember praying after I did become a Christian, "Dear God, please don't send me to Africa."

Yet, there was not one person Mel and I met on this trip who did not radiate a joy I haven't seen in this country for a long, long time. The missionaries were not there begrudgingly. They were there lovingly, joyfully, thankfully. They were there because God had blessed them and graciously called them to serve these people. They were exactly where God wanted them to be and they wouldn't want to be anywhere, doing anything else in all the world.

By the time we left, I understood why. My heart had grown to love this country and the beautiful people who live and work and share together the wonderful life-changing love of Jesus.

And you know what? I miss Africa now. I really do. I miss it a lot. Thank you, Lord, for sending me ... to Africa.

=====================

Blowers, a frequent missions volunteer, is a member of Mt. Yonah Baptist

Church, Cleveland, Ga.

Copyright (c) 1996 Baptist Press

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Story conveyed by Billy Graham:

I recently heard the story of a mother in an African nation who came to Christ, and grew strong in her commitment and devotion to the Lord. As so often happens, however, this alienated her from her husband, and over the years he grew to despise and hate her new devotion to Christ.

His anger and bitterness reached their climax when he decided to kill his wife, their two children and himself, unable to live in such self-inflicted misery. But he needed a motive. He decided that he would accuse her of stealing his precious keys - the keys were to the bank, the house, and the car. Early one afternoon he left his bank and headed for the tavern. His route took him across a footbridge extended over the headwaters of the Nile River. He paused above the river and dropped the keys. He spent all afternoon drinking and carousing.

Later that afternoon, his wife went to the fish market to buy the evening meal. She purchased a large Nile perch. AS SHE WAS GUTTING THE FISH, TO HER ASTONISHMENT IN ITS BELLY WERE HER HUSBAND’S KEYS. How had they gotten there?

What were the circumstances? She did not know; but she cleaned them up and hung them on the hook.

Sufficiently drunk, the young banker came home that night and pounded open the front door shouting, “Woman, where are my keys?” Already in bed, she got up, picked them off the hook in the bedroom, and handed them to her husband. When he saw the keys, by his own testimony he immediately became sober and was instantly converted. He fell on his knees, sobbing, asked for forgiveness, and confessed Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

Pastor Samuel Chilokoteni drums his hand on the pulpit, keeping time to a hymn. There's no microphone on the podium at this rural, dirt-floored church near Blantyre, Malawi. But you can clearly hear his voice above the others.

"There is power, power, wonder-working power," he sings enthusiastically in Chewa, the main tribal language in this part of Malawi, a tiny country in southeastern Africa.

Chilokoteni, 61, is well-acquainted with God's power. In his 20 years as a Christian -- half of those as a pastor -- that power has carried him through plenty of trials. The toughest of those have come during his current pastorate at Jerusalem Baptist Church in Limbe, Malawi.

The day after he moved there as pastor in 1993, one of his adult sons died. Since then four more of his grown children have died, too. All of these deaths are thought to be from AIDS or AIDS-related illnesses.

But in Malawi -- where the average life expectancy is just 41 years and AIDS has reached epidemic proportions -- Malawians aren't preoccupied with the cause of death. "Death is just death here," explains an International Mission Board missionary who recently transferred from Malawi to The Last Frontier.

As a regional leader of the Baptist Convention of Malawi, Chilokoteni travels as often as he can to Malawian Baptist churches. Developing church leaders is a top priority for Chilokoteni and missionaries who work with him.

One of those leaders is Luciano Phiri, 35. Phiri met Chilokoteni about a decade ago after arriving in Malawi as a refugee from neighboring Mozambique. Phiri and his family fled their home to escape a brutal civil war.

Chilokoteni then was serving as a Baptist chaplain to Mozambican refugees who poured across Mozambique's border into Malawi. During his nearly three years in that role, he personally led more than 4,000 Mozambican refugees to faith in Jesus Christ. Phiri is one of them.

"When he started visiting and witnessing to us, I didn't take him seriously," Phiri recounts. "I didn't understand what he was doing. But finally I came to realize that what he was saying about Jesus is true, that this path is the only one to follow. So I repented and gave my life to the Lord."

Chilokoteni helped disciple Phiri, who then began witnessing to other refugees. Later Phiri felt God's call to be a pastor, too.

With Chilokoteni's help and encouragement, Phiri was accepted as a student at Malawian Baptists' Bible school. His studies there prepared him for returning to minister in his homeland in 1993 -- a year after the war ended.

Since then Phiri has started four Baptist churches in Mozambique, near its border with Malawi. To reach some of them, he and fellow Baptists ride bikes about 40 kilometers each way.

He's also working to improve his skills as a pastor. He and some lay leaders in Mozambique travel weekly across the border to attend Theological Education by Extension classes taught by Eric Laffoon, IMB missionary in Dedza, Malawi. Laffoon grew up in Tanzania, the son of IMB missionaries.

The studies have helped him see that "without God's power, I can do nothing," Phiri says. That's long been an important truth for his Malawian mentor.

Just a few day before his visit with Phiri, Chilokoteni had been sick with malaria. Despite that, he found enough strength to baptize about 20 people during a service at Jerusalem Baptist. Not long afterward Chilokoteni traveled to Chilambe Baptist Church on the outskirts of Blantyre, where he baptized 75 people and another 13 received Christ.

Such blessings, of course, have come alongside more than his share of suffering. But Chilokoteni keeps it all in proper perspective.

"Some people have asked my wife and me why we're still here," Chilokoteni says of his grief-filled pastorate at Jerusalem church. "But we can't run from our troubles. Troubles will always be with us. When we tell people we want to stay here to work for the Lord, it's an encouragement to them."

That kind of attitude encourages Chilokoteni's colleagues in ministry, too. "I've learned so much from him, seeing him bury his kids, seeing how much he loves his family," says a missionary who's worked with him. "During [his children's] funerals, he was so strong -- like a pillar, a rock."

But beyond all that, "he has such a heart for his people, for evangelism, missions, church starting," the missionary adds. "He's been a good friend. But more important than that, he's been a pastor to me."

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#4468

*

"Black blood or white blood!" echoed through Maasai land as young warriors grabbed clubs and spears in an effort to stop the spread of the gospel, which has been challenging parts of Maasai culture.

Christians in northern Tanzania went into hiding as large groups of Maasai "morani" (warriors) moved through villages, ransacking churches and threatening believers. International Mission Board missionary Tim Tidenberg's home became a sanctuary for local Christians of all denominations.

After three weeks of destructive conflict, God opened the door for the gospel even wider than before.

The Maasai are among the most colorful people in eastern Africa. Known for their bright red clothes and beaded necklaces, their most important possession is cattle. A man's wealth and status in the community is determined by the number of cattle owned. Though once completely untouched by the gospel, in recent years large numbers of Maasai have come to Christ.

The morani are unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 26. Their job is to guard the community as well as protect the cattle from wild animals.

Conflicts between the morani and Christians had been brewing for some time, but surfaced Aug. 1 when the young warriors stormed Olopuko Baptist Church with war cries. One Pentecostal church was destroyed in a similar attack.

"Most of the conflict deals with the very promiscuous practices among the warrior class as well as polygamy," Tidenberg said. "The conflict has also come as many Christians are no longer seeing the need for the 'laibon' [witch doctor] and his powers. As Christians have matured, they have begun to stand firm in many of these areas."

During the uprisings, a group of volunteers from Hill Baptist Church in Mobile, Ala., trekked through many of the villages praying and sharing. They covered much of Maasai land on foot -- almost 100 miles -- to pray for God to continue working among this people group.

Tidenberg said the volunteers saw many people saved despite vocal and physical resistance by the morani. One of the men who prayed to receive Christ was a very influential witch doctor.

The largest battle came the first day of the uprising when 70 men stormed Olopuko Baptist Church. The morani beat the unarmed church members with clubs and attacked them with spears. A cry went up from the warriors proclaiming that "black blood or white blood" would be shed.

Tidenberg and local Christians tried to fight back but soon realized God was more powerful than physical weapons. The group stepped back and prayed.

"The battle continued around us as a story from the Old Testament began to unfold -- confusion of the enemy," Tidenberg said. "The army Gideon fought against was confused and fought themselves while Gideon's army stood and watched. That is exactly what happened."

As the morani battled each other, the small Christian group stood at peace in the midst of the fight. Then, unexpectedly, the morani began to retreat. The Christians were left standing, unharmed and thankful for God's protection.

After the battle, Tidenberg was able to speak to the morani. He met with the group for two hours, but they were determined the church was to be closed and houses burned down if the believers met in homes. They wanted no Christian witness in that area.

The missionary told the warriors that closing the church building would not remove the church.

"The church will grow stronger," Tidenberg said. "I expressed to them that this is not a struggle with customs or culture. It is not that the world around them is changing, but it is a hardness of their hearts that has caused this conflict."

The door for the gospel has been wide open in Maasai land and Tidenberg asked prayer warriors throughout the world to ask God for its continued openness. In an Aug. 12 meeting between Christians, village elders and morani, the missionary's prayer was answered.

The elders testified about what God has done in their lives and villages. Several morani stood up and admitted they were wrong, asked the Christians to stay and asked for forgiveness. They requested the Christians share what Christ has done and help them fully understand.

"We had asked for prayers that the doors would not close because of this heated conflict between the Maasai culture and Christianity. We never expected such intervention," Tidenberg said. "The main result of this meeting? The doors for evangelism and church planting in this area have never been thrown as wide open as they are now."

*

In the heart of Africa, it is related by an Englishman that a slave procession passed by, and the king called out a poor slave who displeased him in some little way, ordered his men to put their arrows to their bowstrings and avenge the offense with his blood. The Englishman went up to the native chief and begged for the poor slave’s life, offered him a great deal of money and costly bribes, but the chief turned to him and said: “I don’t want ivory, or slaves, or gold; I can go against yonder tribe and capture their stores and their villages; I want no favors from the white man; all I want is blood.”

Then he ordered one of his men to pull his bow-string and discharge an arrow at the heart of the poor slave. The young Englishman, with the instinct of a moment, threw himself in front and held up his arm, and the next moment the arrow was quivering in the flesh of his own arm. The black man was astonished. Then he pulled the arrow from his arm, and the blood flowed, and he said to the chief: “Here is blood; here is my blood; I give it for this poor slave, and I claim his life.”

The native had never seen such a spectacle before, and he was completely overcome by it. He gave the slave to the white man. He said: “Yes, white man has bought him with his blood, and he shall be his.”

In a moment the poor slave threw himself at the feet of his deliverer, tears flowing down his face, and said: “O, white man, you have bought Lebe with your blood; Lebe [for that was his name] shall be your slave forever and ever.”

From that time on Lebe would not accept an offer of freedom; wherever the Englishman went, Lebe was right beside him. No drudgery was too hard, no task too hopeless. He was bound by the mercy of his deliverer as his consecrated servant.

O, friends, if a poor slave's heart can thus be bound by the wound of a stranger’s arm, what should you and I say for those deeper wounds in those two living hands and feet and the heart that was opened by the spear? If we believe that we are redeemed, how can we but be consecrated to him.

________

From “Present Day Parables” by J. Wilbur Chapman

Back in 1921, a missionary couple named David and Svea Flood went with their two-year-old son from Sweden to the heart of Africa-to what was then called the Belgian Congo.

They met up with another young Scandinavian couple, the Ericksons, and the four of them sought God for direction. In those days of much tenderness and devotion and sacrifice, they felt led of the Lord to set out from the main mission station and take the gospel to a remote area.

This was a huge step of faith. At the village of N'dolera they were rebuffed by the chief, who would not let them enter his town for fear of alienating the local gods. The two couples opted to go half a mile up the slope and build their own mud huts.

They prayed for a spiritual breakthrough, but there was none. The only contact with the villagers was a young boy, who was allowed to sell them chickens and eggs twice a week. Svea Flood, a tiny woman only four feet, eight inches tall, decided that if this was the only African she could talk to, she would try to lead the boy to Jesus. And in fact, she succeeded. But there were no other encouragements.

Meanwhile, malaria continued to strike one member of the little band after another. In time the Ericksons decided they had had enough suffering and left to return to the central mission station. David and Svea Flood remained near N'dolera to go on alone. Then, of all things, Svea found herself pregnant in the middle of the primitive wilderness. When the time came for her to give birth, the village chief softened enough to allow a midwife to help her. A little girl was born, whom they named Aina. The delivery, however, was exhausting, and Svea Flood was already weak from bouts of malaria. The birth process was a heavy blow to her stamina. She lasted only another seventeen days.

Inside David Flood, something snapped in that moment. He dug a crude grave, buried his twenty-seven-year-old wife, and then took his children back down the mountain to the mission station.

Giving his newborn daughter to the Ericksons, he snarled, "I'm going back to Sweden. I've lost my wife, and I obviously can't take care of this baby. God has ruined my life." With that, he headed for the port, rejecting not only his calling, but God himself.

Within eight months both the Ericksons were stricken with a mysterious malady and died within days of each other. The baby was then turned over to some American missionaries, who adjusted her Swedish name to "Aggie" and eventually brought her back to the United States at age three.

This family loved the little girl and were afraid that if they tried to return to Africa, some legal obstacle might separate her from them. So they decided to stay in their home country and switch from missionary work to pastoral ministry. And that is how Aggie grew up in South Dakota. As a young woman, she attended North Central Bible College in Minneapolis. There she met and married a young man named Dewey Hurst.

Years passed. The Hursts enjoyed a fruitful Ministry. Aggie gave birth first to a daughter, then a son. In time her husband became president of a Christian college in the Seattle area, and Aggie was intrigued to find so much Scandinavian heritage there. One day a Swedish religious magazine appeared in her mailbox. She had no idea who had sent it, and of course she couldn't read the words. But as she turned the pages, all of a sudden a photo stopped her cold.

There in a primitive setting was a grave with a white cross-and on the cross were the words SVEA FLOOD. Aggie jumped in her car and went straight for a college faculty member who, she knew, could translate the article. "What does this say?" she demanded. The instructor summarized the story: It was about missionaries who had come to N'dolera long ago ... the birth of a white baby ... the death of the young mother ... the one little African boy who had been led to Christ ... and how, after the whites had all left, the boy had grown up and finally persuaded the chief to let him build a school in the village. The article said that gradually he won all his students to Christ... the children led their parents to Christ... even the chief had become a Christian. Today there were six hundred Christian believers in that one village.... All because of the sacrifice of David and Svea Flood.

For the Hursts' twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the college presented them with the gift of a vacation to Sweden. There Aggie sought to find her real father. An old man now, David Flood had remarried, fathered four more children, and generally dissipated his life with alcohol.

He had recently suffered a stroke. Still bitter, he had one rule in his family: "Never mention the name of God-because God took everything from me. After an emotional reunion with her half brothers and half sister, Aggie brought up the subject of seeing her father. The others hesitated. "You can talk to him," they replied, "even though he's very ill now. But you need to know that whenever he hears the name of God, he flies into a rage.

Aggie was not to be deterred. She walked into the squalid apartment, with liquor bottles everywhere, and approached the seventy-three-year-old man lying in a rumpled bed. "Papa" she said tentatively. He turned and began to cry. "Aina," he said. "I never meant to give you away." "It's all right, Papa," she replied, taking him gently in her arms. "God took care of me. The man instantly stiffened. The tears stopped. "God forgot all of us. Our lives have been like this because of him." He turned his face back to the wall.

Aggie stroked his face and then continued, undaunted. "Papa, I've got a little story to tell you, and it's a true one. You didn't go to Africa in vain. Mama didn't die in vain. The little boy you won to the Lord grew up to win that whole village to Jesus Christ. The one seed you planted just kept growing and growing. Today there are six hundred African people serving the Lord because you were faithful to the call of God in your life. ... "Papa, Jesus loves you. He has never hated you. The old man turned back to look into his daughter's eyes. His body relaxed. He began to talk. And by the end of the afternoon, he had come back to the God he had resented for so many decades. Over the next few days, father and daughter enjoyed warm moments together. Aggie and her husband soon had to return to America, and within a few weeks, David Flood had gone into eternity.

A few years later, the Hursts were attending a high-level evangelism conference in London, England, when a report was given from the nation of Zaire (the former Belgian Congo). The superintendent of the national church, representing some 110,000 baptized believers, spoke eloquently of the gospel's spread in his nation. Aggie could not help going to ask him afterward if he had ever heard of David and Svea Flood. "Yes, madam," the man replied in French, his words then being translated into English. "It was Svea Flood who led me to Jesus Christ. I was the boy who brought food to your parents before you were born. In fact, to this day your mother's grave and her memory are honored by all of us." He embraced her in a long, sobbing hug. Then he continued, "You must come to Africa to see, because your mother is the most famous person in our history."

In time that is exactly what Aggie Hurst and her husband did. They were welcomed by cheering throngs of villagers. She even met the man who had been hired by her father many years before to carry her back down the mountain in a hammock-cradle. The most dramatic moment, of course, was when the pastor escorted Aggie to see her mother's white cross for herself. She knelt in the soil to pray and give thanks. Later that day, in the church, the pastor read from John 12:24: "I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds." He then followed with Psalm 126:5: "Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy."

LUSAKA, Zambia (AP) - On the eve of the millennium's first total eclipse of the sun, Zimbabwe's faith healers warned of national turmoil, Angola's street children sold fake protective eyeglasses and Zambia was overrun by busloads of eclipse-chasing tourists.

Thursday's mid-afternoon eclipse will arc across the southern part of Africa before disappearing in the Indian Ocean. Its path crosses over a civil war, a country wracked by political conflict, and desperate poverty.

In Zimbabwe, tribal healers warned that the eclipse is a sign the ancestors were not happy with a nation that had abandoned the traditional African values of peace and harmony. As retribution, they would bring further conflict to a country already suffering from political and economic turmoil and the crushing scourge of AIDS.

"These natural occurrences are not a mere coincidence. They are signs of the punishment we are going to receive from our ancestors," said Peter Sibanda, deputy head of the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association.

In Angola, police seized 5,000 pairs of phony protective glasses being sold by street kids after tests showed they would not protect people's eyes from being damaged during the partial phases of the eclipse as claimed.

Mozambique has urged reporters, including community radio stations, to explain the science behind the eclipse to its impoverished people so it "should not cause fear or panic. Because it is a natural and predictable phenomenon, unlikely to cause any material or personal damage."

In Zambia, members of the Ngoni tribe plan to recreate their 1835 crossing of the Zambezi River during their flight from the warriors of the Zulu king Shaka. The original crossing coincided with a total eclipse.

The eclipse first hits land in Angola at 8:38 a.m. EDT, then travels across Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique before heading out to the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, getting shorter along the way.

Since the eclipse will last longer here than anywhere else except Angola, which is convulsed in a quarter-century-long civil war, Zambia has become the main magnet for eclipse watchers.

Tourists, scientists and even new age eclipse chasers have come to Zambia for the astronomical event. The government expected more than 20,000 tourists _ the most ever. It declared Thursday a national holiday and deployed 2,500 police to patrol the streets of Lusaka and other tourist areas.

"This is a big event for Zambia," said Agnes Seenka, the head of the government's eclipse committee.

A team from Williams College in Massachusetts has brought 11 students and 15 cameras attached to telescopes to take more than 1,000 photos of the eclipse, which will last more than three minutes in Lusaka.

They aim to study why the corona, the hot gas field around the sun, is so much hotter than the sun's core.

The corona is fainter than the blue sky, so it can only be properly studied during an eclipse, said Jay Pasachoff, head of the Willams team and the chair of the working group on solar eclipses at the International Astronomical Union.

"What you need is to have the sun up during the day, without the blue sky. And how you do that is during an eclipse," he said.

Meanwhile, more than 4,000 tie-dyed, dreadlocked, pot-smoking trance dancers from around the world gathered at a farm about 30 miles north of Lusaka for a 10-day eclipse rave.

"It's quite a powerful event that will happen," James Johnson, a 25-year-old South African at the rave, said while rolling a large crystal around in his hand.

"The world is not like an isolated thing in the universe. When something like a solar eclipse happens, vast energies, as far as I'm concerned, are moving around," he said. "The world is moving toward a higher consciousness."

On the Net:

Solar Eclipse site, http://www.astronomy.co.za/eclipse.asp

ON THE LAGOS-IBADAN EXPRESSWAY, Nigeria — For many, this highway leads to the future of the Christian faith, and at 9 o'clock on a Friday night, traffic is heavier than a Los Angeles rush hour.

Hundreds of thousands of Nigerians, from street vendors to computer consultants, sit through the exhaust and the squealing horns to reach evangelical campgrounds with churches as large as airplane hangars. The names are as spectacular as the hopes they sell: Mountain of Fire and Miracles, Deeper Life, and the largest and oldest, the 12,000-acre Redemption Camp.

The worshipers are drawn by a program of rousing song and dance and by an eminently practical gospel promising health and prosperity. They come seeking quick fortunes or protection against mundane maladies, from hunger to arthritis to armed robbers. They shout hallelujahs until close to daybreak, when the highway, famous for accidents and bandits, is safe to make the crawl back to Lagos.

Here nobody, it seems, can afford not to pray.

“In countries where everything is very O.K., where they take care of their citizenry, people are very lethargic when it comes to religion and God,” said Oluwayemisi Ojuolape, 27, a lawyer in Lagos, who attended this all-night vigil, called Holy Ghost Service. “They are not encouraged to ask for any help. They seem to have all of it.”

Not so in the developing world, where Christianity is drawing followers as never before.

That growth is changing the complexion and practice of the Christian faith and other religions in a fervid competition for souls, generating new tremors in places like Nigeria, which are already marbled with ethnic and political fault lines, and causing schisms between the old Christians of the north and the newer ones of the south. It is also beginning to be felt in the political life of these countries.

The new Christian expansion is particularly striking in Pentecostalism, a denomination born only about 100 years ago among blacks, whites and Hispanics in an abandoned church in Los Angeles. Emphasizing a direct line to God, its boisterous, unmediated style of worship employs healings, speaking in tongues and casting out demons.

Spreading Pentecostal congregations — a quarter of all Christians worldwide — are bumping up against established Christian churches and Islam in Africa, and chipping away at what has long been a virtual Roman Catholic monopoly in Latin America.

In Brazil, where the national identity has been intertwined with Catholicism since the Portuguese landed 500 years ago, the emotional services at thousands of Pentecostal churches amount to a religious revolution in the world's largest Catholic country.

In the 25 years of John Paul II's papacy, Brazil's Protestant population has quadrupled, with the biggest surge coming in the 1990's among evangelical and Pentecostal groups. More than 25 million Brazilians belong to such churches, leaving pastors like Ezequiel Teixeira of the New Life Project Church in Rio de Janeiro so giddy that he predicts, “In another 25 years, Brazil will have a Protestant majority.”

By some estimates, more than a third of Guatemala's population is now Protestant, and Pentecostal churches are making significant inroads in Argentina, Colombia and Chile, where Catholics account for 70 percent of the population.

Across the tropics and the south, Christian worship, especially Pentecostalism, has captured hearts and minds in countries where the precariousness of ordinary living — blackouts, robbery, disease, corruption — makes rich and poor alike turn to divine intervention.

“It allows for spiritual or divine agency, so that God has the power to fix and heal and also to protect you,” said Lamin Sanneh, a professor at Yale Divinity School who specializes in West Africa. “You might fall into a ditch, or you might be in a car accident, roads such as they are. You are always in present danger. Pentecostalism speaks that language very well.”

In Africa, a big part of the success of Pentecostal movements, scholars say, rests on the ability to tap into traditional cosmology, in which gods have long been solicited in pursuit of specific, worldly favors.

“God has become a modern-day juju God,” said Chichi Aniagolu, a Nigerian sociologist and a Catholic who, by her own admission, dips into Pentecostal services. “You appease him. You bring him yams, goats, make sacrifices, and you get what you want. Today, you're not making sacrifices. You're giving tithes.”

Churches have become formidable economic empires. Most troubling to critics is the enrichment of enterprising preachers, who say their fine cars and expensive suits can convince others of what God's grace can provide. Critics accuse them of duping the poor and doing little to ease poverty or repair endemic corruption.

Yet their appeal has been seemingly irresistible. Worship today is a far cry from the rituals once imposed by European missionaries. Services are conducted in Swahili and Igbo. Most of all, services can be much livelier than their European antecedents.

“I was in Rome the other day and I found the way they celebrate the Eucharist a bit boring,” said Bishop Anthony Ireri Mukobo, of the Archdiocese of Nairobi.

A GOSPEL OF SUCCESS

From the stage at the Redemption Camp outside Lagos on a recent evening came a gospel of success.

“There will be no more sickness,” sang Pastor Enoch A. Adeboye, the general overseer of the vast empire known as the Redeemed Church of Christ.

“Yes, Lord, I believe,” the worshipers, more than 100,000 of them, sang back.

“There will be no more failure,” the pastor sang.

“Yes, Lord, I believe,” answered the crowd. “Yes, Lord.”

Like other proponents of prosperity theology, the pastor likes to remind his congregation that God multiplies what the faithful give to the church. “If you don't sow, you don't reap,” he says.

“I have heard God speak,” the pastor went on, “and I can tell you, I have heard the sound of abundance.”

Abundance certainly has come to the Redeemed Church. There are no fewer than 5,000 parishes worldwide, about 4,000 of them in Nigeria, Mr. Adeboye said.

A former mathematics professor close to the Nigerian president, Mr. Adeboye could only estimate the total membership at around two million. Asked about church revenues, he demurred, saying only, “By the grace of God, we are able to take care of our ministers.”

There are some 40,000 of them. The church has built a school and a health clinic at Redemption Camp. A university is under construction.

The congregants are by no means all in need. Emmanuel Dania, a tall, fit, British-educated computer consultant, rolled into the V.I.P. parking area of Redemption Camp in an air-conditioned white Toyota pickup truck, then high-fived a friend who had arrived in his own chauffeur-driven BMW. A beggar was quickly turned away.

Mr. Dania regularly worships at an affiliated church in a stylish section of Lagos, where he has found a network of like-minded, upwardly mobile young Nigerians. Some months ago, Mr. Dania said, he had bid on a project with the Central Bank of Nigeria. The official in charge of the contract was a member of the same church.

“He said he was so happy he was dealing with a man of God,” Mr. Dania recalled. “You can actually do business in the church. You don't have to go anywhere else. There's a lot of prosperity in the church.”

Many traditional Christian theologians, particularly Catholics, dismiss the message that faith will bring wealth and success.

“They're preaching Cross-less Christianity,” said the Rev. Iheanyi Enwerem, of the Catholic Secretariat in Lagos. “The idea of everything joy-joy, prosperity-prosperity, well-well. In life, there are certain things we can't have because God doesn't want it. For them, everything is Easter joy, no Good Friday. We say it's totally un-Christian.”

But for the poor, the very presence of the rich in the same sanctuary serves as a powerful lesson, much like the testimonials that those who say they were miraculously healed deliver: If God answered their prayers, maybe he will answer mine.

Iwalola Adebusoye, 40, sells rice at a Lagos market. At Redemption Camp, she stood from her seat, closed her eyes, put her hands on her hips and spat her prayers in rapid-fire Yoruba, as though shouting at a no-good deceiving husband.

Uneducated herself, she said she had put three children through school on her earnings selling rice. She was now praying for an opportunity to expand her trade, maybe sell eggs. “To move forward,” she said in halting English. “No helper,” she said of her predicament. “Only God. And Jesus.”

A FERVENT RESPONSE TO RIGIDITY

Such predicaments are also widespread in Brazil. Like many Brazilian Pentecostals, Manoel Ferreira was born in the poverty-stricken interior into what he calls “a fervently Catholic family,” but converted after migrating to a large city, São Paulo.

While being trained to join the state police in the early 1950's, Mr. Ferreira was accidentally shot by a fellow cadet. The wound became infected, he remembers, and he feared he was going to die.

“In those days, only Roman Catholic chaplains were allowed into hospitals,” he recalled during an interview in a working-class neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. “But a male nurse who was an evangelical preached clandestinely to me, and as soon as I was released I made my way to the Assembly of God, and never left.”

Today, the denomination that Pastor Ferreira heads as bishop of the Assembly of God is the largest of its kind in Brazil, with 8.8 million members, according to the Brazilian census of 2000, and more than 100,000 churches.

Founded in 1910 by missionaries from Chicago, the Assembly of God in Brazil now sends missionaries abroad and has spawned dozens of other denominations with colorful names like Church of Christ's Spit.

These Pentecostal churches have made a special effort to appeal to women, who often complain of being limited to a supporting role in the Catholic church. The Pentecostal movement, in contrast, encourages them to be more than wives and mothers: deaconesses, missionaries, even pastors.

“I thought that it was my destiny to suffer, because I had been taught as a Catholic to accept the fate God had for me,” said Josefa Barros de Sousa, who migrated from Paraíba, a poor northern state, to Rio de Janeiro to work as a nanny. “No one recognized me or my suffering, until I got here and learned that I could talk to God myself and didn't need a priest or saints to do that for me.”

Pentecostal churches have been quick to exploit the potential of television with innovative programing, like that of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, Brazil's fastest-growing denomination.

Begun in a funeral parlor in Rio de Janeiro in 1977, the church has grown from 200,000 members at the start of the 1990's to more than two million today. It owns a leading television network and substantial real estate holdings, and has worked to elect 22 of its members to Congress.

Belatedly, the Catholic Church is responding with a movement that has come to be known as Charismatic Renewal, borrowing Pentecostal thunder, including speaking in tongues.

Services that incorporate rock-style hymns and intense devotion to the Virgin Mary have made the Rev. Marcelo Rossi, 36, of São Paulo, a pop star who sells millions of CD's. In October he is starring in a movie in which he plays Archangel Gabriel.

But the Pentecostal movement continues to grow. Besides Catholicism, it aggressively challenges Brazil's traditional animist cults like candomblé, macumba and umbanda, which have many of the same African roots as Caribbean voodoo and santería and are practiced by millions of Brazilians who consider themselves Catholics.

Yet part of what draws followers may be a certain stylistic resemblance: the trance-like state of Pentecostalists speaking in tongues resembles that of macumba adherents when they are “receiving a saint.”

The chief appeal, however, appears to lie in preachers who offer rural newcomers advice on adjusting to blighted, violent urban neighborhoods, and a gospel of self-esteem, a message of empowerment.

“Don't let anybody tell you that you are nothing,” Silvio Pereira, a 30-year-old Assembly of God preacher, told worshipers at a small church on the outskirts of Salvador da Bahia, in northern Brazil. “Raise your head high because God wants to use you. You are dynamite in the hands of God.”

BRINGING CHANGE TO ALL CREEDS

The expanded Christian following in the developing world has translated into increasing power, both within developing countries and within mainstream denominations.

As church attendance has withered in Europe, senior Vatican officials and Roman Catholic leaders recognize and look to the developing world as fertile ground for conversions and growth, a place where the faith takes firmer root than it does in Europe or North America these days. Indeed, the successor to Pope John Paul could be a Latin American or African cardinal.

The growing assertion of the Christian south is provoking fierce doctrinal arguments, too, often over their preference for literal readings of the Bible and a conservative view on social issues. The Anglican Communion meets in October in London in an attempt to heal an unprecedented rift over homosexuality, a charge led by the head of the Church of Nigeria, which, with 18 million congregants, is the largest member of the Anglican Communion.

Tensions extend to the political sphere. The proliferation of Islamic law in northern Nigeria, which has set off rioting that has killed hundreds, is widely seen as the Muslim elite's response to Nigeria's new, hard-line Christianity.

Throughout Africa, the rivalry between Christianity and Islam, from Sudan to Ivory Coast, is growing.

In Nigeria, a nation of 130 million that accounts for one-fifth of Africa's population, the rivalry is so intense that it has been impossible for the government even to conduct a census to know the numbers of each group.

Christian missionaries have been dispatched to open schools and parishes in northern Muslim strongholds. Church leaders have spoken out loudly against the re-introduction of Islamic law into several state penal codes. Rioting has divided cities where Muslim and Christian neighbors once lived side by side.

In the view of critics, the flourishing of Christianity has only added to Nigeria's poverty and corruption.

“The movement is clearly reflective of everything that's wrong with Nigeria,” said Nosa Igiebor, the outspoken editor of Tell, a weekly newsmagazine. “Poor people are forced to pay these tithes, and by doing so, every problem they take to the pastor will be solved. The pastors know it won't be. Just the same way our political leaders deceive people, by making promises they have no intention to keep.”

Under the rule of President Olesegun Obasanjo, himself a born-again Christian, church sermons are broadcast all weekend long on state-run television. So too is the presidential chaplain's Sunday service from the presidential villa in the capital, Abuja.

In response to Muslim complaints, the television also broadcasts clips from Friday Prayers at the National Mosque in Abuja.

The Christian resurgence has led a group of young urban Muslim professionals to create a Pentecostal-style movement of their own. On Sunday mornings in a downtown Lagos parking lot, men and women sit in separate tents. Volunteers collect prayer requests, just as at Redeemed Church.

On a recent Sunday, the requests themselves were remarkably similar, too. One man wanted the congregation to pray for his visa interview at the United States Embassy that coming Thursday. A young woman wanted blessings for her university entrance exam.

“If you have belief, if you have courage that it is Allah that grants everyone's desire, then within a short time of coming here, your prayer will be answered,” said Oriyomi Musbau Hussein, 31, the civil servant who asked the congregation to pray for his visa application.

The group calls itself the Nasrul-Lahi-Il-Fathi Society of Nigeria, or Nasfat. What began eight years ago at a banker's house today boasts 80 branches in Nigeria and 3 in the United States and Britain.

Koranic prayer books are translated into English, as well as the main Nigerian tongues. These Muslims do not sit and listen to an imam preach in a language they do not understand.

Nasfat's efforts are in direct response to what its leaders see as the encroachment of the new churches. “Now you see young folks deflecting to Christendom,” said Saminu Oki, an American-educated official of Lagos State, who serves on the group's executive committee.

“They've been able to attract the young ones,” he said of the Christian churches, who have received Muslim converts. “They made it so simple. You don't even have to read the Koran. They poisoned them. If you read verses of the Bible, all your problems will be solved.”

Nasfat has purchased 100 acres of land on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway as well, where the group intends to build a retreat and a university, not unlike Redemption Camp.

“We are pace-setting,” Mr. Oki said. “We don't want to do it the old way.”

*

Aidan Hartley was a hard-living (and only nominal Christian) news-reporter based in Nairobi, Kenya. All Kenyans get their mail at post office boxes and after long assignments in other parts of Africa, Hartley always returned to find his box overflowing. One day out of the blue he received a letter addressed simply to SOON. He wrote “Wrong Address, Return to Sender” and popped it back in the collection box. In the following weeks, more letters began arriving for SOON. He sent them all back.

Up to twenty a week kept arriving so he decided to open some. They contained filled out mail order coupons and letters from Africans to an evangelical missionary society’s magazine. On each coupon was written the words “Please write YES next to what you want.” Then it said: “DO YOU WANT GOD TO CHANGE YOU?” The coupons indicated that SOON Bible courses could be ordered from Bangalore, Hong Kong, Derby in Britain – and Hartley’s personal mailbox in Nairobi.

Aidan wrote to the SOON headquarters but never got a reply. The letters kept coming. Soon, they threatened. Soon. They were like premonitions. He read some of them and found many were requests for Bibles, help with school fees or clothes. But begging letters were rare. Typical was this one he opened from Gilbert Kwao Forson of Ahsanti, Ghana: “Greetings of love to you in the name of our Lord Jesus. The reason why I am writing is that I am short in the words of God. I ask you to give me the words of the Bible to enable me to fear God, so that when the Lord appears I will not perish. I end here. Hoping you will hear my cries . . .”

Africans so poor that they had sacrificed a meal to set aside the money for the postage stamps had written to SOON because they have been promised imminent salvation. DO YOU WANT GOD TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE? Their pleas were delivered to Aidan Hartley instead, a journalist who believed in Jehovah only when his airplane hit turbulence at thirty-six thousand feet.

He built up a trunkload of letters. It was as if SOON were some elaborate message from a God who didn’t want to waste on a journalist the high-budget special effects he had deployed against Saul on the road to Damascus. Instead, God is a mailman. He has sought to wear Hartley down by attrition, sending him years of misaddressed religious junk mail containing the plaintive voices of myriad impoverished Africans.

Today he looks back and thinks that each letter is like one of the lost souls he has seen on the roads in Africa. He tried to ignore the anonymous masses for so long, but in the end they have all come back to haunt him: the refugees, the injured, the starving, and the dead. And each and every one has a name.

The president of Zambia, in acknowledging his faith in Jesus Christ, recently was baptized in a public service, Southern Baptist missionaries report.

A crowd clapped and cheered as President Levy Mwanawasa (mwah-nah-WAH-sah) rose from the water in an outdoor baptistery behind a Baptist seminary chapel in Lusaka, Zambia's capital. The event drew hundreds of people, including public officials, leaders and pastors from the area and neighboring countries.

“This baptism was an incredible occasion for the Baptist witness to many people who we have not had in church before,” said Troy Lewis, a Southern Baptist missionary in the southern African nation of more than 10 million people. “They heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

On the day of his baptism, Mwanawasa shared his spiritual journey before a packed chapel service. He told listeners he had been “struck” by Jesus -- similar to the Apostle Paul's experience on the road to Damascus. Mwanawasa, a successful lawyer and former vice president, took office in 2002. Respected for his reputation for honesty, he was known as “Mr. Integrity” even by his political opponents before his election. Now in his mid-50s, he survived a near-fatal car accident in 1992 but insists he is in excellent health.

Mwanawasa remembers attending a Baptist school as a boy, but his relationship with Christ began to transform when he started attending Twin Palm Baptist Church in Lusaka in 2003. The small church meets at the Baptist Theological Seminary of Zambia in Lusaka.

As he came week after week with his “entourage,” the church tried to maintain business as usual -- but it wasn't easy.

“All of us here were immensely excited about this,” Lewis said. “Our excitement and prayers increased when he returned to church again and kept coming whenever he was in the country.”

The president began asking questions about the Christian faith and how he could join the church. Church members answered his questions and ministered to him during difficult times. After Mwanawasa began attending the church, his mother died from injuries caused by a fire. He also lost his two brothers. One died unexpectedly of illness; the other was murdered.

Mwanawasa soon shared how Christ had moved in his life -- and that he wanted to be baptized. Franklin Kilpatrick, missionary in Zambia for 35 years, helped disciple Mwanawasa during this process. Kilpatrick and his wife, Paula, are members of Twin Palm Baptist Church.

“The impact is not just in Zambia; this could have an impact on an international level,” said Kilpatrick, who is temporarily on U.S. assignment. “He could impact a lot of leaders. He is in a position of influence, and people need encouragement.”

The Kilpatricks were originally concerned about drawing too much attention to the event. Local missionaries tried to remain low-key about Mwanawasa's decision. But the news quickly spread all over Zambia -- and to other parts of the world.

Kilpatrick believes Mwanawasa's decision is real. Others have commented on how the president's life has changed. He already has invited friends and leaders from around the world to attend church with him.

Paula Kilpatrick is excited about what God has planned for the future. “We feel like the story is not over,” she said.

The president is just one of many spiritual success stories in Zambia. Last year, 116 Baptist churches were started, bringing the total number of churches to 985 -- plus 124 mission congregations. Some missionaries believe Mwanawasa's baptism is an exclamation point on what God is beginning to do in the country. Lewis encouraged Mwanawasa during a celebration lunch at the statehouse after his baptism.

“I shared with him that we had been praying for him after he came into office, that Zambia would have a leader who had Jesus as his Lord,” Lewis said. “And in him coming to Christ and being baptized, God had answered our prayers.

“I told him that we praise God -- and will pray for him to continue to be a president who sees leadership as serving the people rather than lording it over them.”

"But while in deep distress, Manasseh sought the Lord his God and cried out humbly to the God of his ancestors." (2 Chronicles 33:12 NLT)

========

Peter Cameron Scott was born in Glasgow in 1867 and became the founder of the Africa Inland Mission. But his beginnings in Africa were anything but auspicious. His first trip to Africa ended in a severe attack of malaria that sent him home. He resolved to return after recuperation.

His return was especially gratifying to Scott, because this time his brother John joined him. But before long John was struck down by fever. All alone, Peter buried his brother, and in the agony of those days recommitted himself to preaching the gospel in Africa. Yet again his health gave way and he had to return to England.

How would he ever pull out of the desolation and depression of those days? He had pledged himself to God. But where could he find the strength to go back again to Africa? With man it was impossible!

He found the strength in Westminster Abbey. David Livingstone's tomb is there. Scott entered quietly, found the tomb, and knelt in front of it to pray. The inscription read:

OTHER SHEEP I HAVE

WHICH ARE NOT OF THIS FOLD;

THEM I ALSO MUST BRING.

He arose from his knees with a new hope. He returned to Africa. And the mission he founded is a vibrant, growing force for the gospel today in Africa.

________

John Piper, Desiring God (Multnomah) quoted in 1001 Great Stories and Quotes by R. Kent Hughes (Tyndale) p 310

*

The young West African woman told of the suffering she has already experienced and the suffering she expects to come.

She was tossed out of her Muslim family’s home for becoming a follower of Christ. Her mother threatened to take her two children away, but her former husband said she could keep them –- for now. In the hard days ahead, she must find a way to survive, to feed her children, to endure the loneliness of being an outcast in a place where family and community mean everything.

Who would blame her for going home and renouncing her Christian faith? Many other new believers have broken under the strain in similar situations.

But her eyes give her away: They flash a glint of steel. She will struggle and fall, but there is no turning back for this disciple. No matter the cost, she will follow Jesus. And she intends to tell many other Muslim women about her amazing discovery of a merciful Lord who loves them personally. The priceless treasure she has found is worth all the hardships she will face in the future.

Across the continent, another seeker made his decision for Christ much later in life –- but with equal determination.

Southern Baptist missionary Daren Davis in Zambia visited the village of Mapungu for the first time several years ago. Villagers expressed interest in the Word of God, so Davis asked to see the village chief to seek permission to return. The missionary sat in the shade of a mango tree and waited for the chief to come.

A few minutes later, he noticed an old man hobbling toward him through the sand, leaning heavily on a stick to support his lame leg. The old man was the headman of Mapungu. He considered Davis’ request and gave him permission to return. Davis and a volunteer team came back a few weeks later and shared the Gospel through chronological Bible storying.

After four days of teaching, a line was drawn in the sand. The villagers were challenged to walk across the line if they were willing to turn away from their sin and make Jesus their Lord.

The first person to move was the old headman. He struggled across the line, dragging his crippled leg with each halting step. When he finally made it, he looked up and declared to everyone, “I want Jesus to be my Lord!” He later was baptized.

The old chief died recently after a long series of illnesses.

“Praise God, he is no longer suffering, and he doesn’t need a stick to help him walk,” Davis said.” He is resting and worshipping in heaven.”

But before departing this world, the chief set the stage for his village -– and his people –- to follow the Lord.

Such decisions are being made every day across the globe. They seldom make headlines, but they are changing history –- step by step, village by village. Not every decision to follow Christ brings persecution; some bring joyful community celebration. But each brings a cross of some kind. God calls all of His children to follow Him -– period.

“You’ve burned your bridges behind you,” International Mission Board President Jerry Rankin recently told a group of new Southern Baptist missionaries. “Dedicate yourself to the Lord, because you have never passed this way before and that old life is left behind.”

Those marching orders apply to all followers of Jesus –- not just the ones called to be missionaries in other cultures. There is no “cheap grace,” said German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred by the Nazis for resisting their tyranny. God’s grace is free, but it’s not cheap. If we accept it fully, it will cost us everything –- beginning with our control of self.

“Only the one who obeys believes, and only the one who believes obeys,” Bonhoeffer wrote in his classic book, “The Cost of Discipleship.”

These words seem almost out of place in a day when Christianity is often marketed as a quickie self-help plan along with the latest diet and exercise fads. But the secret to true joy is dying to self and following Jesus, who said, “If you love Me, you will obey what I command” (John 14:15).

“Happy is the soul that no longer possesses anything of its own, not even anything borrowed, and that abandons itself to Jesus, desiring no glory but His,” wrote a wise Christian counselor centuries ago. “Happy is the soul that refuses to listen to self, and refuses to pamper it, but listens to God instead.”

For most of us, that means developing faithfulness and obedience amid the thousands of problems and stresses of daily living. Little crosses, one might call them. Even for missionaries, these are the most common challenges –- not physical dangers or hostility to the Gospel.

“The traffic, the bartering, the staring, the noise, the pollution, the extreme contrasts between rich and poor, being treated like celebrities because of the color of our skin –- all of it produces stress and results in a very intense environment,” one missionary recently admitted. “It’s just been hard to imagine getting comfortable in this place and calling it home.”

But the missionary isn’t giving up: “We are confident we are exactly where God wants us to be.... We are being stretched and challenged by our Father in ways that we might never have experienced if we didn’t obey His direction to this task, in this part of the world.”

Pray for every disciple who “crosses the line” -– whatever that line might be –- to follow the Lord. If you’re standing at the line, don’t be afraid to cross it. God will go with you.

________

Erich Bridges is senior writer with the Southern Baptist International Mission Board.

*

"Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset" – Matthew Parris

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

Background

"But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

In a small Bambara village in Mali, West Africa, light from a lantern cuts the dark of night. Tea is passed around. Village men have waited months for this conversation. Occasionally, one or two other men join the growing circle -– visible only when they come into the light. Excitement is palpable; all know the importance of the night. They need more nights such as this one.

This village is like countless others in Mali. Villagers here suffered severe famine last fall -– eating anything they could find, unsure if they would eat the next day. Harvest did not come soon enough. But this village not only starves for food -– it needs the Bread of Life.

“There will be some persecution,” one village believer says. “A person needs a level of spiritual understanding to resist temptation -– to be able to stand.”

Each believer already has come a long way. Their village claims Islam as its overall faith, but animism drives its way of life. Yet when these villagers came to know the Good News through a series of Bible stories relayed orally, the stronghold of traditions began to waver.

Every believer recounts vast changes since he accepted Jesus Christ. One man was released from anger. A few quit turning to magicians to help solve problems. Several became faithful to their wives. One believer reports he no longer sacrifices chickens to get “protection” for his fields.

While each new believer shares amazing changes through faith in Jesus, they fear former religious practices will overcome their newfound faith without additional Bible training. Of 19 men who initially claimed Christian conversion, only five remain committed. Animistic and Muslim teachers, they say, are good teachers with clever arguments.

“[The teachers] are able to take a new believer not capable of defending his faith and turn him back to one of these other religions,” one believer says. “I want people to get enough training to be able to defend themselves and stand against this effort to turn them from their new faith.”

Steve and Susan Roach, International Mission Board strategy coordinators for the Bambara people, say biblical training is necessary not only for this group of new believers, but for all Bambara people. In fact, it’s their plan. They say building a strong church in this village -– one that can take the Gospel to neighboring villages -– is easily in sight.

Steve recalls how one believer in the village said, “We cannot go back to what we were, but we don’t know how to go forward.” Steve knows if these men have proper discipleship training, they can make a huge difference –- not just in this village, but in the surrounding area.

For many reasons, Steve says, this particular village is strategic to the spread of the Gospel. First, it’s still devoid of Islamic influences although the village claims Islam as its overall faith. Believers here fear greater Islamic practice because village leaders have invited an Islamic school to come in. But for now, Islamic influence is minimal since the imam, or Islamic religious leader, is the village drunk -– although Islam forbids the use of alcohol.

“They’re not as steeped in Islam as they are in animism, their traditional religion, and typically it’s easier to reach people in traditional religion than in Islam,” Steve says.

Secondly, this village is surrounded by hundreds of other villages not yet touched with the Gospel. No village is more than seven kilometers from another village. Bambara believers easily could spread the Gospel from one village to the next with no dependence on missionaries.

“We want to see the Gospel go to the ends of the earth on foot and donkey cart,” Susan says.

Mali is a new field for the Roaches, who transferred from civil war-torn Côte d’Ivoire, and the Toura people with whom they worked. Now they have begun working among the Bambara. Mali is roughly the size of the southeastern United States, but two-thirds of the nation is mostly desert. Bambara make up about 32 percent of the country’s 13 million people. About 4 million Bambara live in 32,000 villages in an area two-thirds the size of Texas.

“If we could win half the Bambara speakers in Mali to the Lord, we could start 25,000 Baptist churches of 200 people each,” Steve says. “That’s bigger than the average-size church in the States. And, that’s just half the Bambara.”

The Roaches hope believers in this particular village will be the ones who, in turn, start other churches. Steve makes regular visits to the village to teach these believers chronological Bible storying, a method they can easily use to share the Gospel with others.

“My heart is to leave training and the methodology of training that Africans can do without white people’s money, without white people’s presence,” Steve says. “I want to teach them how to do it. I want to encourage them.”

The lessons the Roaches learned in four years among the Toura already have helped their work with the Bambara. The most pertinent lesson: To give them the Gospel without passing on a dependence on missionaries. From the beginning, they have equipped new believers to be the ones teaching Bible stories. That way, if missionaries have to leave the area, the Gospel remains.

But training takes time, and the Roaches hope to place another IMB missionary couple in a city close to the area to help with the work.

“You understand the people,” Steve says of an outsider living among the villagers. “You know what they’re facing. You know ... the little cultural things that affect them day by day.”

Until those new missionaries arrive, the Roaches waste no time in training these young believers who are aching to hear more of their Savior.

“[The believers] meet together, but not regularly,” Steve says. “I would not call them a church. I think they could become a church -– maybe a germinating church -– but without any help, the group out here will die.”

But on this particular night of Bible training, the new believers’ questions and interest show promise. Steve leads the men through Scripture seeking biblical principles for cultural things they face every day: idol worship, how they treat their spouses, abstaining from Muslim traditions and their responsibility to the Great Commission.

“I’ve always been impressed with [this village],” Steve says. “I’ve always sensed in my heart it’s somewhere we need to work.”

And so the work begins.

In a large open area of a Rwandan prison, Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana spoke to a crowd of killers responsible for the 1994 genocide. “Close your eyes,” he instructed them. “Go back in your mind to 1994. What did you see?” he asked. “What did you smell? What did you hear?”

Many in the crowd began to weep. He told the men to see their victims’ faces. The sobs grew louder. “Now,” said Bishop John, “that which made you cry, that you must confess.”

It’s amazing enough that Bishop John, himself a Tutsi, would speak to the Hutu perpetrators of the genocide. It’s even more amazing when you consider that John’s own niece, Madu, was brutally raped and killed during the genocide. But Bishop John had a reason to reach out to these men in compassion — for he, too, had found forgiveness of his sins through Jesus Christ.

Bishop John found Christ while growing up as an exile from his native Rwanda. He puts it better than I’ve ever heard before: “I did not accept Jesus. Jesus graciously met me and accepted me.” This is a man who understands how we come empty-handed to Christ.

At a time when John wanted to pursue a degree, God led him and his wife, Beatrice, to start a school for 170 refugee children in Uganda. Today, some of those grown children serve in key posts in Rwanda.

Studying in the States during the 1994 genocide, Bishop John wanted desperately to go back to the ministry he had left behind in Uganda. But instead, he responded to God’s call to face the darkness by going back to his homeland — returning to Rwanda, finding bones bleached white by the sun littering the streets, open graves fouling the air. Still, Bishop John worked with others to establish Prison Fellowship Rwanda.

He helped start the Umuvumu Tree Project, which has brought together tens of thousands of perpetrators and victims of the genocide, offering offenders the opportunity to confess their crimes and victims the chance to forgive. Many have done so.

Most of all, Bishop John is a shining example of what it means to love our enemies — and to overcome evil with good.

________

Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. (Adapted by Rev. David Holwick) Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Mike McAfee weaves the truck through traffic until it finally rolls to a standstill. It looks like bedlam, but it’s just a typical morning in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

The roads are wet from recent rains with standing water in many places. Along the roadside are street sellers hawking goods from tables piled high with mangoes, avocados, bananas and small pineapples. Other vendors wave goods outside the truck windows. At a newsstand, several men read the headlines of newspapers tacked up on a wooden board.

McAfee eases through impossibly narrow spaces between vehicles and finally turns onto a less congested street. After a few more lane changes and turns, he pulls into Koumassi, an area east of where he and his family live. The Southern Baptist missionary comes to this industrial area at least once a week to visit with Seidou (SAY-doo), a Muslim man who moved to Abidjan from Burkina Faso in 2001. McAfee parks the truck and steps through an entrance leading to a long, narrow way -- almost like an alley but called a foyer. Doors on each side lead into rooms where families live.

Seidou is Bissa, an ethnic group that can be found in northeast Ghana, where he was born, and Burkina Faso, where he grew up. He, like many other West Africans, came to Abidjan for work and has been employed as a security guard, but jobs are difficult to find, he said. As he and McAfee start to visit, speaking in French, Seidou talks about work. He hasn’t been paid in two months, he said.

He and McAfee sit in a small entry room. Three doors open out from this room: one for Seidou’s family’s living quarters, another for his brother Issaka’s family and the third for Issaka’s second wife. As the men visit, five or six children, curious about the foreign visitors, wander in and out of the room. It’s summer and school is on break. McAfee’s daughter, Karis, joined him on this visit, hoping to play with Seidou’s niece Sadia. But Karis discovers that Sadia is now in training in a tailor’s shop so she’s at work today. Sadia won’t be returning to school when her brothers start back in the fall. She started working in the tailor’s shop -- leaving her school education behind -- when she was 11 years old.

It’s all about trying to make a living to support the extended family. When wages don’t come, it impacts the entire family -- not just wife and children but sometimes adult brothers and sisters, cousins, aging parents and others.

Learning the stories

On this visit, Seidou brings out a DVD he recently purchased on the street: “Les Dix Commandements,” a French version of the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille epic film starring Charlton Heston as Moses. Seidou knows McAfee will be interested because usually it’s McAfee who shares Bible stories with him.

Seidou speaks fluent French, but McAfee was able to find “The Jesus Film” in Bissa, his heart language, and show it to him on another visit. Today McAfee uses the film on the television as a jumping off point to discuss biblical truths. He also has worked through the Bible with Seidou, sharing many key stories.

“The way we do evangelism in Africa is we tell stories,” McAfee said. “The Bible is one big story and so we break that down. We tell what we call a ‘resume’ of the Bible called Creation to Christ or Creation to Return. That is our evangelism strategy as we go into these communities that don’t have ... a Christian presence.”

When McAfee tells a story, he asks the listener three key questions afterward:

• What lesson have you learned from this story?

• What are the characteristics of God?

• Is there something that you need to obey?

These questions help McAfee discover what the listener has heard and give him opportunities to reinforce biblical truths.

Storying is a powerful tool in Africa, McAfee says. “In the States, you tell someone, ‘I want to tell you a story,’ and nobody wants to hear. Here you say that and everyone gathers around,” he noted.

McAfee said Seidou knows the stories and has heard clear gospel presentations. It just comes down to a decision. On this day as they talk, Seidou repeats what he has told McAfee in the past.

“Seidou says he’s conflicted because the Koran says that God doesn’t have a child and the Bible says that Jesus is God’s Son,” McAfee said. “He says, ‘I’m watching all these things to try to figure it out.’

“I [told him] it’s a very important decision because if what Jesus says is true, then the only way to have eternal life is through Him.”

Along with the French version of “The Ten Commandments,” the pirated DVD Seidou purchased includes two other films: “In the Beginning,” a 2000 American made-for-television film telling stories from the books of Genesis and Exodus, and “The Message,” a 1977 film made by a Syrian-American director that tells the story of Islam’s origins.

Praying In Jesus’ Name

Seidou has not only heard and discussed New Testament Bible stories but also seen Jesus’ healing power in his home, McAfee said. One day, Issaka was there as McAfee was sharing with Seidou. Issaka told McAfee that he hadn’t been able to work much for the past 12 years because of back problems. McAfee agreed to pray for healing for Issaka’s back, if he could pray in Jesus’ name.

Since Issaka’s back had hurt for 12 years, McAfee started by telling him the story of the woman who bled for 12 years and visited doctors and mystics but found no one who could heal her until she touched Jesus. “I told him that story, and I told him that what Jesus said to her is very important,” McAfee said. “He said, ‘Your faith has healed you.’ And I said, ‘Issaka, it’s going to come down to your faith and who Jesus Christ is.’

“And so Issaka agreed to allow me to pray for him in Jesus’ name. We prayed, and he didn’t get healed immediately.”

But when McAfee came back the next week, Issaka saw him from a distance. “He came running and he said, ‘Pastor, Pastor, you’ve got to pray for me again.’” McAfee asked him why and Issaka told him that he was “half healed.”

“So I said, ‘Well let’s go in the house and we’ll talk about it,’” McAfee recalled. “So we go in the house and we start talking about having faith in Jesus Christ ... and I prayed for him again that he would have faith in Christ and that Christ would heal him. Well again, nothing immediately happened. I went home that day, and I came back the next week. Issaka came running and he said, ‘Pastor! Pastor! Thank you! Thank you! I’m healed!’ and I looked at him and I said, ‘Issaka, you’ve got to remember what I told you two weeks ago that if you were healed that you have to give the glory to Jesus Christ because it would be Jesus Christ that healed you.’ He said, ‘I’ll give the glory to Christ, I’ll give the glory to Christ. I’ll tell everybody it was Jesus that healed me.’

“I would love to tell everybody that Issaka accepted Christ and that Seidou accepted Christ and that the family which was a Muslim family has now all accepted Christ and they’re all going to church, but that’s just not the case,” McAfee said.

“In Africa, it’s so hard for a Muslim to accept Christ. He has to count the cost,” he said. “If Seidou accepts Christ, if Issaka accepts Christ, what is the cost? They might lose their jobs; they might lose their means of support. So he has to count the cost. I know that Seidou is probably counting the cost, and what he decides to do will be after he decides [whether] it’s worth it to follow Christ.”

She was a sweet white Christian woman in her sixties who was a seasoned saint. She even brought a Black friend with her to this particular author event on race. That is why her question baffled me.

“Are Black people cursed?” she asked. “Someone told me that a long time ago and they said it was in the Bible.”

I was stunned to find that even in 2022, there are some Christians who still believe a false message about the supposed “Black curse” placed upon the African race.

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda Africa is a reminder of how dangerous it is to claim racial superiority by misinterpreting Scriptures. The African Hutu tribe attacked the Tutsi tribe, and when the killing ended, around 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus were murdered — hacked by machetes, dismembered and slaughtered in other ways.

Although the conflict had several complex causes, one of the main drivers was the hatred the Hutus developed for their Tutsi brothers and sisters. They always had their differences, but that was magnified when European colonists brought the concept of race to the African tribes.

An online article explains how European colonists used the famous story of “The Curse of Ham” in the Bible to assign superiority to the Tutsi tribe and inferiority to the Hutu tribe. After years of racism and discrimination against the Hutus, they finally had enough. That is when the killing began.

According to the biblical account in Genesis 9:18-27, Noah had three sons — Shem, Ham and Japheth. Across time, Noah’s sons have been divided by historians into three races. Shem was assigned to the Semitic race (Jewish), Japheth to the European race (Caucasians), and Ham to the African race (Black).

As the Scriptures explain, Ham disrespected his father Noah in some way that is not fully understood. As a result, Noah did not curse Ham (Ham previously had been blessed by God), but cursed Canaan, who was Ham’s fourth son. Noah proclaimed that Canaan (and his descendants) would be slaves to the descendants of Shem and Japheth. Remember that later interpreters used this story to separate Jews and Caucasians from Blacks.

There are problems with this reasoning.

First, the exact time this biblical account took place cannot be known, but we can say it happened well over 4,000 years ago. That fact alone should pose the question: Has anything changed from then until now, and does this curse still apply today?

Yes, much has changed, and the curse does not apply today, nor did it apply during the pre-Civil War period. Many scholars agree the curse — if to be taken literally — was fulfilled in history long before the 17th century slave trade and the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

Second, according to this typology, it was Ham who represented the entire Black race, not Canaan. Ham was not cursed, but his fourth son, Canaan. That means Ham’s three other sons, Cush, Egypt (Mizraim) and Put, also members of the Black race — were not cursed (1 Chronicles 2:8).

And third, Jesus Christ received power over all curses when he died on the Cross and rose from the dead (Colossians 2:6-15). God did not want any race, including Canaan’s descendants, to be doomed forever under a curse — so he sent his only Son, in the likeness of humans, to die for the sins of the world and remove all curses. The Bible says Jesus became a curse for us so that we would not have to endure curses.

See Galatians 3:13-14 — “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’ — so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.”

Jesus took all the curses we deserved, whether inflicted by us or our ancestors, and nailed them to his Cross when he was crucified. That includes the curse of Ham’s son Canaan. No longer does any descendent of Canaan have to live with a 4,000-year-old curse. The blood of Jesus Christ killed the curse.

As Christian leaders, we often assume there is no need to address certain issues we believe people already should know. However, the old saying, “Better to be safe than sorry,” certainly applies in this situation. If someone asks you if Black people are cursed, now you can tell them the good news: No! The Blood of Jesus Christ is much stronger than the curse of Canaan. Jesus removed the curse!

Seth Mahiga, who served as secretary for Atheists in Kenya (AIK) for less than two years, officially resigned from his position with the society on Saturday after giving his life to Jesus Christ.

In a video posted online, Mahiga shares the good news with a group of church members.

“I’ve been going through some difficulties in life and then I decided to resign as the secretary so I’m so happy to be here,” he said.

[tweet from Atheists in Kenya Society]:

VIDEO - Former Atheists In Kenya Secretary Seth Mahiga in church TODAY accepting Jesus Christ and announcing his resignation.

Surreal! pic.twitter.com/p8OYhw8uQ3

— Atheists In Kenya Society (@AtheistsInKenya) May 30, 2021

AIK President Harrison Mumia thanked Mahiga for his service and wished him well in his future endeavors.

[tweet from Atheists in Kenya Society]:

“Seth’s reason for resigning is that he has found Jesus Christ and is no longer interested in promoting atheism in Kenya. We wish Seth all the best in his new found relationship with Jesus Christ,” Mumia wrote in a statement.

This evening, regretfully, our Secretary Mr. Seth Mahiga made the decision to resign from his position as Secretary of our society.

Seth’s reason for resigning is that he has found Jesus Christ and is no longer interested in promoting atheism in Kenya.

o- pic.twitter.com/G7sCCbytv2

— Atheists In Kenya Society (@AtheistsInKenya) May 29, 2021

Among AIK’s objectives are the promotion and practice of “open, rational, and scientific examination of the universe and our place in it”, and “to advocate that ethics and morality be meaningfully based on rational and humanistic ideals and values”.

The society believes that “human beings are capable of being ethical and moral without religion or God.”

The news of Mahiga stepping down from his role with AIK garnered praise on social media.

Julie J Bird wrote, “It is the power of God. Stronger than anything else in the whole universe.”

Another user tweeted, “Every knee, shall bow and every tongue shall confess, that Jesus, Christ is lord. Amen!”

And Laura RW congratulated Mahiga on his decision, adding “All glory to God in the highest.”

==============

Baptist Press, June 7, 2021, in International News

"Atheist accepts Jesus in public confession of faith in Kenya," by Diana Chandler

NAIROBI, Kenya (BP) – “Praise God. God is good all the time,” Seth Mahiga proclaimed at the altar of Life Church International in Nairobi, Kenya. Just two days earlier he announced his resignation as general secretary of the Atheists in Kenya Society.

“I’m just grateful to tell you I was the ... general secretary of the Atheists in Kenya Society. It is the largest in Africa. ... It represents more than around 5 million atheists in Africa,” Mahiga said in the Apostolic church. “I think a couple of days ago I’ve been going through some difficulties in life, and then I decided to resign as the secretary. I’m so happy to be here.”

Mahiga is now in the majority in the country of about 55 million people. More than 85 percent of Kenyans are Christian, according to 2019 numbers from Statistica, with more than 20 percent of Christians there described as evangelical, and more than 33 percent identifying as Protestant. Statistica counted 1.6 percent of Kenyans as “nones.”

Mahiga’s May 30th profession of faith was broadcast live on the church’s Facebook page and Elevate TV, which regularly broadcasts the church’s services.

As the church prayed for Mahiga, Pastor Mark Mutinda described Mahiga as “a point of contact (for) all those people who are in darkness and all the atheists who say there is no God,” and encouraged prayer that “the grace of God reach out to wherever they are.”

As Mahiga prayed the sinner’s prayer, led by a member of the church’s pastoral staff, he described himself to God as “a new creature no longer doubting about your existence. Indeed you are my God, and I will forever confess you are God. In Jesus’ name I accept you and I give my life to you.”

Atheists in Kenya was formed in 2016 in Nairobi, but suspended for two years after Christians complained. It regained active status in 2018 and describes itself as an organization of secularists who believe no deity exists.

The secular group announced Mahiga’s resignation in a press statement, including a link to a portion of the May 30, 2021 worship service.

“Seth’s reason for resigning is that he has found Jesus Christ and is no longer interested in promoting Atheism in Kenya,” group chairman Harrison Mumia said. “We wish Seth well in his newfound relationship with Jesus Christ. We thank him for having served the society with dedication over the last one and a half years.”

Ibrahim* first came into Warren and Sharon Hesslings’ life as a Taureg language guide for Warren. Though Ibrahim was at first belligerent when the Bible was brought up, his defensiveness turned to intrigue as he studied the English Bible to learn Hessling’s language.

“One day he came to the house here and he said, ‘Today, I have to do something,’” Hessling recalls. “Several hours later he prayed the sinner’s prayer and accepted the Lord as his Savior.”

Ibrahim didn’t wait long before he was sharing the same message with his family. But they rejected his faith. The Tuareg people drink water from a common bowl, but after Ibrahim’s conversion, he was given his own bowl of water. And, in a culture where water is life, the water left in his bowl was tossed out. When Ibrahim was unemployed, his family refused to feed him.

“He’s never been beaten, but he may as well have been for what he has been put through,” Warren says.

Although Ibrahim’s own family has persecuted him for his faith, he continues to share the message of Jesus Christ. It is Ibrahim’s example that gives the Hesslings hope that the Tuareg will embrace Christ.

Ibrahim has seen drastic changes in the lives of his people -– moving from their historically nomadic life to urban living -– and the turmoil that has placed on Tuareg society. Among the changes is exposure to the Gospel. While Tuareg are traditionally Muslim, Ibrahim says they are searching for meaning during this time of transition.

He found a steady foundation in Jesus Christ at a shaky time in his own life. He made the move to Niamey, Niger, from his home village five years ago, joining other Tuareg in the hunt for something better. When he began serving as a language guide for Hessling, however, he saw the concept of homeland in new light.

Ibrahim recalls the first year he spent with Hessling as the two read the Bible together. Each lesson brought more questions for Ibrahim, which finally led him to know the Bible as truth and accept Jesus as his Savior.

“I tried to share my understanding, what I believe, with my people, to my cousins,” Ibrahim says. “They refused to agree with me.”

Soon, a family of believers developed around Ibrahim, however. He had been teaching the Koran to his friend, Amir*, but when Ibrahim went to meet his friend after his conversion, Amir said he didn’t need the lesson that day.

“I said, ‘I’m a Christian today. You’re a Muslim today, no problem. I will still teach you the Koran -- change nothing,’” Ibrahim recalls. “Finally he agreed so I taught him the Koran until he moved into my house.”

One morning, Amir saw Ibrahim reading his Bible and asked what he was reading. Ibrahim read the biblical story of Jonah to Amir. That began a regular Bible study for the two, which eventually replaced the Koran study altogether. Today, Amir is also a believer in Christ and thus a brother to Ibrahim. A third housemate also has become a believer in Christ, so the three now study the Bible and encourage one another in the faith. Day-to-day challenges can easily overcome them, from family struggles to the basic need for food.

These believers are encouraged, however, that their persistence will not only keep them strong in their faith, but also lead others to Christ. They return to their home villages whenever money and time allow. Though they may face persecution, the believers share the faith that drives their lives.

Hessling notes this is the way the Gospel will be taken to Tuareg far and wide. One barrier to evangelizing the Tuareg is the vast distances that exist between them, yet a bridge exists in their nomadic lifestyle to open lines of communication between villages. Ibrahim alone has traveled to Chad, Libya, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali and parts of the Mediterranean.

With the openness among Tuareg today, Ibrahim longs for more helpers to come and help share the message. American missionaries, he says, are especially needed now because Tuareg have no problems with Americans. Additionally, there aren’t enough Tuareg believers to take the message to all his people.

“Our work has become vast now,” Ibrahim says of the Gospel. “Our work has become heavy for us. I hope one day God will provide helpers.”

________

*Names changed for security reasons.

Revenge fantasies were darkening my heart before I trusted in Jesus.

________

We had heard the distant gunshots for a few weeks. But that morning they were close and seemed to ring out with purpose. I looked to my older brother and the other adults for reassurance. Their eyes were full of anguish and frustration. All we could do was wait.

The “freedom fighters” arrived. By mid-morning we were all lying face down in the house, listening as bullets whizzed through the air. Between bursts of gunfire, our typically bustling neighborhood was eerily silent. In the lull we could hear voices shouting instructions. If they found out my name, they would kill me.

Fantasies of Food

I was born in Liberia, West Africa, where my father served in the Special Security Service of President Samuel Doe (no relation), who had come to power through a violent military coup ten years earlier. His regime suppressed political opposition and rigged elections to stay in power. The “freedom fighters” had come to remove him, starting a war and killing anyone who worked in Doe’s government and anyone from his tribe. This was the situation in Liberia in August 1990. While the world was focused on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, millions of Liberians were in the middle of a bloodbath.

I was 11. A year earlier I had lost my mother to illness. Now my father’s life was in danger. A few weeks before the rebel soldiers arrived, he had instructed me to go live with my brother, Roosevelt, and his wife. Bewildered and filled with questions, I packed a small bag with a few sets of clothes.

We lived behind rebel lines for three months, the hardest season of my life. The rebels were ruthless, murdering innocent people on the barest of suspicions.

While we hid, we ate one small meal a day, mostly rice and greens. Meat and clean water were scarce. Hope was scarcer. As children, we prefaced every statement about the future with, “If I live through the war, I will . . .” We lived on fantasies of food. We hadn’t been to school in six months.

By November 1990, President Doe had been killed, and peacekeepers were arriving from neighboring countries. The damage seemed beyond repair, and my innocence was irretrievable.

Roosevelt and I left Liberia on a refugee ship bound for neighboring Ghana in early November. Life was just returning to normal when I received word that my father had been killed. He had turned himself in to rebel forces on the promise of freedom for answering questions, and was never seen again.

I was an orphan. Whenever I was by myself, I cried. The war left my heart reeling.

Fantasies of Vengeance

Like many Liberians, Roosevelt and his wife were Christians. We went to church, but I had trouble believing in prayer. I had prayed that my mother wouldn’t die, and she did. I had prayed that my father wouldn’t die, and he did. Now I was scared to pray that my brothers and sister wouldn’t die.

And so my life’s goal changed. I wanted to find the soldier or soldiers who made me an orphan and make them pay. Wartime fantasies of food were replaced by fantasies of vengeance.

Soon, my brother and his wife applied to go to America as refugees, and in 1993 we arrived in Boston. I was both excited and scared. How would I be treated? Would I adjust to the schools, the crime, the cold weather? I had never felt temperatures below 75 degrees.

I started school a few weeks later, a refugee living in my third country. But my time there was marred by chaos, poor grades, and disappointment. I couldn’t focus in classes. In quiet times, during quizzes and tests, and whenever I was alone, my thoughts returned to war.

I daydreamed of revenge. I cried myself to sleep most nights. I was existing but not living.

After barely graduating high school, I enlisted in the U.S. Army with hopes of learning to use a deadly weapon. But about halfway through basic training, I was medically discharged due to a mild heart condition. I came home utterly embarrassed. What had my life become?

Still overcome by grief, I had lost hope for a brighter future. With no connection to God and no real walk with Christ, I had no source of comfort and no sense of purpose.

To make matters worse, Roosevelt — the only family member I knew to be alive — had a sudden heart attack at age 38. He slipped into a coma and was rushed to the hospital.

Alone in our home, I sat paralyzed in the basement, where I slept. Someone else close to me was going to die. I had nowhere to run. For hours I wept in complete darkness.

In that darkness, I turned to God. At first, all I had was one question: “Why?” I listed all the things that I blamed him for: Ma, Pa, the war, separation from family, their suffering, my disappointments — and now my brother, my beloved brother. I blamed God. Why?

I also blamed myself. Guilt overwhelmed me. I had chosen to hold on to the pain of my past and to nurse my desire for vengeance. I realized, in that darkness, that I could keep those fantasies alive, or I could relinquish them once and for all. I begged God to forgive me. I would let go of revenge and rage. I asked God, from the sincerest and deepest part of my heart, to save my brother.

Practicing Forgiveness

Four days later, I got news that Roosevelt would recover. That answered prayer was the first step in my journey to faith.

Still, it took years to trust God completely. As I grew in my faith, my mind — once a desert swept by anger and despair — became fertile ground. Flowers of faith and hope bloomed, though they were sometimes choked by the vicious thorns and weeds of hatred. For years I had comforted myself with the fantasy of killing the man who had killed my father. The roots of that destructive pattern went deep.

It wasn’t until 2008 that I began truly walking the road of forgiveness. I decided that I wanted to take the chance and find my father’s killer. At first I wasn’t sure what I would say. I sat across from an empty chair in my dining room and practiced saying, “I forgive you.” Sometimes, my monologue would get so intense that I would stand up and scream or break down and cry. I questioned my path. Did I really want to meet him this way?

Besides, the chances of finding him were slim to none. He wouldn’t want to be found. But the longer I practiced, the more resolved I became. I decided to travel halfway around the world to offer this man what Jesus offered me.

In 2010, at age 31, almost 20 years after I had left, I made my way back to Liberia. But I did not meet my father’s killer. He had died in the fighting.

Even so, I forgave him.

In that trip, God answered prayers, though not in the way I expected. Even without the fulfillment of my own plans, I could live in peace. I could forgive.

Today, I hope to share this hard-won peace and hope with fellow Liberians, so many of whom suffered greatly during our country’s brutal civil wars. My wife and I plan to run a self-sustaining farm that will support a library and community center. But more important, we’ll strive to bring gospel healing, a way to escape the darkness of Liberia’s violent past — a darkness I know all too well. Because wherever Jesus’ words of forgiveness are spoken, the future is bright with hope.

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Marcus Doe is the author of Catching Ricebirds: A Story of Letting Vengeance Go (Hendrickson Publishers).

Helen Roseveare was born into a well-respected English family. During her freshman year in Cambridge University she had a conversion experience and joined an evangelical church. She became a doctor and felt called to serve God in Africa. In 1953 she set sail for the Congo.

Very soon she realized the typical missionary hospital wasn’t adequate for the human suffering she encountered. Helen envisioned a training center where nurses would be taught the Bible and basic medicine. Then they would be sent back to their villages to handle routine cases, teach preventive medicine, and evangelize.

Her missionary colleagues blocked her at every turn. Just when her training center was ready to graduate its first students, the mission moved her to Nebobongo, a remote leprosy camp in the jungle. Helen started from scratch and built up a new training center. She also became friends with the Africans and went to an old African preacher when she needed spiritual help. Humbling herself in this way was unacceptable to the other missionaries.

To keep her in her place, the mission board sent a man to Nebobongo and put him in charge. It was a bitter pill for Helen. She submitted to his authority but it tore her up.

Every seven years she was given a furlough back in England. This time she decided to get a husband so she would have more pull with the other missionaries. She met a young Christian doctor, bought new clothes and got a new hair style, and tried to win him. She even resigned from the mission. The young doctor liked her but wouldn’t marry her.

Still single, Helen returned to Congo in 1960, just as that nation became independent. It was a very uneasy time for whites and many of the missionaries began to leave for good. Helen had a great opportunity to build up Nebobongo on her own.

Meanwhile, the Simba rebels took control of village after village. In the summer of 1964 they occupied Nebobongo and put Helen under house arrest. Atrocities were being committed daily. On October 29, Helen was forced to endure a series of brutal assaults. One verse came to her mind: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Two months later she was finally liberated.

A year later Helen Roseveare returned to Nebobongo. The new spirit of African nationalism continually questioned her authority. Finally, after twenty years of hard service, she arranged to turn over the mission to an African colleague. She organized a big day to celebrate the handover and the graduation of a class of students. At the last moment the students went on strike and the celebration was cancelled.

Helen returned to England in 1973 to face a very lonely period in her life. But as with so many other disappointing experiences, she turned to God. Instead of bitterness there was a new spirit of humility and a new appreciation for what Jesus had done for her on the cross. In the years that followed she became an acclaimed spokeswoman for Christian missions.

“In the twentieth century, for the first time, there was in the world a universal religion -- the Christian religion. Christianity acclimated itself in every continent and in almost every country. In many areas that hold might be precarious, and its numbers small, yet in country after country the Christians evinced the power to be a dynamic minority. It took root, not as a foreign import, but as the Church of the countries in which it dwells.” With those words, historian Owen Chadwick updated Bishop Stephen Neill's classic history of Christian missions. By the end of the twentieth century, the Christian missionary movement had reached around the globe. Still, the missionary challenge looms larger than ever before. This comes immediately to mind in light of the remarkable cover story published in the January 29, 2006, edition of THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE. “The Call,” written by Daniel Bergner, offers fascinating and insightful coverage of the work of missionaries Rick and Carrie Maples, who along with their two children have moved to a rural outpost in northern Kenya, in order to bring the gospel to the Samburu people.

Bergner begins his account by describing the primitive church building in which he shares a conversation with Rick Maples. “I want this to be the last church,” Maples tells Bergner. “This should be the last church built in this section of the valley.”

As the article makes clear, Maples is speaking of the church building -- not of congregations. His statement concerning the inappropriateness of the church buildings relates to the words on the cover of the magazine, describing Maples as an example of “the post-colonial missionary.”

Bergner's article offers incredible insights into the transformation of Christian missions that has taken place over the last generation or so. Through the lens of his report, readers will come to understand not only why Rick and Carrie Maples would take their daughters into a desolate region of Kenya, but why they would also want to see the Samburu people develop their own indigenous manifestation of biblical Christianity. Put simply -- evidence of indigenous Christianity among the Samburu would be seen in worship held out of doors, not in Western-style church buildings, however primitive.

Rick and Carrie Maples once knew a comfortable and prosperous life in Danville, California, an affluent community just outside San Francisco. Rick refers to his comfortable suburban life as “my other life,” even as Carrie remembers their jacuzzi and the ornamentation of their suburban home in California.

“We were really happy with our life,” Rick told the reporter. “We saw about 25 years ahead, and we were happy with what we saw.”

All that changed when Carrie and Rick experienced missions firsthand. As teenagers, they had been involved in various mission trips, and when they had married, they talked about serving as missionaries post-retirement. Then, in 1996, Carrie went with a nursing colleague on a three-week mission to a hospital run by Africa Inland Mission [AIM]. Upon her return, Carrie actually filled out an application to AIM but kept it secret from her husband, showing it to him only when he shared of his own sense of call to missions. As Bergner reports, “He recognized his desire one day at work, when he and his colleagues were chatting about what they would do if they ever won the lottery. His own answer, he said, had stunned him: he would quit his job and go as a missionary to Africa.”

Before long, Rick and Carrie, along with daughters Meghan (twelve) and Stephanie (four) moved to Kenya, first spending two years in Bonjoge, then moving to Kurungu, where they now serve with the Samburu people.

Instead of their suburban comfort in California, the Maples now live in a small cinder-block house that is served by a refrigerator that operates on kerosene. They live a day's journey from Nairobi, and face daily challenges that could not have been imagined in San Francisco. As Bergner reports: “The family's dog, Cooper, an irrepressible mutt, had been attacked and nearly blinded by a spitting cobra on the Mapleses' back porch.” Beyond this, lions had recently killed several donkeys and a camel very close to the home. “The pair of Samburu guards that keep watch over the house recently chased the lions from the low fence of the family's yard,” he reports.

Berger cites Todd Johnson, director for the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, and reports that American Christian missionaries around the world now number around 120,000. The liberal and mainline Protestant denominations have been reducing their missionary rosters for years, while missionaries from evangelical Protestant denominations and missions agencies continue to grow. Beyond the 120,000 missionaries cited by Johnson, the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College estimates that some 346,000 Christians are serving for periods between two weeks and one year.

In Kenya, approximately seventy percent of the people now claim some Christian identity. Nevertheless, the Samburu, numbering about 150,000, have been staunchly resistant to the gospel. Instead, they continue to worship “Ngai,” whom they believe to be identified with the steep mountains that border their Kenyan valley.

Bergner is clear in pointing to the evangelistic motivation that drives the Maples and their ministry. “For us, this is home,” Rick confided. As Carrie explained, they were here by virtue of their call to bring the gospel to the Samburu. “How do they know the truth, unless they are told the truth?” she asks.

The Samburu people are a proud tribe, who have embraced the Maples family as friends. They appreciate the fact that the missionaries have assisted with practical needs and medical care. As the report in THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE makes clear, modernity has made few inroads among the Samburu people. “Their wooden bells clacking softly in the still air, the herds graze, tended by the Samburu, whose bodies are draped in wraps of brilliant cloth, whose necks and foreheads are resplendent in beads and burnished metal, whose hair is dyed with red ocher.”

Evangelicals should view this article with respect and appreciation. Daniel Bergner writes of both the missionaries and the Samburu people with genuine respect -- treating them as authentic human beings driven by understandable motivations. When so many impressions of Christian missionaries have been fueled by notions of Christian imperialism and worse, Bergner points to the deep Christian commitment and love that has brought the Maples family to Kurungu, and keeps them there under difficult and lonely circumstances.

Bergner's reportage is touching and deeply moving. He writes of the loneliness experienced by Meghan, who at age twelve isn't quite sure that she shares the same missionary calling. Nevertheless, she speaks of being “really blessed” through her experience with her parents on the mission field. “Sometimes I think I can live without friends, I just don't know,” she told the reporter. “Sometimes I have these breakdowns.” There are almost no girls her age among the Samburu in Kurungu.

Bergner also writes of the “strategic” patience demonstrated by these missionaries. “It seemed to blend with the expanses of arid land and the timelessness of Samburu life,” he observed. “It seemed almost like a cover. And all the while the Mapleses were gaining trust and gathering knowledge so that they would prevail in an area where other missionaries had made little headway.”

Devastating criticisms of Christian missionary efforts as projections of cultural imperialism were often well deserved. In too many cases, Christian missionary efforts appeared to be motivated by something more like Rudyard Kipling's infamous “white man's burden,” rather than by the Christian gospel and the Great Commission.

Daniel Bergner's article is a respectful and accurate demonstration that the age of colonial missions is now past -- certainly among the most respected and established missionary organizations. Rick and Carrie Maples want to see an indigenous form of Christianity emerge among the Samburu, with indigenous churches and with appropriate cultural manifestations of transformational Christian truth.

As an example of the difficult issues often encountered in the collision of cultures and the presentation of the Christian gospel, Bergner points to the practice of female circumcision which is commonly practiced among the Samburu. “It's a spiritual issue, it's a public-health issue, it's a human rights issue,” Rick Maples declared. As he explained, the body is God's temple and the mutilation of the human body is a sin. “Once people have accepted the Lord, we'll talk about how God created sex and ordained sex, that sex is to be enjoyed,” Rick explained. “It is a gift to a man and a woman who are married, and to take away God's gift of pleasure is not right.”

The forthrightness with which Rick and Carrie Maples discussed sex appeared to shock Daniel Bergner, but the fact that Christianity would transform a culture and contradict certain cultural practices is part and parcel of the Christian missionary experience. After all, missionary pioneer William Carey, who went to India two centuries before the Mapleses went to Kenya, understood that the embrace of the Christian gospel must mean the end of the Indian practice of SUTTEE (or SATI), the ritual burning of a dead man's widow.

What this important article makes clear is that Christian missionaries have been struggling with these questions for at least a generation now, realizing that the Christian gospel will transform every culture, but that the goal of Christian missions is not to replicate Western civilization, but to show the glory of God through the transformation of peoples in accordance with their own cultural diversity.

Writing almost twenty years ago, missions strategists Dale W. Kietzman and William A. Smalley observed: “There cannot be preaching except in cultural terms, and no human being can or should try to escape value judgments. The missionary cannot legitimately force or enforce any culture change. Nor does he have an adequate basis for advocating specific changes in a culture unless he has a profound knowledge of the culture.”

They continued: “The missionary does, however, have an extremely important function in the tactful, thoughtful, serious presentation of alternate forms of cultural behavior to the Christians in a society. On the basis of his knowledge of history, his understanding of the church elsewhere, and above all, his knowledge of the tremendously varied ways in which God dealt with men, as recorded in the Scriptures, he can make it clear to them that there are alternative ways of behavior to their own, and help them in prayer and study and experiment to select those cultural forms which would be the best expression for their relationship to God in their culture.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE and Daniel Bergner deserve the respect and appreciation of American evangelicals for the careful and objective analysis this article represents. Non-Christians reading the article are likely to gain a new understanding of why evangelical Christians would abandon comfort in order to follow the missionary call. Readers will be assisted in understanding how modern missions has moved into a post-colonial shape, understanding and appreciating the diversity of human cultures.

Christians, on the other hand, should receive this article as an impetus and a reminder of what is at stake in Christian missions and of the challenge that yet remains -- reaching hundreds of people groups around the globe who have never heard the Gospel. Beyond this, we now know of a people, the Samburu, for whom we should be praying -- praying that they would be open and receptive to the Gospel. Beyond this, this article allows us to meet Rick and Carrie Maples, who along with their daughters are serving the cause of Christ at great sacrifice.

If nothing else, we should also remember the commitment to the Gospel of Christ that is represented by a twelve-year-old girl in Kenya who feels desperately lonely. The Kingdom is visible in such as these.

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