Africa Emerging

This is an excerpt from a Brian McClaren website that I found. It explains so much of what I saw when I was there. There are going to be just as many disillusioned Christians over there as there are over here. What will be the next phase of mission? What will it look like? Will it be moored in the foundations of the traditional Church that preaches salvation by faith alone and wants to get bigger buildings built...read on as he begins with a question about the Church...




"Is that gospel a message of evacuation – how God will airlift some of us out of this world and its problems, how God wants us to huddle in a holy warehouse between now and then, enjoying blessings and the joys of a church subculture? Or is that gospel a call to incarnation and transformation, to live out the message of God’s kingdom so we, like salt and light, like yeast in bread or seeds in soil, bring new possibilities to our world?"



Benny Hinn posters everywhere. “We like Benny Hinn,” a Ugandan member of parliament told me. “He gives our people hope. They feel that they are locked in poverty, but Benny tells them that God can bless them.” What if their hopes are raised at the crusade and then nothing changes? I ask. “Then they are disillusioned,” he adds, implying that their post-crusade disillusionment is no worse than their pre-crusade despair. I see his point, but still wonder

A Ugandan man tells us that the ever-present local Benny wannabe’s promise healing from HIV if only the infected will give the “man of God” their car or home or property. When they “sow their seed” and the promised healing or prosperity doesn’t come, a backlog of disillusioned people accumulates. Sometimes they become angry, so the prosperity preachers have to spend some of their own prosperity on armed guards. TIA.

In Nairobi, our group visited two slums, the famous Kibera (featured in “The Constant Gardener”), and a smaller but equally poor “second hand slum” nearby. A small Pentecostal church of about 60 people, City Harvest, led by Pastor Charles, does more in these slums than many “prosperity churches” of multiple thousands, incarnating the gospel in the form of an HIV clinic and support groups in the slums for those living with AIDS. One afternoon, our group of about 20 gathered in a tiny, dark, corrugated tin hut, one dead light bulb hanging from the ceiling, the only illumination coming in through the open door and from the half-circles where tin meets tin. We listened to stories of women living with HIV, single and abandoned mothers bearing burdens none of us can imagine, and we could hardly talk, eyes brimming and throats choked up not simply by sadness, but also by beauty: at least one church is here, we thought. At least one pastor and those he has trained care and walk among these people in this black muck and desperate need, and that is beautiful beyond words.

Two nights later, I was with a group of about a dozen young Kenyans at the opposite end of the spectrum: lawyers, doctors, business owners, engineers, teachers, workers with NGO’s. I could have been with any group of young adults in Stockholm, London, Santiago, Seattle, or Boston. Too often, the conventional church was no longer working for these educated young Africans. It focused on getting souls saved, building bigger buildings, and attracting bigger crowds, but its gospel ignored the systemic injustice, corruption, poverty, violence, and suffering in which these young adults had come of age. One young woman told me, “I work at an NGO that is staffed by young Kenyans like myself. All of us grew up in the church, but not one of my colleagues identifies himself as a Christian. They call themselves agnostics or atheists. But it is the god of the personal prosperity gospel that they have rejected. Their desire to make a difference shows that they really have faith in a God that nobody talks about – the God who cares about justice, poverty, oppression, and suffering.”
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Back in Uganda, a young woman talks with me. She too has been to college, and she too loves God but is seeking for an understanding of the gospel and church that makes more sense in today’s Africa. “Do you really have hope that the church can change?” she asks. “Yes,” I tell her, and recount stories of churches that are living out a transformational, incarnational, integral gospel around the world. She doesn’t smile. She’s seen too many religious promises and too much religious hype and experienced too much disillusionment. She’ll wait and see if anything comes of our conference


Something will come. I could feel it as we sang and danced together with joy before God. The resilience of Africans is a sign of resurrection, a joy that moves the feet and a faith that can move mountains. The air vibrates with it, hums with it, like the cloud of dragonflies that hover around us as we walk together on red African soil.