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From The Times December 27, 2008 As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God 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. 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.
The Koh Kong team has slimmed down it’s members in country. Our teammates, James and Lynette and family, and Pat and Jeannie and family, are temporarily in the US on home assignment. Pat and Jeannie return first this coming January. This leaves Sret and Daah, our Cambodian teammates, and us pushing forward, waiting for our teammates to return. We have set up our work here expecting this time with half of our team in US. It is a common occurrence with missionaries; always coming and going. I anticipated these few months would be a time in which I could just maintain what was going on, and not push forward with any new endeavors. Courtney is pregnant, and busy with Weston (15 months old). I figured there would be needs for me to help her out at home. However, our Boss, the Lord, had other plans for me.
We have see a lot of results from our Evangelism Explosion seminar. Not in the way of many new believers, yet, but a fire among the believers trained to share the Gospel. They are hungry to get the message out. Especially in the neighboring village of Bak Kong. Bak Klong was the village I had mentioned in my previous post: “Swiper no Swiping.” Only one believer from that village was trained in EE, but what he had learned he shared with other believers there, and a new group has formed. This group, including well as Sret and myself, meet together on Friday afternoons. We have been practicing the things they learned in EE, and are even making new illustrations to use in sharing. They are boldly going out now, meeting with people they know already, sharing the Gospel.
Our plan is to quickly include any new believers in with our group. Going in with the prayer and singing together before we break up into smaller evangelism teams. We will include those new believers with the older, more experienced believers, in these smaller teams to get them exposure and experience in sharing. They will be mostly observing in the beginning, of course, later as they feel led, also participating in sharing.
My current thoughts are this: as the groups grow, we will split off in an organic fashion, half the group staying in the original Friday meeting, and the other half starting a new evangelism group. Bak Kong is big enough for maybe two or three teams, but there is room in the Koh Kong town and out lying villages for groups to go.
The second big task God has given since my teammates left is a young fellow by the name of Kamrint. I am hesitant in mentioning Kamrint to you, because he is a young man, without a family. What has been the case, in my experience here, is young men are very unreliable, and those who do not have family ties to a community are a nuisance, looking for action, and moving on. Yeah, I have been burned, but I can’t dismiss them all.
Kamrint was, at one time, such a young man as I previously mentioned. So much so, his own mom and dad have disowned him (only after they herd he became a Christian). Fortunately for Kamrint, he was allowed into the Youth With a Mission (YWAM): Discipleship Training school here in Cambodian and he got more excited about his faith. Somehow, WYAM decided to send Kamrint to Koh Kong for ministry experience at a small church I know. Kamrint had finished with his course of study with YWAM and had no where to go. So he came to me.
Not a penny to his name, and only the clothes on his back, he asked for our help in getting a job. We gave him work at the gym in the evenings. In the mornings he teaches English to some local kids. In the beginning he had five or six students. Now he has paying students, too many for him to keep his night job at the gym.
In his off time, Kamrint has started a ministry endeavor, on his own. He teaches soccer to fifty boys and Sunday, after bringing them to the local church. He needed only five soccer balls to get going. I am impressed.
The gym is also coming out of it’s slump. The rainy season is over, and more people are coming. I don’t have enough time to teach all the new people who are coming. I just go around and find out peoples names and answer short questions. I am glad to see more people coming. It was really quiet in there the last month.
Then Weston was sick with Roseola, only we didn’t know what it was. He just had a high fever, 103 degrees, for three days. As a new parent, I was surprised about how much stress a sick kid brought to me. We were worried, thinking he had Malaria or something, He is just a little guy, so such a high fever for so long…we weren’t sure how much he could take. But he is better now. His rash is completely gone.
So, that’s my October thus far, who knows what next week will hold?
We collect rain water off the roof for drinking and washing. We filter it as well. Most Cambodians do this as other water sources are expensive. In this video I clean out the water tank.
