Excuse me if you’ve heard me saying this before. After ten years of blogging, I’m starting to repeat myself (it’s also a feature of my advanced years).
Over the last couple of days, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about links with churches in other parts of the world and the vast majority of those links are in East Africa. Now, I have nothing against East Africa; the bits I’ve seen are very pleasant and the people are very nice.
It’s also true that much of East Africa has a pleasant climate, is reletively peaceful and you can get away using English. It’s an ideal place for English churches to have partnerships. The problem is that East Africa also has a significant Christian population.
There are places in the world with far fewer Christians than Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi and so on, but few of these places have English churches reaching out to them. Where are the parishes and fellowships in our leafy suburbs who are reaching out to Tajikistan, Bhutan or Kuwait.
It’s tougher working in these places, the climate isn’t so good and the possibilities for partnership are more complex. So what?
As I say, sorry about banging on about the same thing so often, but I believe that this is important.
13 replies on “The Tough Places”
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Perhaps a broad generalisation or two here Eddie. 335 unreached people groups in East / Southern Africa, and even 30+ in “pleasant” Kenya (Joshua Project figures). Both climate and spiritual conflict real challenges particularly along coastal East Africa and into Horn.
Yes, there are established churches in most of East Africa but still a real need to challenge these churches to have a vision for taking the gospel to other ethnic groups … often their traditional enemies, with no shared cultural / spiritual values.
Yes it’s a generalisation, but that doesn’t mean it is not pointing to a truth. Most of the projects I come across in E Africa are not focusing on the unreached or training the local church to reach the unreached. I am aware that there are exceptions (and you know those better than I do). However, we are still faced with the fact that the majority of the British missionary force is engaged in supporting existing churches rather than reaching the unreached and a disproportionate amount of that effort is focused on a narrow geographical basis.
I’m not disagreeing with your premise Eddie, and it is worth repeating (!), but would underline my point that some of the “tough places” are actually in East Africa.
It may be that one doesn’t hear much about them in UK churches, but this is precisely because these are tough places, and publicity would only make the lives of those seeking to reach out to these peoples more difficult. How does one encourage prayer when one can’t talk freely about the spiritual realities?
I agree and the same is true for people in the Middle East and large parts of Asia.
Yes it’s a generalisation, but that doesn’t mean it is not pointing to a truth. Most of the projects I come across in E Africa are not focusing on the unreached or training the local church to reach the unreached. I am aware that there are exceptions (and you know those better than I do). However, we are still faced with the fact that the majority of the British missionary force is engaged in supporting existing churches rather than reaching the unreached and a disproportionate amount of that effort is focused on a narrow geographical basis.
When a national church (now THAT’s a broad generalisation!) is not a missionally engaged church, how is it placed to produce missionally engaged missionaries?
Churches in maintenance mode are supremely well equipped to send maintenance men, and are highly unlikely to fund and send missionally engaged missionaries because those guys are just seen as mavericks back home!
(Or summat)
Present company excepted o’course …
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Tim Tillinghast liked this on Facebook.
Too right. And forgive me too for repeating myself, but with so many parts of Europe that desperately need the gospel this just seems senseless.
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