The Power of Preaching & the Printing Press: A Vision for Sub-Saharan Reformation
Prior to 1517 and the aftermath of the 95 Theses, the highlight of the church service was an arcane ritual in a language the people did not understand, performed by an individual who stood as the mediator between them and a God they could scarcely understand, at an altar that had displaced the pulpit as the centerpiece of congregational worship, and which was sometimes shrouded in the smoke of incense that simply underscored the obscure nature of it all.
The power was not in the Word of God. The power was in the holy mother church represented by the priest who mediated this power via ritual to supplicants who then had to do certain things to be right with God.
It might surprise you to learn that we in Sub-Saharan Africa face a strikingly similar situation in many of our churches. In order to be right with God, our people must go through an in-between “man of God” who acts as the mediator of power between the physical and spiritual realms. The African twist here, as others have noted, is that this “man of God” is patterned not according to what Paul had in mind in 2 Tim. 3:17 but rather after the traditional African witch doctor.
“Our people need to be taught that the power is in the Word of God. That the power is in the gospel; not power unto health and wealth but the power of God unto salvation.”
Many in Sub-Saharan Africa view life this way: they live in the physical world, above them in the spiritual realm are the recently departed ancestors, above these are good and evil spirits, and above these is God (or gods as the case might be). When things go wrong in the physical realm - drought, sickness, misfortune, barrenness, and so on - intervention must be sought from the spiritual realm via the witch doctor. One can never presume to individually transact with the spirits. It has to be through the witch doctor. The witch doctor is the man with the power. And now the baton has been wrested from him and gentrified by the emergence of this “man of God” in many a charismatic church.
Just like the pre-reformation church, preaching is not the highlight of the service in these churches. Sound doctrine is not the organizing principle of the church. The power is not in the Word of God. It is this mediator, this “man of God,” who takes center stage. He ‘casts out’ demons, ‘heals’ the sick, and promises spiritual intervention for every affliction plaguing his audience. All at a fee, of course.
We need a reformation in Sub-Saharan Africa. We need to throw out the “man of God” and bring the spotlight back to the Word of God. We need to do away with the shenanigans on Sunday morning and give the pulpit its rightful place. Sound doctrine must once again become the organizing principle of the church. This is the only way to turn the tide. Our people need to be taught that the power is in the Word of God. That the power is in the gospel; not power unto health and wealth but the power of God unto salvation.
But how do we do this?
I envision a two-pronged approach: the Printing Press and the Pulpit.
THE PRINTING PRESS
We need to produce sound theological resources that are accessible in terms of cost and language and that speak to this particular context. Our Christian bookstores are presently filled with Western texts which at worst teach the false gospel of health and wealth, and at best might still, at the point of application, not fully resonate with the social-religious paradigms of the Sub-Saharan African.
And yet as Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury opined in an interview, “The average Anglican is an African woman in her 30s living in sub-Sahara Africa on less than $4 a day.” Add to that the fact that there are more Anglicans in church on Sunday morning in Nigeria than in all the British Isles and North America combined and it will become inescapably clear that the face of Anglicanism is no longer English, just as the face of Islam is fast becoming non-Arabic.
It is therefore not audacious to state that Sub-Saharan Africa might very well be the future face of the Christian faith. If this be so, isn’t it time the church in Sub-Saharan Africa produced her own resources in her own languages just as they did in the Protestant Reformation - Luther in the German tongue and Tyndale in the English?
We shall work on the translation of the most helpful English resources as a starting point, but we must also have local authors in local languages across Sub-Saharan Africa as our goal.
Will you partner with us?
THE PULPIT
In various conferences and training events over the years I have personally come across many men who preach amiss not out of a desire to mislead but because they lack two things: training in expository preaching, and a local model of that form of preaching. All they know is what was modeled to them by men they respect who inducted them into ministry. I should know. Years ago, I was one such young man.
And in Sub-Saharan Africa we have young men aplenty. 80% of the Kenyan population is below the age of 35. The median age in Tanzania is 17. In Uganda, it is 15.9 years. Let that sink in. Is that not an opportunity?
Let the local church busy itself in campus ministry. Let the young men thus brought in see expository preaching modeled to them by the elders of the church. Let them be trained in it by local men using locally developed resources, and let them be sent out to plant churches across our lands to the glory of God. In the long term, this is the only way we shall rescue our people from the social-religious paradigms that have left them at the mercy of these spiritual quacks masquerading as “men of God.” We need to remove all distractions from the front of the church and put the pulpit back in its rightful place, just as they did in the Reformation. Indeed, Geneva was transformed not by Calvin’s earlier attempts at legislating morality but rather by the daily expositions he later on instituted in each of the city’s three churches.
For you in the West, missiologically speaking, you might want to consider supporting five such church planters for what it would cost you to send one missionary family from your church.
Will you partner with us?
Pastor Charles Karuri serves as the Neopolis Field Director for East Africa and pastors Crossway Baptist Church in Malindi, Kenya.
