Walking the Tightrope
Africa’s future prospects, as far as they concern missionary sending, are best likened to a high wire act. Allow me to explain.
Let’s get an important issue off the table right from the start. Africa’s future prospects are not like a high wire act when it comes to the Church as a whole. An Africa-centric future for global Christianity is virtually an inevitability. It already has more Christians than any other region. The growth rates of Christian populations in Africa are faster than any other region as well. That is what happens when you combine high birth rates among confessing Christians with continued evangelism and outreach to non-Christians. A third factor is the retention of the younger generation of Christians – and in Africa, children of Christian parents are keeping the faith of the older generation at a notably high rate. So, barring massive and unforeseen developments, we should expect global Christianity to increasingly take on an African flavour.
But, as history shows, having a large and growing Church does not automatically translate into having a missional Church. It especially does not automatically result in sending missionaries. There have been many instances throughout history where Christianity grew large and influential within a culture while failing utterly to engage in cross-cultural mission. For a mission-sending movement to happen, the high wire act must be successful.
Therefore, if any African missionary sending movement is to thrive, there must be an effective mobilization of the Church. The catalytic impact of people such as Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola for European Catholic missionary sending, William Carey for the Brits, the Cambridge Seven and the Student Volunteer Movement (mainly but not exclusively) in the USA cannot be understated. These figures and movements ignited the imagination and the spirituality of Christianity across entire nations and regions. Who will be the catalytic figures in the African Church context that have the same impact? What is distinct about the African Church in the 21st Century that distinguishes the situation from mission movements of centuries past?
LEADERSHIP DYNAMICS
Socio-cultural realities in much of Africa end up reflected in how church life functions. Often referred to as “one man churches”, a significant proportion of congregations are controlled by a single, authoritative leader. Naturally, most of these are smaller churches started by a visionary individual. But on occasion, certain congregations rise to the top of the heap and become megachurches. The apostolic figure at the centre of the ministry becomes a spiritual father figure, sometimes to millions. He is a proxy for the tribal chieftain that was a part of African traditional life for millennia. This has, in some instances (such as with T.B. Joshua, Paul Nthengi Mackenzie, Timothy Omotoso, and many others), led to corruption, abuse, false teaching, a deeply compromised witness, or even horrific crimes.
Yet, even when a high-profile apostolic leader avoids these pitfalls and maintains inviolable integrity and biblically faithful teaching across long years of ministry, the sheer elevation of a single leader undermines the development of the type of spirituality needed to birth a missionary movement. “Big man syndrome” in Africa’s churches is capable of mass mobilization of its members, but it does not – and cannot – create an outward, centrifugal momentum that propels people away from the centre of spiritual power, nor can it convince them to invest their prayers, finances, and very lives into sowing the gospel in places not under the direct control of their “Daddy”.
One of the distinctives of most missionary sending movements is an inherent egalitarianism. God’s call is the determining factor in qualification, not social status. Women served as missionaries alongside men, often from contexts where they could never has served as ministers back home. Artisanship and blue-collar working class skills were often more valuable on the field than whatever it was that the academic or social elite could offer. If there was sufficient worth in the souls that missionary efforts were trying to save, then this presumed also that any believer wanting to serve in mission also had inherent value to their person. This is a clear contrast to the spiritual caste system that often ends up as the modus operandi for African (and other) apostolic structures. The great irony, of course, is that everything we can glean from actual biblical models shows the apostle not at the top of some organizational pyramid, but as the servant of all, enduring the worst of conditions, and functioning in radical, even revolutionary, models of teamwork and network.
MONEY MATTERS
As was shared with great clarity at MANI 2026, the African mission movement must also walk the tightrope when it comes to financial attitudes.
Africa itself, mind you, is not poor. The continent has vast riches; full of natural resources that the world needs - some renewable with good management, some not renewable but incredibly valuable. Were Africa’s wealth invested more effectively into African infrastructure, education, and health, we would see a completely different continent. Were even a small fraction of that wealth sown into the discipling of the body of Christ and the mobilization of a sending movement, the nations would be inundated with fervent African missionaries. The plunder of Africa – by colonial powers across the centuries, and then by its own corrupt leaders, and finally by multi-national corporations in collusion with said rulers – keeps it impoverished just as effectively as the debt traps that have been foisted upon the continent.
While those macro-economic realities shape the landscape, our primary concern here is the theological attitude of African Christians towards money. On the one hand, there are the crippling limitations of a poverty mindset, and on the other, there is the damaging influence of prosperity teaching. If the massive and growing African church is to sustain a missionary sending movement, it must steer clear of both Scylla and Charybdis.
The poverty mindset is the notion that there are not enough resources for everyone, and therefore we must act from the assumption of scarcity. It can also serve to create attitudes of inferiority, dependence, and even victimhood. In this mindset, resource-intensive activities like cross-cultural mission should be the remit of rich Western and East Asian Christians, not of those just trying to survive.
At the other extreme, the mindset of prosperity teaching can be sanctified selfishness. The underlying notion can be that the believer not only deserves more, but that God wants them to be rich – they just need to unlock the door keeping them from that destiny. It’s not baked into prosperity theology, but it seems to be common that those subscribing to such teaching tend not to have much, if any, emphasis on mission. This is modelled by the prosperity teachers themselves. How else can they prove the veracity of their teaching – and therefore their own anointedness – unless they display the wealth that God deigned to give them? Quietly giving it all away – as Jesus advised the rich young ruler – would undermine the whole exercise.
It will be a challenge, but not impossible, for the African Church to financially sustain their own missionary sending movement. The church will need to have some degree of material capacity to support it, which in part will be determined by economic developments at the macro scale in Africa. But it will also need to have the right attitude toward its finances – believing that God will replace all that they give away, and that God’s favour is best demonstrated by being a channel, not a vault. This also assumes that there will be sufficient numbers of people who feel called to be missionaries...
TAKE UP YOUR CROSS
The pitfalls of prosperity teaching reach beyond mere finances. It also impacts our very perception of what life should be about – success, achievement, comfort, and more. It is entirely understandable that African Christians, many of whom are emerging or have just emerged from crushing poverty, are not keen to abandon what stability they have won. It is only responsible that one’s own efforts and ambitions should be passed to the next generation by doing everything possible to give one’s children the best possible life, the best possible education, the best possible careers. Those who grew up with dirt floors, joblessness, constant battles with disease, and no assurance of food on the table, do not want their loved ones to endure such travails. This is a human, not an African, instinct.
Yet, for a sustained missionary movement to thrive, there must be an inter-generational sending dynamic. Children must be willing to say goodbye to their parents and grandparents. Parents must be willing to surrender ambitions for their children and give them over to God’s calling. The good life that many work so hard to obtain for themselves and their children might end up being invested in someone else’s eternity. The prime of your life can be wasted, in the world’s eyes, labouring for an invisible Kingdom with no visible fruit. When the future hopes of your whole extended family have been invested in your education in Europe or America (and hopefully your residence permit afterward), and then God calls you to work in the bush of northern Ghana or the slums of Nairobi, tough choices must be made. This dynamic, framed in the context of filial piety, is also a major mobilization challenge in the East Asian mission context.
Yes, when the teachings of Scripture become ingrained in an entire society, then that society will thrive in many ways, including in its education, economy, and socio-political stability. At the same time, the teachings of Jesus are hard to accept:
“Take up your cross and follow me.”
“Whoever wants to save his life will lose it.”
“Do not love the world or anything in the world.”
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”
The reality of the African mission field is often a harsh one. Life is hard, and frequently cut short. Disease, conflict, and disaster constantly loom. It should come as no surprise that many people—Africans included—feel quite at ease with God calling them to the affluent, secular, post-Christian cities of Western Europe, but hesitant to serve in Eastern Congo, Somalia, or Northern Nigeria. Yet these are precisely the places where Kingdom workers are needed most.
It is rightly said that what you value the most will be revealed by where you are willing to invest the most. Being and sending missionaries to the least evangelized parts of Africa will be a costly endeavour. Is it a cost that the African church will be willing to pay? For some, the answer is already an emphatic and demonstrable “YES”.
But for most Christians on the continent, and given that missionary sending movements are still in the process of forming, the answer to that question is still forthcoming.
PART TWO of this article is coming soon…
Jason Mandryk
https://lausanne.org/global-analysis/problem-false-prophets-africa#endnote-7
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/young-adults-around-the-world-are-less-religious-by-several-measures/
Photo by Gintel Gee https://unsplash.com/@gintel