–– Seth Meyers
The audio version of this article is available here: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
Who can be a Christian without reading? Some could hear the Word and respond in faith, but without a broad base of careful readers, no church will endure in a culture. If a group were converted simply by listening, could they grow and reproduce on a national scale without first becoming very Bible-centered?
Paul told Timothy that pastors must give care to reading the Word both in public and private (1 Tim. 4:13 and 15). Individual believers must search the Scriptures to weigh a teacher’s words against the original standard (Acts 17:11). Because man does not live by bread alone, but by the words of God (Matt. 4:4), he must grow as a Christian until he is habitually literate.
However, only 50% of South Africa’s students matriculated in 2024, and even those students were allowed to pass with a 30% proficiency score. From my experience, few Tsongas or Vendas have a bookshelf in their homes. Libraries are not common, and books are rarely published or sold in the rural areas of Africa, and yet the rural areas make up the majority of Africa’s population.
Animism Opposes Literacy
The religion of animism has no absolute Spirit who controls the other countless spirits, and so absolute Truth is easily thrown to the side. Those who are bound by the useless way of life produced by this terrible religion need to jettison every weight and the sins that so easily entangled us when we were in darkness.
Lack of reading is just such a sin. Demons blocked men from recording their own names, details of battles, and social contracts because any movement toward recorded words would allow the Bible to take a foothold. God has given a Book, and demons don’t like it.
Missionaries Promote Literacy
Of the many benefits God mercifully brought to the lost nations through the missionary movement, reading, writing, and schools stand near the top. “As late as 1961, 68 percent of all the school children in Africa were still in mission schools” (Herbert Kane, A Concise History of the Christian World Mission, 141).
Schools are a good start, but missionaries must work one-on-one with new believers to help them learn the skill of meeting with an author’s mind through his books. The first and greatest need is to learn to read Scripture, but many of the same habits for the Best of Books work with other books as well.
The rural areas are in desperate need in Africa. Yet, to plant churches in those places, we must be prepared to train disciples in reading. This takes time because a missionary needs to become fluent in the writing and reading of the new Christian’s language, as well as his own. He then needs to spend time helping, reviewing, encouraging, correcting, and showing the joys of reading to the disciple he is making.
On the morning of the date I wrote this article, I spent an hour doing that in Jeremiah 25 with a Tsonga brother. As he prepared to leave, he asked if I possibly had another book he could try since he was nearly finished with The Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis. A few moments later, he walked out with Andrew Murray’s Humility. We have worked together for years, helping him learn to read, sometimes taking our entire meeting to do a single page. But the Sunday prior, he preached verse by verse from Hebrews 11:8-19 on the life and faith of Abraham.
If we would overturn the “stupid and foolish delusions of the nations” (all words taken directly from Jer. 10:2, 3, and 8 referring to cultures without God’s Word), then this is my advice.
- Recognise that problems with reading are owing primarily to false religion. The more we turn to undiluted Christianity, the more literate we become.
- Admit that a lack of reading is a serious error, not someone else’s fault, and it is certainly not a virtue.
- Prepare ourselves to make disciples in a winsome, patient, and personally humble way that brings these poor sinners into more and more frequent contact with written words.
If education means obtaining a certificate, then Africa has done it. But have certificates given us the results we want? Where are the Tswana-speaking churches sending Tswana-speaking missionaries to learn new languages and raise other language groups to real literacy with the Word of God? When the matter of literacy is scrutinised, it is one more evidence that we have very few Christian churches or disciples in the rural areas of Africa.