Empowering Africa's Youth: The Future of Faith

One, we're in a continent or a country, in my case, Kenya is so young, it means the things that you taught or established a couple of decades ago, you need to go ahead and do those things all over again. So, there's no assuming the history of the church that you're in, where you have maybe taught the gospel, is the reality that you're currently facing. [00:03:57]

Because in many ways you have a totally brand-new crop of individuals in that congregation, or your city is now filled with a whole new population that you need to re-proclaim those truths to. It also means that the challenges that they're facing are very different. So, it's going to be younger people who are on social media, who are using their phones a whole lot more, who are a whole lot more aware of the things going on in the internet. [00:04:28]

And it is showing up amongst young people. There seems to be a disgruntled spirit with either attending a charge where it feels like it's all about politics, announcements take an hour, and it's all these wrangles in the congregation or just building projects. And people are a bit tired of that, and you can see a hunger in the young people for something more, something transcendent, if you so please. [00:07:05]

So, it's not unusual in our case to be invited to a university and for the young people to ask us to preach on the authority of Scripture, the sufficiency of Scripture, the inerrancy of Scripture. And we ask them, "Who told you about these things? Where did you hear about those words?" And for them to give you an answer that does not track back to either your ministry or the ministry of people that you know, but something that just seems to be a broad hungering for truth and for God Himself. [00:07:39]

I think to some extent it's because maybe the growth of the church ran past the attempts to equip the church that were currently existing. So, with an explosion in population growth, it simply means that there are far more people out there than there actually are institutions that are trying to either reach them or equip them. [00:09:42]

So, you'll find when it comes to books, for example, there's not much going on, on the continent that is doing two things – the producing of sound theological resources and the distribution of sound theological resources. So, if you come across a book on the continent that's by a Sinclair Ferguson, right, or one of the people that you guys will listen to you here, right, it's likely that that book was either put in a ship and brought in from the West to Africa or was put on a plane and flown over to the continent of Africa. [00:10:54]

So, the lack of indigenous ministries that are working to produce content amongst their own people and then distribute that content in local ways, just like putting that content on boda bodas, you don't have an Amazon, right, or a UPS, which I hear is hanging around here waiting to ship books for you back home. [00:11:42]

So, because of the lack of theological resources, it's meant that most pastors, even most ministries, most individuals who are trying to equip pastors are starved of the resources necessary to be able to properly equip those pastors, even something as basic as Bibles. Quite recently, we were talking to a very solid and sound ministry partner in the coastal part of our country, and with our training program which we highly subsidize to be able to train people for three dollars and fifty cents, he was telling me, "Ken, they can't pay that three dollars and fifty cents, because the guy that you're trying to get to do that is a guy who's trying to preach from the book of Exodus and can't because he doesn't have that book in his Bible." [00:12:39]

So, when you speak about a fifty percent on the continent who claim to be Christians, it looks different in different places. So, in our country specifically, there's almost eighty percent. It's a little less than eighty percent who will claim to be Christian. And what that will look like in the city is a very cultural Christianity, right? People who, their parents were reached by the missionaries, and let's say it was Anglican missionaries who reached them, and their parents attended the Anglican church, and now they are just committed to the Anglican church or the Baptist Church or the Presbyterian Church. [00:21:58]

And yet when we ask those questions about what is the gospel, you do not really get a biblical answer. So again, it's become the Christianity has become an identity that is, in many ways, apart from the Christ of the Scriptures. And even though in that context there's actually a lot of pain and suffering that they have experienced, the sad part is when you're articulating what the Bible teaches, you just hear very different answers. [00:24:37]

But over the next thirty years there will be an additional two billion souls that will be added to the planet. Over half of those will come from Africa. And so, Africa's population will double in the next thirty years. What that means is this, try to get your mind around it, that's like adding China today to Africa. All the people in China today, adding those to Africa. [00:26:55]

And another thing that I think we need to keep in front of us too, as we think about Africa, is also this idea of the Global South. And so, when we look to the Global South, one thing that we're seeing is that probably within the next ten to fifteen years, the Global South will eclipse the Global North, which the United States is part of, in terms of sending missionaries around the world. [00:27:42]