Enterprising Africans

Festo Kivengere and Michael Cassidy are excited about Osborne, Kansas (population 2,500). There, last month, in a local Key 73 campaign, the two evangelists from Africa saw “almost a community-wide response” to the preaching of the Gospel. Night after night, crowds of 1,200 jammed the town’s largest building.

Large cities, too, are the scene of their turnabout in Christian ministry: a black Anglican bishop speaking to audiences of predominantly white Americans, and preaching beside him, a white lay preacher from South Africa, where apartheid still holds sway.

Bishop Kivengere, reputedly one of the outstanding black evangelists in Africa today, lives in Kabale, Uganda, and has been deeply involved in the so-called East Africa revival for nearly thirty years. He has teamed with Cassidy, who founded African Enterprise in Pasadena, California, since the two preached together in a citywide mission in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1969.

This October was the first time the pair had undertaken a community-wide ministry in the United States. Their itinerary includes Salinas, Pasadena, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara, California; St. Louis (where they are associate evangelists to Billy Graham in his November crusade); and Pittsburgh. Osborne, though, first turned them on.

“It was a reviving ministry to the church,” declared Cassidy in an interview in Salinas. “When you hit the nerve center, you see the whole community respond. Evangelists should think more of the forgotten places.” The Osborne invitation came from a minister friend of Kivengere’s who had known him while they were both at Pittsburgh Seminary in 1967.

A warm, open attitude prevailed at the Key 73 crusades in California, too. Meetings over four to six days included large rallies, informal sessions on college campuses, luncheon speeches to civic and service groups, pastors’ conferences, and neighborhood teas.

Kivengere, 53, and Cassidy, 36, have impressive credentials as evangelical spokesmen. They are well plugged into the political-racial scene in Africa. Interestingly, they first met in California while Cassidy, a native of Johannesburg, was a student at Fuller Seminary and Kivengere was on a solo preaching mission. Cassidy felt called to urban evangelism in Africa, earned an M.A. at Cambridge University, and found his call solidified at Fuller. His African Enterprise organization, now with eight team members, was formed in the summer of 1961, and missions are carried out throughout Africa.

Last March Cassidy organized the South African Congress on Mission and Evangelism (see April 13 issue, page 47), arranging for Billy Graham to address the congress and to conduct rallies in Durban and Johannesburg. Unprecedented racial breakthroughs occurred, and the pair see continuing fruits.

A free-lance evangelist until he joined African Enterprise in 1971, Bishop Festo, as he is called, interpreted for Graham throughout East Africa in 1960. He spoke at the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism and at the West African congress in 1968, and he represents Africa on the planning committee for the 1974 international congress to be held in Lausanne, Switzerland, next summer. In December, 1972, he was enthroned bishop of Kigezi in western Uganda. Later this month he will conduct a mission to the Episcopal diocese of Pittsburgh, which ordained him a deacon six years ago.

The African evangelists were asked about government and churches in their native land. Cassidy asserted that the South African situation is more fluid now than at any time in the past thirty years. “Political patterns are in flux,” he said. “For a long time they were absolutely rigid. There is some relaxing on a day-to-day basis of ‘petty apartheid.’ ”

His remarks corroborated an assessment in Time magazine (October 15) that “the granite-hard face of apartheid is cracking.” Such chinks as abandonment of the Job Reservation Act (which barred blacks from the best jobs) and recent integration of public-park benches, hotel elevators, buses, planes, and athletic events are hopeful signs, says Cassidy.

Some parishes of the mixing-nixing Dutch Reformed Church now permit multi-racial services, a change that may stem from the “total denominational sweep” that took place during the South African Congress on Mission and Evangelism, co-sponsored by African Enterprise and the South African Council of Churches (the first church council to back a regional congress). Only the largest wing of the Dutch Reformed Church and the Roman Catholic Church were not officially represented. Cassidy estimates that 55 per cent of the 700 delegates (they all stayed in a white South African hotel) were non-whites.

Pressing his observation that the pace of change is accelerating, Cassidy added that in June the Progressive political party also held an interracial congress in a white hotel in South Africa. “The personal and social dimensions of the Gospel really are coming together,” Cassidy said with a smile. “In South Africa, evangelicalism has tended to become an ecclesiastical ghetto unrelated to social and political issues of the land. And non-evangelical churches have tended to over-emphasize the social and political.… Now, each is realizing the importance of the other’s contributions.”

Another bright spot cited by Cassidy is the first prayer breakfast for the Kwa-Zulu cabinet and other Zulu political leaders, coordinated by an African Enterprise team member and Gatsha Butheleci, prime minister of Kwa-Zulu and a professing Christian.

Still, full equality for blacks is only a dream in South Africa. The government does the “nationalist jig,” said Cassidy, meaning leaders alternate between concessions and hard-line segregation—“one step forward, two steps backward.” And black power is definitely on the rise—a copy of the United States movement four or five years ago, Cassidy thinks. Ironically, black-power separatists fall into line with Prime Minister John Vorster’s “segregationist mentality.” Black powerists, however, have their eyes on full control.

Both South Africa, where 22 million persons live on land considerably larger than Texas but smaller than Alaska, and Uganda, about the size of Wyoming and with a population of about 10 million, are overwhemlingly “Christian.” In South Africa, 87 per cent are at least nominally Christian, according to Cassidy; in Uganda, 70 per cent, says Kivengere. Most Ugandan leaders are products of church mission schools. And, notes Kivengere, churches there “have been able to stand amid political confusion because there has been a movement of God in renewal for the past forty years.”

When Uganda won independence from British rule in 1962, churchmen feared Christianity would die out because the colonial missionaries were recalled. But, observes Kivengere, the opposite happened: “Propagation of Christianity has been done by the indigenous people themselves. We see more young people becoming educated evangelists. We see hunger for preaching the Gospel.”

Missions experts predict Africa will have 359 million Christians by 2000 A.D. If so, part of the credit will be due articulate, compassionate men of God like Kivengere and Cassidy.

Free To Preach

After three months in jail, Pastor Park Hyong Kyu of Seoul’s First Presbyterian Church, the world’s largest Presbyterian congregation, was freed, pending appeal of a two-year prison term on charges of political subversion.

Hooking The Neighbors

“The preacher says, ‘Witness,’ so we go out and do what he does—preach—and wonder why the fish don’t bite.” But Marilyn Kunz and Neighborhood Bible Studies co-founder Catherine Schell throw out a different hook. This fall they’ve been conducting workshops across the nation on how to bait it.

Preaching is only one way to communicate the Gospel, they note; fishers of men and women may also angle from small, nondenominational Bible discussion groups. Their lures may be coffee and rolls, baby sitters, the importance of Bible knowledge for total education, and freedom to disagree with or be ignorant of church doctrine.

“We have to get out of our spiritual ghettos and meet our neighbors and co-workers where they are,” Miss Kunz told a group in Ames, Iowa, last month. “It makes me nervous,” added the outspoken graduate of New York’s Biblical Seminary, “when someone says, ‘My neighbors know where I stand.’ What they know is that you’re a religious nut who goes to church a lot.”

After working with college and nursing students through Inter-Varsity and Nurses Christian Fellowship, Miss Kunz and Miss Schell, a nursing graduate of Columbia University-Presbyterian Hospital, concluded that mothers of young children generally attended church less and needed it more. In 1960 they began a Bible-study group for neighborhood women in posh Westchester County near New York City. Within a year a dozen groups involving men as well as women were discussing the Gospel of Mark, and the two instigators were kept busy in their Dobbs Ferry, New York, headquarters writing questions to guide study of other Scripture passages.

FOR CHRISTMAS

The United States will have a religious and a secular Christmas stamp this year. The religious stamp depicts a Madonna and Child by Raphael, from the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. The secular design is a “whimsical, old-fashioned Christmas tree” designed in needlepoint by American artist Dolli Tingle.

Both stamps will be printed in six colors. One billion copies of each will be issued, with the first day of sale November 7 at the National Gallery of Art.

GLENN EVERETT

Last year NBS sold 170,000 copies of the seventeen study guides now available, including one translated into Spanish by a Colombian nurse. Japanese, Vietnamese, Finnish, and German translations are in progress and English versions have been used as far away as Singapore and Viet Nam. Study groups meet in Canada as well as throughout the United States. Half a dozen part-time regional staffers assist leaders and help get groups started, but because of NBS’s unstructured approach virtually anyone can start a study group. Hence no one knows for sure how many groups have been organized. Some two hundred meet in the New York City area alone, seventy-five in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, region, seventy in Ann Arbor, Michigan, thirty-five in South Bend, Indiana. And a number of churches that have organized neighborhood study groups as part of Key 73 use the NBS guides.

But success is bad, Miss Kunz warned the workshop in Ames, where at least twenty groups meet. Neighborhood groups should be “lean and hungry”; groups that are too large prevent total participation. Educators now understand the value of discussion for learning, Miss Schell pointed out, but many churches continue to rely only on lecture methods, even for adults.

Always having a teacher “steals from people the joy of discovery,” they claimed. But they stress that home study does not replace church worship. Rather, they have found, people who study the Bible for themselves desire—and demand—sound biblical preaching.

In a sample study of Mark 2:1–12 Miss Schell demonstrated the role of an NBS leader (a different person each week). Using questions from the NBS study guide, she led lively discussions of the scene Mark described, what the facts he related mean, and their application to individuals in the group.

There are no pre-programmed answers. “Our questions are open-ended,” Miss Kunz said. “When people write asking for the answers, we refer them to the Bible. We really have the highest view of Scripture: we take what it says and refuse to rewrite it to make it palatable or to make it fit some topical arrangement.”

They have a high view of courtesy and sensitivity as well. “Have you ever been in a group where someone says, ‘Ah, that reminds me of Ezekiel 34:18’?” Miss Kunz asked. “I guarantee you that in Ames there are a hundred people who don’t know who or what Ezekiel is.” Resorting to “the Christian’s numbers racket” is “terribly rude. A non-Christian in that group is impressed only with what the Christian knows, not with who he knows.” To prevent that hole in the nets, and to avoid the dangers inherent in taking things out of context, NBS discussions are set up so as not to wander from the appointed passage.

Although NBS aims primarily at thinking but unchurched adults, a number of church groups and Sunday-school classes are using the guides. Several pastors attribute the strength of their churches to the NBS and its fishing methods. Once hooked, apparently, the neighbors stay hooked.

JANET ROHLER GREISCH

Religion At The Fair

Publishers from around the world swarmed to Germany in mid-October for the biggest trade event in their business: the Frankfurt Book Fair. More than 3,800 were there, 930 German (including 43 East German) and 2,884 non-German. Most German booksellers place their orders for the year at the fair; foreign publishers come not only to sell books but to sell and secure translation and other foreign rights.

Although West Germany, like the rest of the Continent, is highly secularized, evangelical books are increasingly in demand, according to publishers Ulrich Brockhaus of R. Brockhaus Verlag and Hans Steinacker of Aussaat Verlag. The titles offered this year show that German evangelicals still rely to a large extent on translations of British and American works; few evangelicals are writing in German.

Both in and outside the fair, several varieties of Marxist groups were selling literature and appealing for contributions to support “the workers” in Chile. Books on Hitler, both scholarly and fanciful ones, are the rage in West Germany this year, and a small number of new works express a measure of sympathy for the Nazi movement or individual leaders.

Challenging the Marxists while mimicking their style and some of their slogans, the Children of God actively sold their anti-Communist, anti-American, anti-church apocalyptic literature; they had a big display at the fair in hopes of finding commercial publishers for their tracts. The Evangelical Sisters of Mary from Darmstadt seemed to be the only group actively witnessing to the biblical gospel, though plenty of publishers sold evangelical literature in German and other languages.

Possev Verlag, a Frankfurt firm that specializes in publishing Christian and other non-Communist literature in Russian, reports it has produced approximately 100,000 Bibles in Eastern European languages so far this year, most of them on order from Underground Evangelism.

A spokesman for London’s Hodder and Stoughton publishing firm reported that sales of religious books in Great Britain were up 300 per cent over last year.

HAROLD O. J. BROWN

End Of State Church?

Church and state will be totally separate in West Germany within two decades, predicted Dr. W. M. Oesch, president of the non-state-supported Lutheran Theological Seminary in Oberursel, in an interview last month. He said he also expects an end to state support for faculties of theology in the universities.

The German government collects a controversial church tax—approximately 10 per cent of each person’s income tax. This is passed on to the church in which that person was baptized, provided it is one of the two main churches (state Protestant or Roman Catholic). This Kirchensteuer is the source of the tremendous wealth and financial power of the German churches. Although few attend their services, the German Protestant churches are able to give major support to the WCC, including its much-criticized grants to African guerrilla organizations.

Withdrawal of tax support will necessitate a radical change in the churches’ attitudes, said Oesch. He feels that at present pastors and administrators can virtually ignore the needs of their parishioners because of their financial security. Thanks to the state-church mentality, they think they are influencing society through its structures even if no one goes to church. But more and more citizens are filing the papers necessary to be taken off the churches’ books (and tax rolls).

GOLFING GUILTLESSLY

Now there’s a way to overcome that twinge of guilt from playing golf Sunday morning instead of attending the Sunday worship service: switch churches. There’s a Japanese sect gaining a few adherents on the West Coast, the Church of Perfect Liberty, that puts golf right on the fairway to heaven—or, at least, the tee to self-improvement. Says chief U. S. minister Koreaki Yano: “Players can learn the power of meditation and can eliminate bad ideas.”

Oesch, who was born in Colorado, has been working in Germany since the 1930s. He belongs to the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church (Selbständige Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche), formed last year by the merger of several independent Lutheran groups. It has 45,000 members in West Germany and is in fellowship with 15,000 independent Lutherans in East Germany. It also has 20,000 African and 3,000 European members in South Africa.

HAROLD O. J. BROWN

Nigeria: The New Brotherhood

A weird combination of the Christian faith and African religious rites has become popular in Nigeria’s South-East State. Known as the Brotherhood of the Cross and the Star, the movement is drawing followers from all denominations. It recently sent a young missionary “bishop” to organize a branch in the United States.

The brotherhood was described in a Toronto interview by visiting Presbyterian elder Chief Ntieyong Udo Akpan, 49, pro-chancellor and chairman of the governing council of the University of Nigeria, vice-president of the country’s Christian Council, and formerly holder of the highest rank in the Nigerian civil service as chief secretary of the national cabinet.

The founder of the new sect is a former Presbyterian, Orumba Orumba Obu, believed by the most devoted of his followers to be Christ in his second coming. All who become members of his brotherhood give a tenth of their income to him believing he will use their contributions to redeem the world. The Bible is read and studied, and Christian hymns are used in worship. Baptism by immersion is practiced (a Presbyterian minister recently quit his church in Calabar, joined the sect, and was rebaptized).

But Obu appeals to African tradition by admitting the existence of evil spirits and ghosts. The “charm” used against their power is belief in Christ. A sick person is under an evil spell, which is broken by the power of prayer rather than by a witch doctor. Reports of miraculous cures have brought crowds to his meetings. Married women who have been childless for years claim that after accepting the new faith they have become pregnant.

Chief Akpan points out that Africans are deeply religious by nature. Many believe there are numerous gods, tribal and others. But they acknowledge one supreme God, ruler of heaven and earth, called in Nigeria Abasi Ibom. They also believe in charms, sorceries, witchcraft, the power of evil spirits, and reincarnation. By pointing to the Bible and its mention of the plurality of the Godhead and the existence of evil spiritual beings, Obu is combining the old with the new in a way that appeals to thousands of Nigerians.

Chief Akpan, who has a degree in economics from the University of London, is the author of five books, including The Struggle For Secession, described as “the first authentic inside account of the Nigerian civil war.” He says the concept of chief is no longer that of a tribal or clan leader regarded with something akin to worship because he is believed to possess magical powers. Today he is the leader responsible for local development and community progress. This year Akpan was elected paramount chief of Ibiono Ibam, an area including 182 villages each with its own chief. He accepted the honor on condition that he be installed in a Christian service of worship rather than by the practice of pagan rites. He had his way.

DECOURCY H. RAYNER

Korea: Gis And Jesus

The revival movement in the Korean army continues. In two September mass baptism ceremonies a total of 3,400 were baptized. Nearly 150,000 soldiers have reportedly become Christians in the last two years, bringing to an estimated 35 per cent the number of believers among the troops.

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