Tag Archives: Seth Meyers

The Scandal of the African Church

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–– Seth Meyers

The audio version of this article is available here: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

The scandal of the African church is that there is not much of an African church. Most of the 54 countries in Africa claim to be Christian by more than 50% of their inhabitants. That works out to be nearly half of the 1.5 billion Africans on the continent. 

Number of Churches

Using South Africa as a test case, can we estimate the number of Christians in the country? If we estimated there were 50 Sola 5 churches with 200 members each in South Africa, that would be 10,000 members. That is more churches and more members in each church, but just as a thought experiment, let it stand. Now add in an estimated 50 assemblies from the Afrikaans Baptiste Kerke with 200 members each, and there is another 10,000.

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‘Whites Only’ in this Town—A Christian Response

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–– Seth Meyers

The audio version of this article is available here: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

A small town about 250 kilometers from Bloemfontein does not allow black people to live in it. Recently, an articulate black woman named Katlego discussed this phenomenon. Other men are trying to promote the idea of Afrikaner preservation as well. 

Do ethnic groups have a right to self-preservation? Can a people group self-segregate? Do they have a responsibility to integrate with all the people around them? Is it kind, loving, or Christian to block people out? Or is it good to make a special place where your values and heritage can be passed on? 

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Literacy, Reading, and Missions

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–– 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. 

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The Two Worlds in Africa

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–– Seth Meyers

The audio version of this article is available here: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Of the 80 members in the South African Tsonga churches, 15 members have full time jobs. Several of those 15 are informal jobs such as cleaning houses or selling snacks to school children, meaning that the pay is less than R2,000 ($110) per month or R66 ($3.70) per day. One man told me that he is 100% satisfied with the job he has had for a year because it pays R4,500 ($250) per month. Other members work from time to time doing hair, building, or cleaning when part time work presents itself. 

But that should be compared with a friend in Johannesburg South Africa who told me that it would be hard for a family to live with less than R30,000 ($1,666) per month. How could it be hard to live with 10 times more than other Christians are making? 

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Do African Churches Send Missionaries? 

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–– Seth Meyers

The audio version of this article is available here: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Mission boards

A mission board is an organization that gathers together numerous missionaries and helps them with technical details like visas, finances, and networks of like-minded churches. Churches in the USA have started numerous mission boards sending out hundreds and even thousands of missionaries from America to different nations of the world. 

Roughly 64% of Americans claim to be Christian today which represents about 200 million adults. It is difficult to get precise numbers, but an estimated 60,000 Bible-believing, full-time missionaries are currently living and serving in other countries having been sent from the US. 

200 million people sending 60,000 missionaries. 

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Why Don’t Men Go To the Rural Areas?

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–– 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. 

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Have We Looked at All the Fields? The Forgotten Majority: 800 Words for 800 Million

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–– Seth Meyers

Audio version of this article is available here: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

The population of the world now lives more in cities than in rural areas—approximately 57% to 43%. But that number is reversed for Africa where more than half still live in rural areas. 

A brief comparison of urban and rural areas

If the numbers are accurate, 1.4 billion people live in 54 countries on this continent meaning 800 million are in the rural areas. It is very difficult to determine what the word rural means precisely, but I have commonly used the tripartite metric of jobs, tar roads, and use of English. As these three become more rare, the area deserves the title rural more and more. 

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