The Institute of Evangelism

Every Church an Evangelizing Community!

Good Idea is our online magazine where you’ll find inspiration, tips, ideas, and stories of how God is working in other churches. Every month we offer one good idea to help churches grow in sharing the faith.

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Living Expressions of Church

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The people we met in the diocese of Bungoma are ready to hear the good news and, fortunately, there are over two hundred evangelists and seventy priests ready to share it. Two stops in the Bungoma diocese best represent my memories of evangelism in Kenya.

One day, we visited with a woman who lived in the midst of a cornfield. The road we walked along could not support car travel so the maize would be used for feeding people, but could not be transported or sold.

The woman was dressed in a torn shirt and kitanga (long skirt) and her three children varied in their approach to us between hiding behind their mother and walking up to touch us.

A pastoral visit in Bungoma generally follows the format of a song, a prayer for the home, introduction of the family and evangelists by way of testimony, closing prayer and a chorus. The difference in this woman’s home was that there were no chairs to sit on. The one-room hut had a small table and one chair. We stood within the dark and mud-caked walls as she shared that her husband had been sick and had gone away some time ago. She was grateful for our visit and insisted that we wait while she picked some corn for us to take with us.

This was a woman who did not attend church. She did not have the ability to get to a church, the “proper” clothes to wear or any money to contribute to the church. For her, as for many like her, the evangelist has become the church. The evangelists here are the living expressions of the community of the body of Christ.

A second visit helped me to fill out the vision of evangelistic goals in Bungoma. We traveled along a path in an area untouched by machines. A man in the village of five small mud huts had donated some of his land for the church. We stood in a ten by six-foot structure with two completed walls and poles holding up the grass roof. We prayed and gave thanks for the witness in the community. He then asked us to come to his home and pray for his wife. During prayers, she lay on the floor with her six-month old infant, not having the strength to get up.

This church community represents the goal of the evangelistic process: to engage people, turn them to Christ, develop their faith and then have them share in the responsibility of church building.

Changing an Evangelistic Culture

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In our theological training in Kenya, we try to cover evangelism in our curriculum, but we do not offer a course about evangelism as such. Rather, it is implied in various segments of different courses, especially in Christian education.

The reason for the lack of training goes back to the 1920’s and the East Africa revival. At that time, it was important not only to go to church but also to be able to testify about Christ and what Christ had done to you. It was also important to be able challenge someone else to accept the same Christ. As a result of this history, there is an assumption in the Kenyan church that you do not need formal training in order to evangelize. To evangelize is to tell people about Christ, a Christ whom you have experienced. So a priest should know that already. If you have received salvation, then you are able to talk about it. Conversely, if you need training, then maybe you do not really have faith!

This approach has its weaknesses, of course. I want to say that evangelism is a process. If someone comes to Christ instantly, praise the Lord, but if it takes a year, praise the Lord. People are not ready to say things like, “For ten years the Lord was working in me before I came to faith.” Ten years is too long: the Lord should work more quickly than that! Too often our students want to plant now, to grow now and to harvest now. To me, that is taking the place of the Lord! Tell people the message, certainly, but let the Lord work. Thus training should discuss what salvation is. What are the biblical models of salvation?

There is only one basic model for evangelism in Kenya, and that is the crusade model. Yet crusade evangelism is a time bomb. It has already become a joke. But it is so hard for our students to accept that. I tell them, Yes, that is one method, but can you also take the Jesus way, that one is as important as a hundred? How do you tell the students, what you are going to be doing in the parish is also a model of evangelism, you are also having an impact on people. We should be saying to our pastors that this model of daily, undramatic faithfulness is also biblical, and this model also has results.

The whole idea of a one-to-one discussion about faith-that is so difficult for them to take. When I tell the students not to “harass people for Christ”, I say why don’t we sit over a cup of tea and discuss some issues of faith? Maybe that is where we need to be training our evangelists.

I think we also need to provide more training for the laity rather than rely on these three years of ministerial training, because often the laity actually run the churches. So it is they who need the training. My question is how lay people can be empowered, how the evangelists can be equipped. In some Anglican circles, people have got into Theological Education by Extension (TEE) which works well when you have a class going and when you have people who can read. So that is part of the answer.

But there are lay evangelists who are not content to be lay evangelists. For them, ministry is a kind of back door to ordination. The Anglican hierarchy is still problematic. We still suffer from notions of who is really important: the lay woman is right at the bottom, then the lay man, then the evangelist, the deacon and the priest, and then the bishop above everybody. Biblical patriarchy, Western patriarchy and African patriarchy have formed a very solid rock! Even among those who are ordained, men and women are regarded differently. What defines them is not the training they have had, whether as priest or deacon or evangelist-it’s their gender. So there are systemic problems as well.

One Family, Many Faces – The Background of the Church in Kenya

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The 1998 Lambeth gathering of Anglican bishops from throughout the worldwide communion represented a watershed in leadership for the Anglican Church worldwide. Anyone who had previously failed to notice the prominence of the African Anglican Church in particular could no longer help but note that Anglicanism is, for the most part, a black, Third World religion. Something similar may be said about almost any major Christian denomination or confession.

Most of us are familiar with this observation, but the deeper question is less frequently asked: why are Africans continuing to come to Christ? what comparisons with Africa can cast light on our Canadian context? and, most appropriately for good idea!, what can we learn from the Anglican Church of Kenya’s deep commitment to conversion and evangelism? into what mutually enriching conversation about evangelistic theology and method can we enter?

A deep kinship

Much of traditional African culture centers on the reality of clan relations. In a comparable way, we can begin by observing that Wycliffe College is kin to the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) in that they share the same nineteenth century evangelical parentage, both being the offspring of the spirit and theology of the Church Missionary Society. Both assumed from their very conception the presence of episcopal ecclesial structures, but, equally, both assumed that these structures did not suffice in themselves, but were, rather, the site for evangelistic renewal. This deep kinship makes facile distinctions of “our” and “their” brands of the Christian faith impossible: go (as we did one Sunday) to a church built of mud and sticks in the remote hills of western Kenya with Bishop Wabukala (a Wycliffe grad himself) and listen to the Moody and Sankey hymns sung by the local choir, accompanied by African drums, and any easy divisions evaporate.

During our time in Kenya, we had an opportunity to meet with John Karanja, an Anglican priest and historian who teaches at the University of Nairobi. He has written insightfully about the process of conversion by which the first generation of Kenyan Christians came to faith a century ago. He describes how their decisions often involved, quite literally, a move from their homes, often in circumstances of social conflict, to the mission station. There they learned the basics of the faith and experienced Christian community.

The cost of commitment

Karanja goes on to point out, however, that the truly decisive moment came only when they then went back to their home village, most often for a traditional rite of passage. At these critical moments the recent convert had to decide what parts of the old rite were benign and observable for the sake of respecting one’s elders, and which parts, most notably sacrifice to the ancestors, were now impossible for a Christian. The painful moments of witness to one’s closest kin which ensued had the most dramatic evangelistic effect. Our circumstances are radically different at one level, but what “evangelism in context” means is in its essentials quite the same: to find the culturally appropriate, symbolically fraught, moments (often around initiation) where the cost and the claim of the Christian gospel can be made clear.

Go to almost any ACK Church, and you will be greeted with the words “Bwana asifiwe!” (“Praise the Lord!”) This sentence is a signal in the churches of East Africa that the speaker is “born-again,” a child of the East African revival, one of “the redeemed” (waliookoka). This movement rose up in the 1930’s, and though subsequently institutionalized, it has continued to characterize East African Anglican piety. Its trademarks were an emphasis on the atonement, a stress on holiness of life, mutual confession in small groups (all of which are reminiscent of its older cousin, Methodism), along with an emphasis on overcoming racial animosities. The revival hearkens back at once to the evangelical Keswick conferences in England and to the early days of Christian martyrdom in Uganda. It allowed East African Christians to overcome a sense of “limping between” the old life and the new, and to feel at home in their faith. It also led, wherever it sprouted, to growth in evangelism.

Again, though our situation and history are different, one cannot escape the close connection between making the Gospel contextual, vigor in evangelism, and revival. At the same time, the Revival tradition has its own problems: a tendency to make evangelism decision-oriented, conversion formulaic, and discipleship as shallow as it is wide. For East African Christians (as for us), the on-going task of catechism, of follow-up teaching, is an enduring one.

Mutuality in the Body of Christ

At once similar and so very different, the East African church and ours need one another. One reason is that their strengths are in many cases our greatest needs, as if they were providentially suited to address a word to us today. We need clearer contours to the new life, a greater willingness to witness publicly, a more intensely Scriptural focus, and the East African Church has all of these features in abundance. Amidst enormous trials in everyday life, East African Christians convey a powerful sense that, having been “washed in the blood,” nothing that befalls them can deflect them from their heavenly destination. To meet such a witness leaves one changed. To be sure, their Church too has its corruptions and its weaknesses. But in this most important of practices, in their desire to witness to the faith, who can doubt that God has given them to us at this time, in these concrete circumstances, as a means of renewal?

Visiting with Mercy

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During my day in Kenya, I spent two weeks with the pastor in the village of Kabuku. It happened to be at the time when the Diocese of Mount Kenya South was celebrating the one hundred-year anniversary of the arrival of the first Anglican missionaries in the area. The first station in Kikuyuland was founded in Kabete in 1900, and the people still refer to it as the mother church.

To kick off the mission, a luncheon was held in Kabete with representatives from each of the 82 parishes. Each parish then sent six missionaries to spread the Gospel in a parish unfamiliar to them. The theme of the week-long venture was John 1:1-13: “the light shines in the darkness.” From the words spoken at Kabete, I gathered that there was a general feeling that life is a struggle against evil and that one needs God’s grace to overcome it.

I was paired with a Christian woman named Mercy, and we went door to door in a small village. At one of the homes we attended, the people were busy working in the fields, with each family member contributing to the work effort. Once we introduced ourselves, however, they all put down their tools, shook our hands, and invited us to have a seat. Mercy read from the Gospel of John and then the family asked if they could say a prayer for me. They felt it an honour to pray for my safety while visiting their country and on my return flight to Canada. It was quite apparent that members of the Kenyan Church have a strong sense of fellowship in prayer, and they love to pray for one another.

Everyone we met that day happened to be a Christian, though from a number of denominations. Although I felt slightly uncomfortable going from home to home at first, all the people that we met opened their homes and hearts to us. It was quite the experience.

A Diocesan Vision

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It is not unusual for a Kenyan diocese to have a diocesan officer responsible for mission, evangelism and church planting. One such Director of Mission speaks of his vision and his personal experience.

The outreach program of this diocese aims at strengthening Christians into a hopeful, living relationship with God through Jesus. We preach and heal in order to seek a loving, caring and just society that is able to grow in faith and live life in its fullness.

We cannot carry out this program as it is supposed to be, however, without the ministry of lay people. So our goal is to recruit evangelists, lay readers, and church elders, and then to equip them, so that they in turn can train others to reach God’s people with good news. In fact, the coming of the Wycliffe students to help with our training has been a blessing to us, and, to judge from the evangelists’ comments, they see this kind of training as a great need. They wish we could have this training continue, to prepare them better to spread the good news.

One thing I understand to be different from Canada is the role of confirmation in our church’s life. With us, part of the work of evangelists is to visit congregations in order to discover those who were baptized as infants but may not have been in church since, and who are now approaching the age of twelve. Then the evangelist will talk with their parents, and bring the young person back to the church before the priest. Then they will teach them catechism, a period of teaching in which they learn to understand themselves and to know who Jesus is. Once he or she understands what is being taught, they will be given a chance to stand before the congregation and testify to their faith. Then they will be recommended for confirmation.

Let me end with a story. When I was vicar of a parish, I had a team of evangelists. We were going round making pastoral visits to the congregation, house to house. We came to one house where the man had never heard the gospel. He had been baptized as an adult during what we call a mass baptism, but after that he went away. He thought that once you are baptized, that’s enough. When we were going round with the team, we took time to share with him and to teach him the faith. Then he surprised us. He said, “I have never heard of this. I thought that you just had to be baptized, and then you can inherit God’s kingdom.” He had been baptized, but the way he was living was quite opposite from the way of a Christian.

So we taught him and he was so happy to commit his life to Jesus Christ. From that time on, he was very committed in the church. He left the kind of life he was living and his attitude was changed. He and his wife had been quarrelling with each other all the time, but he changed. To me that was quite practical! Husband and wife started a new life together as Christians. He was confirmed, and his wife testified, “You have been a blessing to us, especially to our house.” To me, that was really evangelism.

How the Church in Kenya is Growing

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When I was in my parish, I would sometimes look at the geography and say, “If I went and started a congregation in that locality, a number of Anglicans who live there and who want to come to church can actually be served better from there.” Most people are not readily mobile and cannot afford to spend money going far to church on a Sunday morning when they need it for Monday to take them to work. They want to go to church, but they would rather go to a next door church. So we find that if the church is right there, they will come, and, over time, they will become members.

As a result, we are doing quite a bit of church planting. In fact, at our last Synod in Nairobi we passed a motion stating that we do not have to have land or buildings in order to start a church. We can use a classroom in a school to begin our services, or indeed a cinema if it is what is available.

This brings in the question of visitation, and the readiness with which people visit one another’s homes. Africans say that if you welcome a man of God, he leaves a blessing behind. So for example, when I was working in a parish, I might visit a home, even if that person was not a member of my church. I would just say, “Well, I was passing by, and it’s nice to come and say hello to you people. I’m the minister in this particular local church, and just wanted to say hello and to pray for you.” They would say, “You’re welcome. Come have a seat, have a cup of tea, share with us the Word of God, pray with us.” I might do this two or three times, and after the third time I would see them in church. Before I realized it, they had become members. That happened to me quite a bit when I was in the parish.

On other occasions, I might just ask one of my parishioners in a particular area, “Would you kindly allow me to have some of your time, and you take me to your neighbours, even if they’re not our members, because they know you, and introduce me to them.” Sooner or later those neighbours will begin coming to your church.

Alternatively, parishioners will sometimes tell you, “I have a neighbour who doesn’t go to church and we think about him and his family a lot. They may have had some problems. Would you like to come and see them?” So the neighbour invites you on behalf of the other family. You go and visit, and after two or three times you find one member coming to church, then two of them come, then finally you find the whole family is there. 

Building Blocks for the Kingdom

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Prior to my trip to Kenya, I was told, “Africa will always be a part of you.” Only now do I realize how true this is.

I was part of a team of three sent to minister in the rural diocese of Bungoma. Our team conducted four seminars over a period of two weeks, teaching skills of sermon preparation to a total of 200 evangelists, virtually none of whom have had any theological training. I learned more than I taught and I received more than I gave. 

Most of all, I was struck by two things: the growth of the Kenyan church and the sense of community among Christians. I also came to the conviction that there is a direct relationship between these two.

Kenyan Christians take community very seriously. Indeed, their concept of community reminded me of the picture of the church in the New Testament. Kenyans have fellowship with one another regularly. For example, when a guest arrives at the home of a Kenyan Christian, the guest prays a blessing on the home, food is served, and they eat together. They then share what God is doing in their lives.

Pastors and lay leaders see community building as a major component in evangelism. Pastors place a high priority on visiting people. One pastor shared with me his personal philosophy of ministry. He pointed out that Christianity is grounded in relationship. In his context, it was through visiting that lasting relationships were formed and that people established relationships with the church and with the Lord.

This priest had been challenged to plant a church. So, starting with not a single member, he began to visit people and established relationships with them. He committed himself to meeting with them regularly, and the people began to come to his church. He now has a church of 150 members–in the space of three months. He has already established a core group of members to visit others and to further grow the church.

This sounds quite simple. Yet, what this pastor has done and continues to do is to model in his relationships the type of fellowship that God seeks to have with His people. Thus, through these encounters the church grows. As I look forward to beginning parish ministry, this priest’s example will stay with me, specially in terms of establishing relationships and building the community. Indeed, the whole Africa experience will always be part of me.

Equipping Others for Mission in the Inner City

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Available as a PDF This Article is from the Spring 2007 edition of good idea!, also available here in a fully formatted PDF file.

One thing a mission can provide is a new vision of ministry and how it can be carried on. An inner city mission in Edmonton sparked innovations that continue today.

A team of students from Wycliffe College spent an extended weekend at St. Faith’s in inner city Edmonton, infusing new life into the parish and surrounding community through music, storytelling and breaking bread.

St. Faith’s is characterised by its ministry to the poor, through Sunday services, community meals and the children’s program. This ministry of hospitality created a cornerstone for community, and the parish was ready to take the next step.

The mission team taught the parish basic tools on how to share their faith. They shared personal stories, introduced contemporary worship music, gave a reflection on Lord of the Rings for the teenagers, gathered people in home groups, and inspired the children with new songs and games. Much of the activity did not take place in the church: instead, the team went to where the community gathered—the youth centre, the hall and people’s homes. These simple but effective methods encouraged people to share their faith more openly. This creative approach opened a door for the people of St. Faith’s to be disciples—and to make disciples.

The parish experienced a wave of renewal as parishioners realised their own potential through using their gifts. The mission impacted the women’s ministry as one parishioner acted on her vision to create a women’s group which still flourishes today. The Women’s Fellowship Group, based on the mission model, reaches out to both the parish and community meeting monthly with testimony, music and a program, all centred around a meal. A monthly healing ministry began at a nearby women’s shelter using prayer, shared stories, and singing.

The home groups gave parishioners on the periphery an opportunity to become directly involved in both the parish and the community. The parish moved quickly from becoming a loosely knit assembly of individuals to a community investing in one another through true friendship and informal pastoral care.

The children’s program thrived on the changes from the mission, with several young ones asking to be baptised and to become servers in Sunday worship. Some children also brought their parents and grandparents to St. Faith’s. The parish implemented Youth Alpha for the teenagers, and the new music quickly became an integral part of the parish’s music ministry.

“We can do this!” was the voice of a growing lay leadership who began looking at intentional ways of implementing the parish mission statement: “Reaching out and growing in Christ’s love”. What the Wycliffe mission team offered was an experience of Spirit filled ministry to “… equip the saints for the work of ministry.” (Ephesians 4: 13)

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