–– Seth Meyers
The audio version of this article is available here: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
Have you ever met a man who preached the gospel of Jesus Christ and taught the Scriptures honestly and consistently on the Lord’s Day in one of Africa’s 2,000 black languages? Years ago I had the privilege of speaking to a black leader of an African denomination that had more than 400 churches, and he told me that the churches in his group are, generally speaking, all using English. At a different meeting with dozens of African pastors from several countries, I could not find a pastor ministering in a black language. If you have not met a man like this, that indicates relatively, that men are not commonly going to the rural areas.
To put it another way, how many churches using English support a missionary or have fellowship with a pastor in a rural area? Why are there so few faithful churches and missionaries using Kalanga in Zimbabwe, Sena in Mozambique, or Nsenga in Zambia? These languages include about 4 million people, which is more than the population of entire countries like Uruguay, Moldova, or Botswana.
Here are 4 reasons why not many men go to the rural areas.
- It is hard to get there.
One of the factors that I use in sketching the borders of rural areas is “tar roads.” Good roads allow trucks to bring commerce, wealth, and jobs. Bad roads or no roads cloister poor people in smaller populations and darkness. Some rural areas are in the mountains or on islands requiring extra work for missionaries.
- It is hard to live there.
Living includes buying. When products are available and cheap, men can more easily bring their wives and children. But it is hard to live in places where wealth has not raised the standard of living to within the range that a city-born Christian can flex. Could you be a pastor in a place that does not sell cement or cheese? Without cement, the houses of all your neighbours will be small and weak, and your house if it is to be strong must be built with imported materials making you stand out again. Without cheese, your daily custom of living will be reduced or only maintained as an expensive import. Cement and cheese are just two examples which could be replaced as examples by others such as antibiotics, computers, or brakes for a car. Godly Christians from a city lifestyle will find it hard to live in rural areas.
- It is hard to speak there.
There was no language school when I came to work with the Tsongas, but there were more helps than many languages have thanks to the work of the Swiss missionaries from a century ago. Nevertheless, learning to preach in Tsonga was one of the hardest things I have ever done. Even now, I can’t smoothly say “progressive sanctification” or “the three Persons share one essence” or “on every chain in Hell is stamped the word ‘forever’” [Spurgeon]. Some difficulties come from the wide gap between my mother tongue and this language, and some come from the vocabulary and syntax of Tsonga itself, but the bottom line is still there: Mastering an indigenous language so that you can teach verse-by-verse, understand and make jokes, and sympathize at a funeral is very hard.
- It is hard to evangelize there.
In rural areas, education is usually lower so many struggle to read. Books are not common in each house which makes expositional preaching and daily Bible reading a heavy task. The scarcity of jobs makes supporting your pastor seem hopeless. The men show very little interest because they do not want to stand out and begin a new way of life at their mature years. The women show interest in hopes of gaining healing through prayers. Since the gospel brings an entirely new way of life (2 Pet. 3:11), Biblical evangelism must change all the ways of paganism. And that is to leave the matter of Bible translation, songbook compilation, dictionary writing, and literacy classes if schools are not there yet. It is hard to evangelize everywhere but the rural areas have even more sticky challenges.
Conclusion
Previously, I attempted to put the rural areas in our focus. But simply seeing the need is not enough. There are at least 4 reasons that missionaries have not yet reached the northern section of Mangochi in Malawi with the Yao people. Those reasons could be summarized in this single word, “hard.”
There are godly preachers and missionaries in some rural places, but those few do not change the fact that there are proportionally few because it is profoundly hard. May some even today not find unusual strength for this hard task since the Captain of our Salvation has promised that He would go with us?