Bringing Light to the Dark Continent?
A common question that people have about Christianity, especially when presented with statements such as Jesus’ “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), is “What about people who have never heard about Jesus? What about those in deepest, darkest Africa?"
In one sense, this question is quite offensive to the thousands of Christians who died in an effort to bring the gospel to Africa. Consider the country of Nigeria. Out of a population of over one hundred and twenty million people, 50% are Muslims, 40% are Christians and 10% follow indigenous beliefs. That’s more Christians than twice the population of Australia.
Over 3 700 Nigerian Christians are serving as missionaries to foreign countries! With the increased secularisation of Western countries such as the USA, Western Europe and Australia, we will see more and more missionaries coming from African countries. What about those in deepest, darkest suburban Wollongong who have never heard the gospel?
HISTORY OF AFRICAN MISSION
The big push to bring the gospel into Africa from Protestant churches only really started after the formation of the first missionary societies in London in the 1790s.
Probably the most famous missionary to Africa was David Livingstone. He spent most of the period between 1840 and 1873 in central Africa, the countries of Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia. His greatest impact was his exploration and gathering of information about the African continent to open it up to trade and to missions.
He was taken ill in 1866 and completely lost contact with the outside world until 1871, when Henry Morton Stanley found him in the town of Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, giving rise to the famous quote, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Despite Stanley’s urgings, Livingstone refused to leave Africa and died from malaria and internal bleeding in 1873.
THE CURRENT SITUATION
Despite this, Africa remains the poorest continent in the world and one of the most difficult in which to conduct Christian ministry. The problems include incredible levels of poverty and endemic corruption from the top levels of government downwards. In this economic background Christian work in religious environments ranging from Muslim dominated Egypt and Sudan to incredibly pluralistic South Africa and a variety of indigenous spiritual beliefs including voodoo.
The Christian population suffers from a lack of bible translation and good teaching, with many pastors having only primary school level education. Many forms of false Christianity abound, with some including aspects of the existing local religions and some emphasising the material riches which God will bless them with. It is an incredible temptation for those who are poor to seek after wealth and prosperity in this world and ignore the riches of the world to come.
Yet in the face of this opposition the gospel is going out. Christians from Australia are working to build medical clinics where the gospel can be shared with waiting patients, establishing bible schools to train local pastors and planting churches. One woman, Sue Jaggar, is working in Tanzania teaching Scripture to school students. In Tanzania, people from any religion can go into a school to teach Scripture, so Sue has been working incredibly hard to get local Christians to teach in the schools.
For more resources on praying for the spread of the gospel in Africa, see CMS and African Enterprise << Revelation Revealed | Return to the Index | Three Indisputable Reasons Why You Should Come to MYC >>