The significant and growing Christian presence in Africa, emphasizing that God has always had a presence and interest in the continent, evidenced by figures like the Ethiopian eunuch and early Church Fathers. It details current trends such as rapid population growth, economic underdevelopment, political instability, and the strong influence of Islam and communism. Despite these challenges, the sermon points to the encouraging growth of evangelical Christianity, particularly in urban centers, and shares inspiring stories of faith and perseverance from various regions like Nigeria, Chad, Angola, and Malawi, while also noting the critical need for more teachers of the Word of God.
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Thank you, choir. That was good. Keep up the good work. I'd like to read one verse or two from Acts chapter eight this evening. We're continuing our continental surveys of some of the major areas in the world, and tonight we're going to look at that most lovely of continent, Africa. Having spent twenty-five years there with my wife, among Zulu people, we have grown to love Africa a great deal. Acts eight, verse twenty sixth, and the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise and go toward the south, on the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is desert. The doctor is giving me an operation.
Thank you, doctor. And he arose and went, and behold, a man of Ethiopia and eunuch of great authority under Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of all her treasure. and had come to Jerusalem for to worship, was returning and sitting in his chariot, read Isaiah the prophet. And the Spirit of the Lord said unto Philip, Go near and join thyself to the chariot. Now, you know this incident very well, and I'm not going to take time to comment on it in particular tonight, except to remind you that even from New Testament times, God has taken an interest in Africa.
Here was this Ethiopian... a man of high position. He came because he was attracted by the Jewish knowledge of one God. He purchased a scroll of the book of Isaiah and was carrying it back to Africa when God met him in his need through the evangelist Philip and God saved him. Did you ever think of other people in the New Testament from Africa that God used in special places that the man who carried the cross of the Lord Jesus was Simon of Niger, probably an African. So here we have the first Gentile saved after the resurrection, before Cornelius, there is, the Ethiopian eunuch, that one of the elders responsible for the commendation of Paul and Barnabas, when they initially set out to go to Cyprus and then in what we call Central Turkey, today, one of those was an African of Niger or black.
And that the host country for some of the early great Christian scholarship happened in Africa, Clement, Tertullian, Augustine, Athanasius, all people from Africa. If you know about Church Fathers, you will recognize those names. Now I want us to look at for a few minutes this evening at Africa and some of the great things that are happening in that land, for it's a very, very interesting land indeed. One or two initial things, it covers something like one-fifth of all of the Earth's land area, and yet its population is only one-tenth of the world's population area.
That is, it has twenty percent of the land, but only ten percent of the people. That was very much different, wasn't it, than Asia, where the figures are ever so much bigger. Forty percent of the people in Africa are under fifteen years old. Population growth is expanding at an exceedingly rapid rate And therefore these young people that are growing up in Africa are the leaders of the future and need to be reached for the Lord Jesus. The economy of Africa is still largely agrarian. Africa, for all its size, twenty percent of the world's land area only produces two percent of the world's food.
Well, I'm not sure whether Woodhouse is jiggling with the platform. It's going to keep me tethered here or not. But we shall see. Twenty percent of the world's land area, two percent of the world's food is produced in Africa. It's a very underdeveloped continent. It has huge potential that is not being reached and not being even touched so far in the economic condition of the world. Its government... rule something like fifty-six countries. Of all the countries in Africa, many of them are fairly small, and there are fifty-six in all.
Almost all of them are dictatorships. That is, they have had one election once. From then, they will not have any more elections. If they do, it's like in a Russian election, where you have one party and one man to vote for, and so you can vote for him or not vote for him. In Russia, it's always a good idea to vote anyway. But makes no difference. Africa is not great on democracy. In fact, democracy is really not working anywhere in Africa at all. But we don't need to worry too much about that. There are something close to one thousand languages spoken in Africa. Some of them are just slightly different in terms of dialects.
Others of them are very, very different indeed. The religion of Africa looks something like my pie chart here. If you can see, something like forty-two percent of Africa is Muslim at the moment, and about thirty percent is still pagan or secular, largely pagan, meaning they still serve the old idol gods of old Africa. The other twenty-eight percent is supposedly Christian, divided into Catholic, Protestant, Coptic, and independent. The good news is that the growing part of this religious scene on the Christian side is that of the evangelical.
The evangelical growth in Africa is something that is very, very encouraging. And there are some that are projecting that as much as forty-five percent of Africa will be claiming to be Christian. I didn't say they were all born again, but at least claiming to be Christian by the end of this century. And the new members of these are largely born-again Christians, and we can be thankful for that. There are something like fifteen thousand Protestant missionaries today serving in Africa. almost one-third of them serve in two countries. Did you guess which two countries those are?
Well, I'll tell you, they're Nigeria and Zaire, the two most populous countries in Africa itself. And there are all kinds of things going on in Africa from a wide variety of means. I want you to look for a minute at some of the current trends that are going on in Africa today. or it makes a difference how we view the rest of the country or the rest of the continent. Some of the trends that are there. And the first one is that Islam is on the march. Islam is on the march. I don't know how well aware you are of the gains of Islam.
But in Al-Aham University in Cairo, there are at least four thousand Islamic people in training to be missionaries. Islam is a missionary religion and they are out to conquer Africa and are advancing in Africa faster than Christians are. The countries all across North Africa are all Muslims. You start with Egypt, you go across to Libya, you go across to Tunisia, you go across to Algeria, you go across to Morocco, you go down to Mauritania and Spanish Morocco, you get into Mali and Volta and Upper Volta, you come across northern Nigeria and the Chad and the Sudan, and these are largely Islamic countries.
And that embraces about half the land area of Africa today. And Islam is moving south fairly rapidly in Africa. Now, they are not stopped by what stopped evangelicals. because they do not demand so much personal conversion or conviction, but simply the head of a village which acknowledges that Islam is the way and begins the five-fold prayer during the day and will begin to wear a fez at the proper time, and then gets his fellow countrymen to follow him. That's about enough. But they do this. And of course, once they are under the sway of Islam, they become very, very difficult to reach as far as Christian missionary work goes.
Islam is on the march. Tribalism is very strong. There is a new tribal loyalty building up in Africa. Jealousy has almost to be seen to be believed. No government in Africa can bypass African tribalistic thinking. The things that divide the countries like Nigeria and Zaire and Zambia and Ghana and Chad and Central African Republic and country after country in Africa are these tribal loyalties. And no one will be loyal to anybody except those in their own tribe, speaking their own language.
And so Africa is hopelessly divided. You see, the European powers divided up Africa according to their own dictates and whims and where rivers happened to go or mountain ranges were or where their cartographers drew lines. It had nothing whatever to do with where tribes were. And so you find bits of tribes in several different countries and very little loyalty toward those countries and a great deal of loyalty toward their tribal connections. Then you have the growing communist influence, and that is becoming increasingly important. I'm slowly winning down here.
Let me show you a map here, and that will... Some of the countries in Africa where communism is growing are in the west coast of Africa, in the country of Angola, where you've seen a good deal of of communist activity there are now something like twenty five or thirty thousand Cuban soldiers and family settlers here there are three or four thousand East Germans in in Angola that's a man a lot of the machinery you may know that there's been a continual war for the last ten years across the southwest Africa Angola border here with South Africa backing forces from the south and Cuba and ultimately Russia backing the the communist back Angolan government.
There has been another force in this part of Angola called Unita. And it was those forces that captured the mission station where the two girls had to walk four hundred miles south and were flown out from the southern border of Angola down to Johannesburg and home just on the day before Christmas during this last year. But this is a largely... communist country. Mozambique on the other side of Africa is a largely communist country. Ethiopia is largely controlled by communists. And they are making great efforts in other parts of Africa to spread their influence as well.
The communist influence in Africa is based in Lusaka, in Zambia, the capital of Zambia. And there's a Russian there. His name is Vasily Solodovnikov, probably a man with a larger handle on Africa and its varied problems than any other man alive in the world today. And he's running the Russian team to try and influence various lands in Africa itself. South Africa, of course, is one of their goals, although they haven't made much specific headway down here yet at all. South Africa is rich. and powerful and strong. And whatever happens in the future, and it's likely to be a long, bloody guerrilla war with increasing intensity, certainly South Africa will not capitulate for a long, long time to come.
But there's growing communist influence all throughout this southern Africa area here. Lots of Russian teachers, for instance, in countries like Zambia. And Tanzania has a large red Chinese influence there. The Red Chinese built a railroad that connects Zambia with the port of Dar Salam over here. And so this growing communist influence is very interesting. Not only Ethiopia here and with a large Russian base off Eritrea here in northern Ethiopia, guess who controls the Red Sea really? And the traffic that flows through the Suez Canal.
And I'm sure you understand that. One of the reasons why they're so interested in South Africa is the Europe oil, eighty percent of it comes around the coast of Africa and goes up to Europe, comes twenty percent of our oil, but eighty percent of Europe does, comes around this coast, and the two points at which it can be stopped out of straight to Hormoz right here in the Persian Gulf, which is in the news today. And the South African coastline here, those big tankers, cannot go very far away from the coast. The weather is too rough out there. And so they have to stay in close here. And you can stand on the shore in South Africa any day of this week and watch lines of tankers on their way to take Europe's oil to them there.
And that's the strategic reason why they're interested in that part of the world. So there is a growing communist influence in Africa for their own political end. There is increasing urbanization, meaning city. When missionaries first went to Africa, there of course were no cities. We lived in Africa for twenty-five years, and for twenty of those years we worked in a city. A city as modern as Jacksonville, or Miami, or Chicago for that matter, Durban, South Africa, right over here. And it is in cities like this that the main action of Africa is going to take place.
We are generally taught to think in terms of mission stations way out in the bush. But that's not where the future of Africa lies. The future of Africa lies in its city. There is where education is. There is where the money is. There is where the political influence is. And there is where the influential... assemblies and churches of God's people are going to be, and they themselves will reach out. When Paul reached his part of the Roman Empire, he went after the large influential city. And those cities are beginning to appear, not only in South Africa, but right on up through.
You have the growth of new cities, the names of which you will hardly know, and yet they are growing at a rather rapid rate. in our day. Then you have growing political instability. The tribalism, the inexperience of African Africa in terms of politics, the power of the Western world to use African countries as pawns, and by the way Africans feel this very, very strongly. They feel that they're just being used by either eastern or western powers, and that people have come along and exploited Africa, which during colonial days was partly true.
But having exploited it, they feel that they have not had a chance to do things themselves, and they would like a chance to do that. And because of many of these factors, most of these countries are very unstable politically, and you'll find changes of government. you'll find coups occurring. There was one recently in Nigeria and there will be others before this year is out in different countries of Africa. This is happening on quite a regular basis. And then there is the Western economic imperialism. Oil companies, rubber companies, gold mining companies, diamond mining companies, shipping companies, You name it, big power from the West exploiting Africa, not for the altruistic good of the dear African people, but for the almighty dollar.
And while they sound so wonderful when we hear about them on their advertisements, for the most part they're getting out as much as possible and putting in as little as possible. And this has largely always been the case. So Africa has found itself caught in the middle. And they very much resent this. They resent the West and they resent the East as well. I'm not trying to tell you that communism is taking over. It isn't. I'm not trying to tell you that the West is gaining everything in Africa. It isn't either. But I am trying to tell you that for Africans in the future, there is a very unstable future coming.
And we need to be aware of this and to pray for... African people, specifically African Christians, that are in the land today. Now there are some religious trends there as well. One of them is a trend called black theology. Black theology is the idea that says something like this. We were living in our old pagan ways and we were dancing around the fires and beating our drums to our idol gods. and then along came Christian missionary. And they told us that if we only lifted our eyes upward and looked toward heaven, one day we would have a wonderful eternity with God in heaven.
And so they say, we lifted up our eyes, and we looked toward heaven. And they say, while we were lifting up our eyes, those same people came along, and they put their hands in our pockets, and they took our palm oil and our coconut and our minerals and the other things they could. And now they said, we're not going to lift up our eyes and look for the white man's God anymore. We're going to find our own. And we're not going to allow them to put their hands in our pockets anymore and take away our riches and goods. And we're going to develop a God of our own and a religion of our own and an economy of our own. And we're going to be African for Africa.
And then they get all kinds of offshoots of religious thinking that develop from this kind of background. But it's growing very rapidly. Another thing that's interesting in Africa that's growing is the growth of what they call independent churches. Meaning syncretistic or... those churches that have a little bit of Christianity and a little bit of old African idolatry and a great deal of emotional enthusiasm. And you put this mix together and you get these syncretistic religions.
And they're marked by robes, usually of bright colors, blue or green or red, and often crosses on them. It's marked by dance. for instance, all over southern Africa. And in the city of Durban, where we live, for instance, you go to almost any open spot, a vacant lot or somewhere, and you'll see a strange ring about fifteen feet across and about six inches deep and about a foot wide. And you'll wonder what sort of army ant made this kind of thing. But if you come on Sunday afternoon, you'll find people shuffling around in that ring, beating drums and beating one another on the back. and sometimes on the front and singing or hollering at the top of their voices and doing this for hours on end.
And that has to do with the emotional release of this kind of syncretistic independent church. Usually no gospel, no truth, no hope, a kind of emotional venting. And that's what they call a religious experience. But on top of all that, I want to tell you that the Gospel has been very active in Africa. If we were to go back in history for a little bit, you'll remember, I hope, that the first movement in modern missionary history really came from William Carey in seventeen ninety-two. And in seventeen ninety-two, William Carey tried to get his Baptist colleagues in England to to consider starting a missionary organization to send out missionaries.
They said, Mr. Carey, when God is interested in sending out missionaries, he'll do it without your help or mine. Be quiet. But Mr. Carey was not quiet. He ended up, of course, on getting his brother in to at least send him and to start the BMS or the Baptist Missionary Society. And he left for India in seventeen ninety-three. least the end of seventeen ninety two he arrived in seventeen ninety three very shortly after that the Church Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society and many other missionary societies in Britain and in Germany and in Holland began and they began sending missionaries not only to India but also to Africa and by the beginning of the nineteenth century you were beginning to have movement of missionaries moving up from the south and the first great movement into Africa came from some of the Dutch missionaries, later followed by the Scotsman Moffat, who went up to Botswana in this part of the country here.
And Moffat's son-in-law, David Livingston, who moved up into Central Africa and explored a lot of what we call Zambia and Tanzania and little bits of Zaire today. He was trying to open up Central Africa for the cause of Christ. There was another thrust from the east, from the west over here in Sierra Leone, and there was another thrust from the north in coming up the Nile River to try and reach into Central Africa this way. There was still another one from East Africa over here. We won't take time. But I would like to mention one. And that was a thrust of the Assembly Missionary Movement, which got going. fairly early.
The first assembly missionary went to Baghdad and later to India. Anthony and Aras Groves, you probably know. But by the time they got interested in Africa in the early-eighteenth-sixties, Fred Stanley Arnott set sail from Scotland with a small band and came to the country we call Angola today. And he began penetrating some of these lands. The first time he came, actually he did not go through Angola, but started out in this part of Africa. And by ox wagon and walking and so on, he walked up through South Africa and crossed Botswana and came into Zambia and part of Zaire, and then came out again.
He made something like seven different missionary journeys into Africa. A man of remarkable ability. and he managed to open up what was ultimately to be called the Beloved Strip, which stretched from Angola across Zambia and all the southern Zaire, and he hoped that there would be a whole band of mission stations right across Africa, all in this southern central part here. Well, his efforts were eminently successful. Dozens upon dozens of people went out first of all from England and Scotland, later on from Ireland, later on from the United States and Canada.
And these people have spread right across not only Angola but Zambia and the Katanga or the southern part of Zaire as well. And Arnott, who died in nineteen fourteen in Johannesburg down here, had managed to open up this section of Zambia. And even today, the by far and away the largest evangelical group right across this whole section of Africa are the assembly missionaries there. The English Baptist moved up the Congo River and started what is today an exceedingly extensive work there. And other groups began in different parts of Africa and have done a stellar job.
I want to remember that much of what they did in these days was done at tremendous cost. Of those that joined Arnott, And went in from West Africa here, or at least the western coast of Angola, into Zambia. Forty-five percent of them never came back. They lost their lives. Malaria, blackwater fever, other kinds of diseases and accidents and so on. Claimed the lives of people and of children and so on. Missions has never been done without cops. And so Africa was opened up and the voice of praise that goes from south right up to the line about where my pencil is here in Africa today reaches tens of thousands, yea, millions of people that call the name of the Lord Jesus Blessed and have come to know him as Savior.
But across here in Africa there's a huge stir for the gospel. country after country, excluding Egypt. You take all of Libya, all of Algeria, all of Tunisia, all of Morocco, all of Mauritania, all of Mali here, and across that whole section of Africa there, north of my temple. There are not seven hundred believers. Not seven hundred believers. Whole countries have not one single known believer. There is not one known Libyan converted believer in the country of Libya.
There are expatriate believers, but no Libyan. There's not one known believer in Mauritania. There is a tiny handful in Algeria. Assemblies have had work in Algeria for fifty years. There's one tiny little assembly, tiny, in the city of Algiers. and not much else at all. The North Africa mission has a very, very small work and have put great effort into Algeria as well with very small results. It's something similar in Morocco and in Tunisia and so on, so that there is still a great deal of Africa.
And some of this is desert, but you'd be surprised how many people live in the desert. I once had the privilege of driving all down through the desert through Algeria and Niger and across here and down to South Africa. Most interesting trip. And well worth the effort, ladies, as far as I'm concerned. I don't know that some of you would like that kind of life, but it was certainly informative and told us a great deal about what's happening in Africa. Now, maybe it would be interesting for you if I just told you in the last four or five or six minutes that we have a few little stories of some of the things some of the wonderful things that God has done in Africa just to to encourage you to encourage others who are working there I'm deliberately not named trying to name modern missionaries we have still several hundred missionaries working in Africa and if I named some I would not name your favorites perhaps and then you'd be mad at me and come rushing up and don't you know about my little niece don't you know about my nephew and so if I don't name any then you won't get mad at me you see so So let's see how wise I am.
But let's move off to the country of Nigeria, the country in the bite of Africa there. And I'm thinking during the Second World War, there was an English couple there by the name of Raymond and Lawrence Dibble. They'd begun working among Igala people in Nigeria way back in about the nineteen, in the nineteen twenties. And they'd begun to translate the New Testament. And by nineteen forty or forty one when the war was on and when they had to leave the the country there the New Testament had been complete but all there was left were six copies of mimeographs or duplicated copies of the New Testament and they left these with a very small struggling church among the Igala people there now there was still opposition from the people around about.
Some of the meeting places were burnt down, and leaders in the assemblies in six different villages were imprisoned, and they were charged with disobeying the laws of idol sacrifice and so on. And there was no missionary around, and now that the missionary was gone, the call came out, now that the white man has gone, get rid of the white man's book. But the people tenaciously said, we won't get rid of the white man's book, for it's not the white man's book. You see, it's not written in the white man's language. It's written in our language. This is Igala. And they got away with it this way. This is our book. This is God's voice to us. And so on. They were ordered to give up the book or be driven out of the village, but they did not.
And so they went and they spread out these copies. And they began to make handwritten copies. At least a hundred of those handwritten copies were found in five years' time or so. Some people learned whole books off by heart. But when the Dibbles came back after the war, there were at least fifty new assemblies started. And they were called people of the book. Because they had the word of God. And they allowed the word of God to work in their heart. And the backbone of the Agala work in Nigeria became very stable as a result of all that. Well...
Let me tell you another story, and this was in Chad. He's an African. His name is Dubari. And Dubari was a man who was an idol worshiper. He'd never heard anything else all his life. And one day, his idol was knocked over, and it broke. And so he decided to carve himself another one. And as he was carving, he began to think. And he thought, if these hands are carving this idol, these hands must be stronger or smarter or greater than the idol I'm carving. And then he thought again, if my head tells my hands what to do, then my head must be greater than my hands or the idol.
And he began thinking, if I can make an idol, and if I can think, maybe there's somebody greater than I am. And so it was that Dubari climbed into a tree in a village in Chad. every day for a small period and began calling out, If there's a God in heaven, I want to know who you are. Well, as God would have it, in his wonderful way, just during one of those times F.W. Rogers came through with a group of African believers. And the man was seen in the tree, and he was asked, What's he doing there? Oh, he's calling out because... he wants to know if there's a God he'd like to know him and so of course he came to know him and that man Dubai was not only a believer but an elder in one of the assemblies in the Chad for something like forty years before the Lord took him home God preparing the way one of the some of the more exciting things that have happened in recent years in Africa happened perhaps in the country of Angola that has been so war-torn for the last almost twenty years now but perhaps the most
respected missionary as far as I'm concerned in Africa is a man by the name of Crawford Allison he's with the Lord now he was Scottish about this high very thin perhaps weighed ninety pounds but a real man of God and he and several others including some that you would know managed to go up among the Shinji people in the northern part of Angola and preached the good news of the Lord Jesus for the first time. And they went back a couple of times a year, back and forth through very rough country to this area of Angola and spread the word. And the word began to multiply.
And it wasn't long before there were thousands of believers. towns all across that part of Angola among the Shinji people. And in the ebb and flow of the wars that have come across that country, many of these people have been murdered. Many of them have lost everything they've had. But the Church of Lord Jesus has gone on and grown. You'll have Mr. T. Ernest Wilson next week. He can tell you story after story of what's gone on in Angola. a wonderful man and a man that God has used in a very real way. One more story, and that takes us over to the little country of Malawi over here.
My wife and I are privileged to be in Malawi about three years ago. And the same man, Crawford Allison, later on because of the war, couldn't stay in Angola. He moved to Rhodesia, which is now called Zimbabwe. Then he learned after he was sixty years old, four new languages, just in order to keep himself up on things. Brilliant man. And in those four new languages, he began to reach out. One of them was Swana, down here in this country, and he began the Swana work that we have today. One of them was Shona, and he began the correspondence work in the Shona language.
One of them was Chichewa, and that's in Malawi. And he moved over into Malawi. He found one man that had received a tract and sent away to Cape Town where the tract was published in order to find out if he could learn more. Crawford Allison got a hold of that address, went all the way from Radisha over to Malawi. to find that that man had been reading his Bible, had gathered other people around him, and found the Lord Jesus as his Savior, and was anxious to grow. And as a result of that small beginning, there are today something over fifty assemblies established in Malawi. There never ever has been a missionary live in that land.
And as we thunked over the rocky roads or no roads, cross muddy streams and sandy plains and whatnot there in this little country of Malawi. To visit little groups of believers, it became our delight to minister to them by interpretation. Crawford Allison's son is now the business manager of Emmaus Bible School in Oak Park. And David Allison promised his father before his father died that he would do all he could to promote the work of God in Malawi there. And he himself made the trip out every other year or so to try and encourage believers in that land. You might pray for Malawi.
You might pray that God will send somebody out to help those believers. And if you're praying for Africa, I think the number one request, if you're praying for believers in Africa, is that God would raise up teachers of the Word of God. There are many excellent evangelists in Africa. There are not many good teachers of the Word of God. Pray that God might gift those who are gifted in teaching the Word of God to strengthen and stabilize the growing number of assemblies and evangelical groups all across Africa. For this is not only true in work in connection with our own fellowships, but all the evangelical fellowships right across Africa.
So pray that there may be teachers in all of Southern Africa. and pray that there may be a breakthrough in the Muslim parts of Africa, where there never ever has been any significant breakthrough into these people that live all through these desert regions in North Africa. Well, there's my time gone, and we'll just close in prayer. Shall we allow a moment? Our Father, we thank you tonight for the Lord Jesus. We thank you that His name has been spread through all the earth abroad. and that many would call him blessed because they know him as their savior from sin. And we pray, our Father, that even in our own prayer light for other believers, and particularly those in Africa, whom we're thinking this evening, that we might be faithful in upholding them before the throne of grace, and that you would be pleased to bless those people and to cause the church of the Lord Jesus to grow in a remarkable way.
And so we look to you for help. and blessing. Open our eyes toward great needs that still exist. And I'll commend ourselves in dear care for this evening. In Jesus' name, amen.