African Church History: David Livingstone

Sunday afternoon I'll have the privilege of standing up in front of 80-100 people and telling them stories about pioneers of world missions. Perspectives is one of my favorite gigs.

It's also going to help pay for some of the other teaching I'm doing this month; looks like the trip to Cincinnati is on my own dime, and so is the one to Fort Collins, Friday, for an Islam class.

About halfway through Sunday's class I'll tell the students about David Livingstone, who said,

“My views of what is a missionary duty are not so contracted as those whose ideal is a dumpy sort of man with a Bible under his arm. I have labored in bricks and mortar at the forge and carpenter’s bench, as well as in preaching and in medical practice. I feel that I am not my own. I am serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men, or taking an astronomical observation. … and after having, by God’s help, gotten information which I hope will lead to more abundant blessing being bestowed on Africa than heretofore.”

He didn't accomplish much as an evangelist - saw one guy come to Christ, and that was it. He was a poor husband and father, pretty much just striking out on his own (though that may have been preferably than keeping the wife and kids in Africa in those days, at the mercy of disease and wild animals).

But you better believe he made the way for abundant blessings being bestowed on Africa. Medicine, education, commerce, and the abolition of the slave trade. A man ahead of his time.

His opposition to slavery didn’t make him very popular with other British missionaries or British society as a whole. Charles Dickens was one opponent, and took his sharp pen in hand to write a novel satirizing people who gave all their time and money to “the African project” rather than relieving suffering within Britain. “The needs are so great here at home, how can we be expected to concern ourselves with Africa?!” was his basic argument.

Sound familiar?

> More labeled "Africa"

Refugees, What Is the What, and the US Refugee Resettlement Program

Did you know that Saturday was World Refugee Day? I don't think many in the US gave it much thought since this weekend is also Father’s Day here.

At church, a short-term team gave a report, and a ministry-partner from the Middle East was visiting, and a speaker who works with the poor gave an impassioned plea to the church to do something about the hungry and suffering children of the world. He didn't say anything about refugees, but did make the connection between Father's Day and so many of the world's children growing up without fathers.

It was all too much “missions” for me, to tell you the truth. I swim in this stuff all week long. When I come to church I want worship and Bible teaching. But maybe that’s just me!

Nevertheless, I do seek out this kind of thing on my own.

What Is The What

I’ve been reading Dave Eggers' lightly fictionalized account of the life of a Sudanese refugee. The cover copy sums it up better than I can:

"What Is the What is based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng, who, along with thousands of other children – the so-called Lost Boys – was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges."

S. is staying with us for a few days. She picked it up and read the quote on the cover from Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner):

“It is impossible to read this book and not be humbled, enlightened, and transformed.”

I rose to the bait, of course. “Impossible?! I bet I can do it… and come to work Monday not the least bit 'lightened! Nor humbled, neither!”

But what a world we live in. Such a blend of beauty and pain, goodness and injustice, each so huge at times it seems like that’s all there is in life.

When What Is the What opens, a man and woman have conned their way into Valentino's Atlanta apartment to rob him and beat him up:

"…my cheek resting in its own pooling blood, I know a moment of comfort, thinking that in all likelihood he is finished. Already I am so tired. I feel as if I could close my eyes and be done with this. … So I rest. I close my eyes and rest.

"I am tired of this country. I am thankful for it, yes, I have cherished many aspects of it for the three years I have been here, but I am tired of the promises. I came here, four thousand of us came here, contemplating and expecting quiet. Peace and college and safety. We expected a land without war and, I suppose, a land without misery. We were giddy and impatient. We wanted it all immediately….

"I have held too many menial jobs… Too many have fallen, too many feel they have failed. The pressures upon us, the promises we cannot keep with ourselves, these things are making monsters of too many of us."

What Is the What, pp. 7-8

What Can Be Done?

One of my ezine subscribers recently wrote to me,

"Please pray for the US refugee resettlement program, which is badly underfunded and in crisis at this time. While this humanitarian program is meant to rescue and provide stateside protection for those who cannot return safely to their home countries due to a well-founded fear of persecution based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality or political opinion, the funding for the program falls so far below the needs to actually stabilize new arrivals once they are here in the US that we now see many refugees precariously close to eviction or homelessness in the US after only a few months here. This just isn't right.

"I have worked with refugees for more than 30 years, and have never seen the program closer to implosion than it is now, nor have I seen so many heartbreaking cases of refugees facing homelessness in their new country before they even have a chance to learn the language, learn how to use public transportation, or get reliable work (increasingly impossible in this economy.) Yet the numbers of arrivals continue to increase.

"No one wants to see the refugees remain in danger in their homelands of the neighboring countries to which they have fled. Yet the US government must invest more resources in the program if we are to do justice to those we bring to this country. Currently, the non-profit agencies that have agreements with the Dept. of State to resettle refugees receive just $900 per refugee to resettle them. This must cover the security deposit and first month's rent on an apartment, furnishings for the apartment (all the way from beds and tables to towels, bedding, lamps, etc.) PLUS the staff time to provide orientation to life in the US and take the refugee to appointments at the health dept., English classes, Social Security, Social Services, etc. Many idealistic young college grads take these positions - and soon become burned out. This is a shame.

"Currently, most refugees are arriving from Burma, Bhutan, and Iraq."

To get a picture of ways you can make a difference for refugees, read Mary Pipher's The Middle of Everywhere: The World's Refugees Come to Our Town.

African Church History: Martyrs in Madagascar and Uganda, Prophets in Kongo and Liberia

To see all posts in this series, click here.

During the colonial era the young Africans who were among the first to encounter the Christian faith brought in home to their villages where in spread in local ways. Colonial powers may have been the first to bring the message, but they were not the only or the most effective messengers.

Willingness to Suffer

“Just how deeply, and how quickly, the new Christians appropriated the religion can be illustrated from the many stories of zeal in the face of persecution. In Madagascar in the 1850s, perhaps 200 Christians were ‘speared, smothered, starved or burned to deal, poisoned, hurled from cliffs or boiled alive in rice pits.’

“We can also look at the British colony of Uganda, where Anglicanism was established in 1877 and African clergy were being ordained by the 1890s. Also in this decade, Roman Catholic missionaries started making their own converts. From its first days Ugandan Christianity has produced its share of martyrs, whose stories demonstrate how firmly the faith has rooted itself in African soil.

“Some of the worst persecutions occurred in the kingdom of Buganda, which was later absorbed into the British colony. Christianity made rapid progress at the royal court to the horror of the king. Among other things he found that his Christian male courtiers now refused his sexual demands. He ordered his subjects to renounce the new faith upon pain of death, and hundreds of native Bugandans were executed in 1885 and 1886. On a single day, thirty-two Christians were burned alive.

“With such examples in mind, it was ludicrous to claim that the new religion was solely for white people, and the faith spread quickly in both Uganda and Madagascar. In the 1890s, Buganda experienced a mass conversion of astonishing speed. Today, perhaps 75 percent of Ugandans are Christians, as are 90% of the people of Madagascar.”

Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p. 44.

Fringe Movements and Prophetic Voices

While much of the early church growth was in Protestant and Catholic communities, is sometimes broke out in independent movements that appear to be quite different. Consider the former witchdoctor Kimpa Vita, baptized “Beatrice” by Catholics in the kingdom of Kongo. In 1703 she had a vision of St. Anthony who told her that the Colonial churches were mistaken, that Jesus was in fact a black Kongolese and born in the capital city, Sao Salvador. African Christians needed to find their own path to God even if that meant practices condemned by the other churches.

William Wade Harris was another charismatic, prophet-type figure, this time in Liberia. After seeing a vision of the angel Gabriel he abandoned his European-style clothing, put on a white robe and turban, and began preaching across West Africa carrying a bamboo cross, a Bible and a gourd. Jenkins describes his message as “largely orthodox Christianity, teaching obedience to the Ten Commandments and demanding strict observance of the Sabbath” (p. 48-49).

Recognizing the spiritual powers in the popular fetishes and pagan shrines he encountered (scorned or dismissed by European missionaries), he dealt with them directly, taking on the spiritual powers and combating their power.

He also traveled in the company of several wives.

Philip Jenkins suggests more and more the global church is going to be characterized by things that seem strange or foreign to Western Christians. And why not? We’re no longer the majority.

Africa Stories: Meet Lilias Trotter, a Victorian Woman in Algeria

Excerpts from the diaries of Lilias Trotter; source here.

“Oh, the desert is lovely in its restfulness – the great brooding stillness over and through everything is so full of God. One does not wonder that He used to take His people out into the wilderness to teach them.”

Lilias Trotter (1853-1928) had a wealthy and privileged upbringing as part of an upper-class family in the golden age of Victorian England, schooled at home by governesses. In her twenties she grew in faith through the “deeper life” conferences being held across England in those days, and volunteered at the YWCA (then in its infancy) reaching out to London’s working girls, including the prostitutes who hung around Victoria Station. 

But her other passion was art. When she was in her early twenties and her family was vacationing in Venice, her mother discovered that the painter John Ruskin was staying in the same hotel, and asked him to look at some of Lilias’s watercolors. This began a lifelong friendship between the two.

He considered her artistic talent so great that he told her he could make her “immortal.” That is, if she would give herself wholly to her art.

Though tempted, she turned him down – a difficult decision but one that once made, gave her a sense of liberty; she was surrendered to God and would not cling to anything else. She later described it as "the liberty of those who have nothing to lose because they have nothing to keep." She wanted to put people first, and threw herself into the ministry in London. 

Lilias never became a great artist. It does take a lot of work to become a master of anything, doesn’t it? And that’s not what she chose. She did however continue to fill up sketchbooks, and her letters and journals are well illustrated. (You can see some of her work here.) And more to the point, she continued to see the world with an artist’s eye.

Ruskin had taught her that someone who paints nature or humanity should not just use the two for their art, but that art is a means of seeing, a means of understanding and loving what you see, and helping others love it too:

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”

When she was 35 Lilias left the urban ministry in London and went to Algiers, with two friends. She made a home for herself in the Arab section of the casbah, amid the narrow winding streets. She described her beginnings like this:

“None of us would have been passed by a doctor for any missionary society. We did not know a soul in the place, or a sentence of Arabic, nor had we a clue as to how to begin work on such untouched ground. We only knew we had to come. If God needed weakness, He had it! We were on a fool’s errand, so it seemed, and we are on it still, and glory in it.”

For the next 40 years she served there, as well as traveling along the coasts of North Africa and South into the Sahara on camel-back. She went places never visited by a European woman. They didn’t build anything impressive – nothing, really, but relationships.

She was sick a good bit of the time, and put much of her energy into praying for others who were doing what she could not. She also wrote devotional material that spoke to the hearts of North Africans and is a big part of her legacy. By the time Lilias died in 1928 they’d established 12 mission stations, and Lilias and left behind a team of 30 workers who continued reaching out to the people of North Africa. A biographer says she “pioneered means, methods and materials that were 100 years before her time.”

* * *

So, there's your introduction to Lilias. I wanted to share some of her writings as well, but thought the context would be helpful. (Later - here's the second post: Full Face to the Sun)

See also:

Until the Day Breaks: The Life and Work of Lilias Trotter: Pioneer Missionary to Muslim North Africa, by Patricia St. John (1990)

A Passion for the Impossible: The Life of Lilias Trotter, by Miriam Huffman Rockness (2003)

A Blossom in the Desert: Reflections of Faith in the Art and Writings of Lilias Trotter, compiled and edited by Miriam Huffman Rockness (2007)

African Church History: Colonialism

Both Protestant and Catholic mission efforts took on new life after the publication of David Livingstone’s book Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p. 37).

During this period Christian missions were intricately tied to political and imperial expansion: kind of ugly. In Southern Uganda Catholics were usually referred to as “baFaransa” (the French) and Protestants as “baIngerezza” (the English) (Jenkins, p. 34).

“For all the hypocrisy and the flagrantly self-serving rhetoric of the imperial age, the dedication of the missionaries was beyond question. Knowing as they did the extreme dangers from violence and tropical disease, it is inconceivable that so many would have been prepared to lay down their lives for European commerce alone, and many certainly viewed missionary work as a ticket to martyrdom.” (p. 36).

The stereotypes about the wrong-headedness of missions and missionaries abound, and have for some time. In modern times a Kenyan leader named Jomo Kenyatta complained,

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” (p. 40).

Yet even when that’s how it was, the Africans got the better deal, didn't they?

By the late nineteenth century Africa had 10 million Christians of all denominations (p. 38). There must have been something Africans recognized as “African” about the whole thing. The number of Christians in Africa increased from 10 million in 1900 to 360 million by 2000 (p. 4). Staggering.

So, not the white man's religion.

And not necessarily a religion many white men would recognize, either. The fastest growth has been among non-traditional denominations that adapt Christian belief to local tradition… “Their exact numbers are none too clear, since they are too busy baptizing newcomers to be counting them very precisely.” (p. 7).

African Church History: Ethiopia, Kongo

As promised/threatened, a couple of posts on Christianity in Africa.

The first thing I noticed is that it isn't something that began when American and European missionaries sat up and took notice of the place a couple centuries ago. Nope. Goes way back.

The Church in Ethiopia

The Ethiopian church, as ancient as any, “offers one of the most heroic success stories in Christianity,” but the West knows almost nothing of it since they (like the Armenians) were separate from European Christianity by differences over doctrine.

“The Ethiopian church has many aspects that would surprise a Westerner, including practices that stem from Judaism. Believers practice circumcision, some keep a Saturday Sabbath, and many churches feature an ark. Claiming Solomonic tradition, the kings practiced polygamy. We do not know whether early Ethiopians had been converted to Judaism before they found Christianity, or if (more likely), they just treated Old Testament models with much more reverence than would European Christians. As we will see, many modern-day African Christians likewise feel very comfortable with the world of the Old Testament, and try to revive ancient Hebrew customs – usually to the horror of European Christians.

“But for all the Ethiopian church’s quirks, it would be a daring outsider who would venture to suggest that the faith for which Ethiopians have struggled and died for over 1,700 years is anything less than a pure manifestation of the Christian tradition.”

Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p. 19

The Kingdom of Kongo (see its location here.)

Portuguese Catholics introduced Christianity to the West coast of Africa, and missionaries penetrated inland in several places. The king of “Kongo” was baptized in 1491. (Here's his picture, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

“Observers over the next two centuries remarked on how widely the Kongolese people knew and accepted Catholic Christianity, at least as thoroughly as their South American counterparts. This was no mere conversion of convenience, for the purpose of securing European guns and gold. One of the first Christian Kongo rulers, Mvemba Nzinga, has been described as ‘one of the greatest lay Christians in African church history.” (Jenkins, p. 29)

Christianity thoroughly penetrated the society, and by 1700 Kongolese Catholicism was already in its sixth generation. (p. 30)

In the early 1800s Protestants began mission work across Southern Africa, but in many cases these missionaries were “not so much breaking new ground as reopening ancient and quite familiar mines. In the 1880s, missionaries in the Kongo met with mass enthusiasm that would be difficult to explain if we did not realize that the people were rediscovering what had been the national religion only a century or so earlier.” (p. 34)

Hey, Did You Know?

Things like blogging and the social networking tools we use, they provide so much – perhaps too much – opportunity for “did you know?” and “hey, listen to this!” communication. It’s like sitting reading the paper with a family member or housemate. Do you find it annoying to have someone read the funnies to you, or quoting an odd headline or story that you might have already read, or are planning to? Or do you enjoy it?

How are the “did you know” style of blogging, facebooking, and “tweeting” the same, or different? Or does it depend on how engaging the blogger, facebooker, or tweeter may be, or how interested you are in the specific topic?

While I do share my own thoughts and experiences I often find myself quoting – you might say parroting – things I’ve picked up elsewhere. And I don’t know if those posts are as much of interest to my readers as they are to me.

Ah well, you’re still here, aren’t you? I don’t run into as many people who tell me “I love your blog!” and I don’t get many comments, as once I did. But still get as much traffic as ever. Well, I do like to think some of what I post is of use to the stranger who find it through a search engine. So I think I’ll keep up doing history and literature posts from time to time. They keep my brain working, too.

Africa Series

I have been toying with the idea of researching and writing a series of essays on missions in Africa. (How many may depend on the feedback or encouragement I get. Though, then again, it may not!) I had thought to start with the plucky Victorian women like those I wrote about who worked in China. I’ve read a few books now about Mary Slessor (Nigeria) and would like to read more about Lilias Trotter (Algeria). And I’ve got the materials I pulled together for teaching about David Livingstone (Zambia). Each one of these characters was something different from what you might expect.

But I’ve realized I don’t know very much about African Christianity, generally. I keep running into people who are interested in Africa, and/or who plan or yearn to go on a mission trip to some part of that continent. So I thought I’d like to be more knowledgeable than I am. They ask questions, or want background or feedback, and I don't know what to say. Over the next few weeks I'll share some interesting bits I’ve picked up in reading Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom.

Chaos in Kenya and the Psalms of David

My plan for our Missions Catalyst e-Magazine this week fell apart at the last minute. I had something I thought was going to work but when I sat down with tweezers and scalpel (so to speak) to prepare the piece for publication, I saw it was not usable after all.

So the search for a replacement was on, with just one day's notice. My trusty news editor, Pat, pointed me to the email account where she gets all her subscriptions, and among the items she's starred was one about 200 Kenyan children who are gathering for daily prayer meetings to lift up their country. Perfect. Here's an excerpt:

Ever since the children started praying together, the pastor says there have been no deaths, houses burned or even violence in their section of this slum. Adults recite this fact in amazement. The children, however, don't even mention it because it's exactly what they expected to happen.

"Pastor told us that there is power in prayer. He said we can change the country through prayer," 12-year-old Boniface explains. "So that is what we are doing, changing the country."

I decided to run it, and add a few other stories from Kenya to round out the edition (you can read the end result and click through to the sources here). Here's another part I liked...

RoxAnne Cox, serving on the SIM Sudan team based in Nairobi, wrote, "We grieve for friends like Lydia, who fled for her life from Eldoret. She and her husband have lost everything. We wept together as she shared their trauma."

"I wrote Psalm 27:13 on a card for her, and the other day Lydia told me, 'I have been clinging to the verse you gave me. I shared it with a Kenyan friend who was on the verge of suicide because of the chaos. It literally saved his life, giving him hope to go on.'"

Have you ever known what it is to have the scriptures pull you out of darkness like that? I have, though maybe not to that extreme. Anyway, I don't think I'll read Psalm 27 - long one of my favorites - without thinking of these brothers and sisters in Kenya.

Psalm 27

1 The LORD is my light and my salvation—
whom shall I fear?
The LORD is the stronghold of my life—
of whom shall I be afraid?

2 When evil men advance against me
to devour my flesh, ^[a]
when my enemies and my foes attack me,
they will stumble and fall.

3 Though an army besiege me,
my heart will not fear;
though war break out against me,
even then will I be confident.

4 One thing I ask of the LORD,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple.

5 For in the day of trouble
he will keep me safe in his dwelling;
he will hide me in the shelter of his tabernacle
and set me high upon a rock.

6 Then my head will be exalted
above the enemies who surround me;
at his tabernacle will I sacrifice with shouts of joy;
I will sing and make music to the LORD.

7 Hear my voice when I call, O LORD;
be merciful to me and answer me.

8 My heart says of you, "Seek his ^[b] face!"
Your face, LORD, I will seek.

9 Do not hide your face from me,
do not turn your servant away in anger;
you have been my helper.
Do not reject me or forsake me,
O God my Savior.

10 Though my father and mother forsake me,
the LORD will receive me.

11 Teach me your way, O LORD;
lead me in a straight path
because of my oppressors.

12 Do not turn me over to the desire of my foes,
for false witnesses rise up against me,
breathing out violence.

13 I am still confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the LORD
in the land of the living.

14 Wait for the LORD;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the LORD.