The Church Can Help End The Phone-Based Childhood

by | Sep 13, 2024 | Uncategorized

As American kids head back to school this fall, many will do so with smartphones in hand. The average age at which American kids receive their first phone is just 11, and most public schools only ban nonacademic classroom phone use—and struggle to enforce even that.

We know this is a problem. Research from academics like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge continues to show American young people are in a mental health crisis, and there’s compelling evidence that the phone-based childhood is the leading cause. And the church is not an outlier here; if you’ve worked in youth ministry recently, you understand the challenges that come with a room full of teens who are chronically online. If you’re young yourself, you understand how tightly tech use is linked to belonging and how difficult it can be to pull your attention away from your own device out of fear that you may be missing out.

Christians have already begun to consider how churches can encourage safer digital media use in ministry and approach tech use as a matter for discipleship. But I want to recommend another response with a long history in the church: political discipleship.

If we believe that the gospel has the power to speak to our whole lives, we must recognize that this includes our digital lives, and not just individually but together: as families and congregations, yes, but also in politics. Political discipleship—how we follow God as people rooted in a certain time and place in a political community—can be part of how we love and serve God and neighbor in our digital age.

I understand why some Christians are wary of getting involved in politics and government, whether for theological or historical reasons or simply because of skepticism about the government’s ability to do anything productive. But if we have the opportunity to advocate for public policies that promote safety and flourishing for us and our neighbors, we must steward that responsibility well, like the servants in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. From time to time, we may have a duty to step into the role of advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves.

That particularly means children and teenagers whose families do not have the knowledge, resources, or wherewithal to make limiting screen time a priority. Low-income children are two to three times as likely as their peers to develop mental health conditions, and some research shows that they’re also more likely to spend a lot of time online. Phone-free public schools would provide at least some respite from intentionally addictive digital media. 

So how has the church historically engaged in political discipleship for the good of our neighbors? Christians who navigated the rapid technological, economic, and social changes of the Industrial Revolution provide examples we can learn from today.

The shift from agrarian to industrial economies in the US and UK brought with it new convenience and opportunities, but also new dangers for children. Sound familiar? It may be difficult for us to imagine now, but this was an era without mandatory schooling or many safety regulations. Children often worked alongside parents or other adults in fields or factories. 

Without the labor laws we now take for granted, children sometimes worked 16-hour days or longer. They had few breaks. Injuries were common, and no special care was taken for children. Even child prostitution was found in many workplaces, as historian Penelope Carson wrote for Christian History, and there “were no safety regulations, and financial penalties and beatings were imposed for the slightest slip or misdemeanor. Accidents and deaths were all too common.” Orphans were particularly vulnerable, with no guardians to intervene on their behalf.

But some Christians did intervene, playing an integral role in the passage of child labor laws on both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Oastler, a devout Methodist and abolitionist of the 19th century, began spreading public awareness once he learned how children were treated in British factories. Then, he sought legal solutions to ensure the protection of children. Oastler’s sometimes radical methods and rhetoric got him in trouble more than once, but his concern for the poor and victims of injustice helped pass the UK’s Factory Acts of 1833 and 1847, which limited work hours for women and children. 

Decades later, in the US, an Episcopalian priest named Edgar Gardner Murphy was concerned for the well-being of children working in mills. For years, he advocated for legislation that would shorten the hours children worked, raise the age of children working in factories and mines, and outlaw overnight work. Understanding that reforms were essential to protect children from employers and sometimes their own parents, he established the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) in 1904 to spread awareness and advance policy solutions. 

Just two years after the establishment of the NCLC, conversations about reforming child labor laws were elevated from a state to a federal level, and the committee succeeded in highlighting both the injustice of child labor and the benefits that public schooling would provide. Many parents and employers were content with the status quo, but photographs taken by Lewis W. Hine exposed the plight of children working in factories and mines, prompting legislative action. 

Smartphones don’t pose the same physical dangers as early industrial mines or cotton mills, but their risk for American children is real. So is Christians’ responsibility to intervene on vulnerable kids’ behalf by advocating for better public policy around tech in public schools. 

Of course, there’s no guarantee that our advocacy will succeed. History and current polls alike suggest that in spite of our best efforts, proposals to protect kids online have a high chance of failure. Many parents—and certainly many kids—would rather maintain the status quo. That possibility shouldn’t discourage us from trying.

In a speech at the International Christian Political Conference in 1977, Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon listed many bills he had championed or voted for because of his Christian faith. “As it happens,” he continued, “each of these proposals was defeated. Yet in each case, a witness was borne, I trust, to the goals which would move us in the direction of the kingdom, as I understand it.” Even if we don’t get the policies we want, we can still practice this kind of faithfulness in the public square. We can still bear witness to the hope we have in Christ, trusting that God will accomplish justice.

At a practical level, Christians—and especially pastors and other church leaders—should build relationships with school board members, state and local officials, and even members of Congress who can shape tech policies in our local schools. We can make the case to these leaders, just as Oastler did with British policymakers two centuries ago, that we have both the duty and ability to better protect vulnerable youth and families in our communities—to better love our neighbors.

Emily Crouch is a public policy and communications professional living and working in Alexandria, Virginia. She leads college student programming and the fellowship for early-career congressional leadership development at the Center for Public Justice. 

The post The Church Can Help End The Phone-Based Childhood appeared first on Christianity Today.

What It Takes to Plant Churches in Europe

by | Sep 12, 2024 | Uncategorized

The goal is audacious. But as far as James Davis, founder of the Global Church Network, is concerned, Christians need deadlines. Otherwise, they will never do what they need to do to fulfill the Great Commission.

His group gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, last September with 400 ministry leaders from across Europe who committed to raising up and equipping more than 100,000 new pastors in the next decade. The network plans to establish 39 hubs in Europe, with a goal of 442 more in the years to come, for training church planters, evangelists, and pastors to proclaim the gospel.

“A vision becomes a goal when it has a deadline,” Davis said at the event.

“So many Christian leaders today doubt their beliefs and believe their doubts. It is time for us to doubt our doubts and believe our beliefs. We will claim, climb, and conquer our Mount Everest, the Great Commission.”

Davis has a number of very motivated partners in this project, including the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. The network also counts The Wesleyan Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Foursquare Church, the Church of God in Christ, and OMF International (formerly Overseas Missionary Fellowship) as members of a broader coalition working to complete the Great Commission in the near future. If it turns out their European goal is a bit beyond reach, they will still undoubtedly do a lot between now and their deadline.

And the Global Church Network is not alone. In Germany, the Bund Freikirchlicher Pfingstgemeinden (Association of Free Church Pentecostals) has announced plans to plant 500 new churches by 2033. The group, celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2024, told CT it is currently planting new congregations at a rate of about seven per year. Raising up new pastors is key to its growth strategy. 

And the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland (Association of Free Evangelical Churches in Germany) has planted 200 churches in the past decade. It has grown to about 500 congregations with 42,000 members. The Free Evangelicals also have plans to launch 70 new churches by 2030, at a rate of 15 per year, and then start another 200 by 2040. 

“Goal setting is a bit of a thing in Europe,” said Stefan Paas, the J. H. Bavinck Chair for Missiology and Intercultural Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam and the author of Church Planting in the Secular West.

He’s not convinced it’s a good thing for Christian missions, though. In fact, he doesn’t think ambition, verve, and goal setting actually work.

Paas’s research shows that supply-side approaches—the idea that if you plant it, they will come—seem promising and often demonstrate early success, but the results mostly evaporate. While it is widely believed that planting new churches causes growth, he said, that’s not what the evidence shows.

“Yes, newer churches tend to draw in more people and more converts, but they also lose more,” Paas told CT. “There’s a backdoor dynamic where people come into newer churches but then leave.”

He examined the Free Evangelicals’ membership statistics from 2003 to 2017 and found that church plants often correlated with quick growth but then slow decline. 

“It’s one thing to draw people, and another thing to keep them,” he said. 

Part of the problem, according to Paas, is that the things that attract people to new churches, like great music, dynamic preaching, and a sense of real passion about something happening, don’t translate into deeper discipleship. People don’t get more involved or committed, and when church stops being new or exciting, they fade away. 

This is why church plants often seem very successful in urban contexts, where lots of new people arrive every day; it can ironically prove easier to attract new converts in deeply secular contexts, such as former Communist countries. But getting people to come in the front door is not as big of a challenge as connecting in deep, meaningful, and life-transforming ways. Many newcomers don’t last.

Paas says Christians should focus more on contextualizing, trying new things, and training pastors to build real relationships. While Davis and others argue ambition is necessary to mobilize people to evangelize the world, church plants in Europe succeed through experimentation and creativity, according to Paas.

“Experimental spaces and fresh expressions are much more important than traditional church plants,” he said. “Innovation is much more important than growth-driven entrepreneurship.”

One church doing this is in Eisenach, a small town with about 42,000 inhabitants in the eastern German state of Thuringia. Eisenach has historical ties to the Protestant Reformation—Martin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach both lived there, though at different times—but today about 70 percent of the population has no religious affiliation. They are, as the Germans say, konfessionslos (“without confession”).

“Belief is just not a thing here,” said pastor Cordula Lindörfer. “When Eisenachers are in trouble, or in crisis, they don’t think of God or the church. They never look to the supernatural. They just don’t see it as relevant.”

That can make planting a church rather tricky. So Lindörfer and her team, with the support of the Association of Free Evangelical Churches, decided not to start with a Gottesdienst (church service) but to focus first on three other G’s: gemeinschaft, geniessen, and gestatten—community, enjoyment, and permission.

At StartUp Church, their plant in Eisenach, the team invites community members to monthly brunches to discuss topics like whether “justice for all” is a utopian pipe dream or something that could be achieved. The church’s first event, back in 2020, was at a pub. They advertised it as a meetup to “discuss doubts, beliefs, talk about God and the world.”

Today, StartUp has a weekly gathering at a local bar named Cat’s Leap, and families socialize at a local park. 

At one recent gathering, people explored the different possible perspectives in the story Jesus told about workers in a vineyard all getting paid the same, even though they worked different amounts (Matt. 20:1–16). 

Lindörfer said most of the people who come to StartUp are between 30 and 40 years old. Her own job is less that of a typical pastor—she doesn’t do a lot of preaching and teaching—and more moderator and convener.

“Eisenachers are all ready for a conversation; they all have opinions and ideas,” she said. “For me it’s all about creating a space where they feel welcome, where people come to connect rather than compete.” 

Paas thinks this is probably the real future of church growth in secular Europe. Success will have less to do with big goals and more to do with the difficult ones, and it will focus on the daily work of making friends, building connections, showing people God’s love, and inviting them to imagine that Christian faith could be relevant to their lives. 

Anyone who thinks that church planting in Europe is going to be quick and easy should probably stay home, Paas told CT. “Otherwise, you’ll get disappointed; you may even lose your faith,” he said. 

Paas hasn’t lost his. 

When he surveys the mission work taking place across the continent, he finds hope in the promise, as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:18–31, that God uses foolish things to accomplish divine purposes. 

“I know this is God’s work,” he said. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.” 

Church Plant Struggles to Take Root in Liechtenstein

Driving south on European route 43, you might notice there are only five exits for the country of Liechtenstein. Or you might not notice, given how quickly the 24-kilometer-long German-speaking monarchy flies by. 

Sandwiched between Austria and Switzerland and surrounded by the Alps, Liechtenstein is one of the world’s smallest nations. It is also one of the richest. Liechtenstein’s gross domestic product is a staggering $197,000 per person. That’s more than twice the economic value produced in the United States every year and more than three times the value produced by Germany, which is considered Europe’s “economic powerhouse.”

So most people, if they think about Liechtenstein at all, don’t think of it as a mission field.

But most people are wrong, according to the father-son pastor team Paul and Mike Clark. Since June 2022, the Clarks have been trying to plant a church in Liechtenstein. 

“Here there is just as much need for the gospel as elsewhere,” son Mike Clark, 44, told CT on a walk through the capital of Vaduz, a town of about 6,000 people located down from the castle where the monarch, Prince Hans-Adam II, lives with his family.

About 70 percent of the 40,000 people are Roman Catholic. There are some small minorities of other religious groups—8 percent of the country identifies as Reformed Protestant and 6 percent as Muslim—but most people are counted as Catholic. 

“Don’t let the official statistics fool you,” Mike Clark said. “Only about 10 percent of these people are in church on any given Sunday.”

Convincing Liechtensteiners to consider going to church—and to an evangelical church at that—has proved to be quite challenging in a country defined by private capital and established Catholicism. Few people seem interested in conversations about faith. Few seem to feel they have spiritual needs. The idea of something different than nominal Catholicism is very foreign to them.

“We’ve tried just about everything to connect with people,” said Paul Clark, a 72-year-old American who has spent decades in Europe. “Setting up an informational table in Vaduz’s city center. Starting a gospel choir. And now launching an Alpha course in the summer,” which teaches the basics of Christianity.

The gospel choir was popular, but no one came back to the church to visit. Getting permits from city hall for the Alpha course demanded lots of time and energy, but the classes weren’t especially popular.

Maybe it will turn out that people are just not that interested in church. Currently, there are actually more casinos (seven) in Liechtenstein than non-Catholic congregations (five). There are only two evangelical churches: Free Evangelical Church in Schaan and Life Church Liechtenstein in Eschen, where the Clarks minister to a small group of people and dream of reaching many, many more. 

Life Church meets once a month in an office park on the outskirts of town. The church’s setup is simple: a few rows of plastic chairs, a drop-down screen with a background image of the Alps, a smattering of tabletops in the back, and a mix of homemade cakes and store-bought chips and guacamole for visitors to snack on. 

Paul Clark leads worship on acoustic guitar alongside a young man from Brazil playing cajon. One Sunday, about 25 people came to the 4 p.m. service. Most were from partner churches in eastern Switzerland and western Austria. They sang “10,000 Reasons” and “Goodness of God” in German. Paul reminded them what the church plant is all about. Quoting the German lyrics of “Shine Jesus Shine,” he prayed that Jesus would shine the light of his Father’s glory on Liechtenstein.

If numbers remain low, they might close by the end of 2024.

“In my experience, if a church isn’t gaining traction in the first couple of years, it won’t ever,” Paul Clark said. 

Church plants in Germany, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland show the challenges—and opportunities—for evangelicals in Europe.

He knows what he’s talking about. Paul Clark first came to Europe from Michigan in the 1970s with Teen Challenge. He met his wife, Mechthild, who was also working with Teen Challenge, in West Germany. In the past 50 years, the couple has helped establish six European churches in collaboration with the Association of Free Church Pentecostals. They’re in the German states of Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Thuringia.

Mike Clark followed in his parents’ footsteps and has helped start ministries in Missouri, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. 

Both the Clarks, however, say Liechtenstein may be the toughest place they’ve ever tried to tell people about Jesus. Planting a church has been harder here than anywhere else they’ve experienced.

“There’s a cost for following Christ here,” Mike Clark said. “It’s not your life, but it is a certain loss of anonymity and the social pressure that comes with saying, ‘I follow Jesus.’ ” 

But the father-son pair remain resolute. They believe—or maybe hope is a better word—that some hungry souls have questions about faith that they can’t explore in the context of the Catholic church. They want people in Liechtenstein to have a local evangelical option. Today, many would have to go out of the country for that.

In fact, the original idea for the plant emerged when visitors from Liechtenstein came to the Clarks’ more established church, FCG Bregenz (Free Christian Church Bregenz) in Austria. Similar to Life Church, FCG Bregenz operates out of an office park. It’s located in a former textile factory area on the shores of Lake Constance, in a building with a modern, postindustrial feel.

Heading over to Austria, as boundaries between some of the richest nations flitted by, Mike Clark noted, “Borders are no big deal when it comes to commerce in this part of the world.”

He added, “People shouldn’t have to cross borders to come to Christ.”

FCG Bregenz is very international, though, as are many evangelical churches in Europe. Austrians attend services, but so do people from Germany, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, as well as expats from Kenya, Syria, and the United States.

Mike Clark himself grew up in Germany; studied theology in the US; earned a doctorate in law in the Netherlands; and, with his wife, Laura, spent 15 years in church emergency and development aid work before feeling the call to plant a church in Austria and then another in Liechtenstein. 

The Clarks founded FCG Bregenz in 2016. Mike Clark, who was ordained in a Pentecostal church in 2004, has led it since 2020. 

He brings all of that experience to ministry and his cross-cultural identity comes through when he preaches. When he pops on stage, worshipers might think they are at church in the US. With his beard, skinny jeans, gray sweater, white tennis shoes, and iPad, “Pastor Mike” looks the part of a hip megachurch pastor. But then he starts preaching in excellent German. 

About 60 people attend his Austrian church on a given Sunday, and about that many watch online. According to Mike Clark, FCG Bregenz is one of several churches planted in the westernmost Austrian state of Vorarlberg in the past 10 years. Most of the churches in the network have fewer than 50 worshipers every Sunday, which makes FCG Bregenz a leader. The church has become a training ground for church planters looking to evangelize more Europeans.

Evert van de Poll, a Dutch missiologist, said Europe presents a particular challenge for evangelism. The weight of a cultural Christian heritage and a century of secularization means few people are seeking out churches. 

New forms of individualized spirituality can be quite popular, but that rarely translates into curiosity about spiritual experiences at an evangelical church.

Van de Poll said he has seen evangelicals successfully reach out to migrants and refugees in Europe. And some churches—in Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and even rich little Liechtenstein—are trying a more seeker-sensitive model, with contemporary worship, relevant preaching, and a message that the gospel matters today. 

But what works on one side of a European border, Van de Poll said, doesn’t necessarily work on the other. 

“You’d think that the basic principles are the same, but borders matter,” he said. “Pastors and missionaries need to appreciate Europe’s diversity and the dividing lines between different states; cultures; and their varying degrees of Protestant, Catholic, or secular influence.”

This may be the lesson the Clarks learn from Life Church in Liechtenstein. Despite their success in Austria and their varied international experience, nothing seems to be taking root in the affluent topology of Europe’s smallest German-speaking state.

Maybe next year, if the church can string things together that long, a few shoots of life will appear in
the soil.

But maybe not.

“If nothing comes from our efforts … we are probably going to close up shop,” Paul Clark said. “But God called us here, we know that.” 

Evangelicals Flourish in One Town in Switzerland

For a small town, Buchs has a surprising number of churches. The municipality on the eastern edge of Switzerland has a Roman Catholic community, of course, and a Swiss Protestant congregation, but it also has an Evangelical Alliance church, a Free Evangelical Church, a New Apostolic Church, an International Christian Fellowship, and the nondenominational GRACE.Church. 

In fact, there is about one evangelical congregation for every 1,000 people, which has earned Buchs the nickname “Canaan on the Rhine,” a promised land for Swiss evangelicals. 

Only about 2 percent of Switzerland identifies as evangelical. But in Buchs, for some reason, about 10 percent of people worship at an evangelical church.

Why is this town different?

The pastors leading churches in Buchs have a few theories. There may not be a sociological explanation, they say—the Holy Spirit works in ways beyond human comprehension. 

“There is something prophetic in this place,” Ben Stolz, pastor of GRACE.Church, told CT while sitting in a Buchs café drinking a cappuccino. “The town has a deep spiritual background.”

Ulrich Zwingli, the 16th-century Reformer, was born just outside of Buchs. The farmhouse where he was raised still serves as a place of pilgrimage and spiritual reflection.

More recently, the charismatic preacher Leo Bigger was born in Buchs. Raised a Catholic, he was a disco promoter and had his own rock band before becoming an evangelical and rising in the leadership of the International Christian Fellowship (ICF). Today he’s the pastor of the largest Protestant congregation in Switzerland, ICF Zurich, and the fellowship has grown to about 60 congregations in 13 countries. One of them is in Buchs, of course, led by wife-and-husband team Sarah and Werner Eggenberger.

Stolz’s church attracts about 150 people on an average Sunday, with another 30 or so checking in online. The nondenominational congregation is one of the largest in the city and is known for contemporary worship, a relaxed atmosphere, and topical sermons.

Stolz, who grew up in Buchs, describes it as a “modern,” “living” church. He dreams that one day Europe could be “dotted with vibrant, healthy communities” like GRACE.Church, “where people come to know Jesus Christ, experience healing, and thrive through their growing knowledge of the love and grace of our wonderful God.”

Some people, he knows, find that vision upsetting and even offensive. Several years ago, the Catholic theologian Günther Boss, just across the border in Liechtenstein, used GRACE.Church as an example of what was wrong with modern Christianity. He said its theology was thin, its sermons “repulsive,” and it was simultaneously too modern and too old-fashioned. 

“In their form they are very jazzed up, youthful,” Boss told the Liechtensteiner Vaterland, one of the country’s two daily newspapers. “But in their content they are reactionary and have very narrow moral ideas.”

Such criticisms are not uncommon in Europe. Free churches—those that operate without state-granted privileges—are often stigmatized as strange, antisocial sects. In Buchs, however, there are enough evangelicals that most people know one, and here attacks carry less weight than they might elsewhere. 

“We go to each other’s weddings, attend one another’s funerals, celebrate births and baptisms together,” Martin Frey, the pastor of an official, authorized Swiss Protestant church, told CT. “This helps educate people about the free churches and makes the ‘sect’ image seem outdated.” 

Frey considers Stolz a friend and likes to drink coffee with him at the café. He works with other evangelical pastors in town too. They have theological differences, of course, but he knows them, relates to them, and can see how invested they are in meeting Swiss residents’ spiritual needs. 

People in Buchs find something in an evangelical church, according to Frey, that they can’t find in more mainstream religious communities.

“To raise hands, to stand and sing, to proclaim in tongues is very, very far away from the typical Swiss mentality,” Frey said. “The Swiss tend to hold back.”

Yet some people in Buchs feel they’ve connected with God and other Christians only when they stop holding back—overcoming or at least overlooking their own instinctual restraint. 

Olivier Favre, a Reformed Baptist pastor and sociologist who coedited Phänomen Freikirchen (Free Church Phenomenon), argues this is the key to evangelicals’ success. They understand human needs. They show people how to connect to each other and have a relationship with the divine. 

“In our very individualized society, where many are alone, the idea of a personal relationship with God, belief that he answers prayers, that he can heal the sick and effect miracles, meets a spiritual need,” Favre writes.

In this way, of course, Buchs is no different than other European countries. The town may have a unique history, a sense of spirituality, and enough evangelicals that they’re not seen as odd and marginal as they are in other places. But still, people are people. Europe is Europe. And efforts to evangelize are all pretty similar. 

At a recent vision Sunday at GRACE.Church, Stolz laid out a plan to grow the church. The formula is friendship and faithful Christian witness, he told CT. He hopes this will soon lead to the construction of a new building in which to worship, making one of the many churches in Buchs a little more visible. 

He wants GRACE.Church to be like a light to people in the dark. Or a warm fire for those who are cold.

“People are lonely,” Stolz said, “and the churches here in Buchs are here to help build connections.” 

Ken Chitwood is CT’s European correspondent.

The post What It Takes to Plant Churches in Europe appeared first on Christianity Today.

The Uneasy Conscience of Christian Nationalism

by | Sep 12, 2024 | Uncategorized

Too many of us assume that Christian nationalism promises a road map to a New Jerusalem or a New Rome or a New Constantinople. That’s understandable, given the triumphal and martial rhetoric of would-be theocrats. But what if the actual road map is to none of those places? 

What if the new Christian nationalism wants to take us not to the rebuilt shining city on a hill of Cotton Mather’s Massachusetts Bay Colony but just to double coupon night at the Bellagio in Las Vegas? 

Journalist Jonathan V. Last noted years ago, when staying at a Vegas resort and casino, how momentarily moved he was by the hotel’s commitment to help their guests save the earth. Last noted the card on his bathroom sink asking guests to conserve water by using each towel multiple times. On the bedside table, he saw another card asking visitors to safeguard natural resources by opting not to have bed linens changed. 

Then he looked out at the front of the hotel, where two massive fountains stood “spewing precious water into the arid, desert air.” That’s when, he wrote, “it struck me that the … concern for the environment might simply be an attempt to save on laundry costs.”

The stakes aren’t very high at one Vegas hotel, but it’s a deal that reveals an impulse in fallen human nature, in a way that’s a win for all the parties involved. The guests get to feel like they’re doing something virtuous, and the house gets to keep more of the chips. It’s a microcosm of what Martin Luther identified as the psychological game behind Johann Tetzel and others selling indulgences to medieval Christians. 

Paying the money helped ease the consciences of those fearful of purgatory while at the same time helping to raise money for building St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The indulgence hawkers could tell themselves they weren’t in the business of nonprofit fundraising or commercial real estate but in the mission of saving souls. And the indulgence buyers could reassure themselves with penance, which was, and is, much easier than repentance. 

Tossing a coin is easier than carrying a cross. Actual contrition, confession, and surrender are intangible, internal, spiritual realities that require entrusting one’s forgiveness to the promise of an invisible God. Indulgences, on the other hand, come with receipts. 

For Luther, the crisis of it all was not just that the church was corrupt but, more importantly, that the reassurance bought with this type of indulgence actually kept people from seeing what really can overcome sin and wipe away guilt—personal faith in Christ and him crucified. 

“Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter’s church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep,” Luther asserted in the 50th of his theses. 

In our time, the indulgences are more akin to a hotel’s green initiative than to the construction of St. Peter’s. The new Christian nationalism—like the withered old state churches of Europe and the secularized old social gospels of mainline Protestantism—defines Christianity in terms of reforming external structures rather than of regenerating internal psyches. Unlike the older theological liberalisms, though, Christian nationalists seek solidarity not in the actual mitigating of human suffering but in the mostly symbolic boundary markers of taking the right amount of theatrical umbrage at culture war outrages, at having the right kind of enemies, at “owning the libs.” 

The uneasy conscience of Christian nationalism pretends that our problem is the opposite of what Jesus told us: that by calling ourselves an orchard we can bring fruit from diseased trees (Matt. 7:15–20), that by controlling what is on the outside of us we can renew what is inside (Matt. 12:33–37). 

This message is popular in all times; prosperity gospels and fertility religions always are. An extrinsic religion enables people to claim Christianity without following Christ and enables powerless, prayerless, porn-addicted culture warriors to convince themselves that they are goose-stepping to heaven. By assuaging our guilt with our political choices, we can convince ourselves that what we find in our new Bethel is Jacob’s ladder to heaven when it is really just Jeroboam’s calf of gold (1 Kings 12:25–31). 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Philip Yancey, a longtime columnist here at CT, along with other Christ-ians, met with the disillusioned Communists of the regime, including the propogandists at the Kremlin newspaper Pravda. The Bolshevik experiment, of course, had subordinated personal ethics, much less personal faith, to the collective cause—to the supposed “worker’s paradise” of the future, which would justify every lie told, every dissident exiled, every life extinguished along the way. 

What Yancey found most poignant was not just that Soviet communism had failed, but the particular way it failed. As he mused: 

Humans dream of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, wrote T. S. Eliot, who saw many of his friends embrace the dream of Marxism. “But the man that is will shadow the man that pretends to be.” What we were hearing from Soviet leaders, and the KGB, and now Pravda, was that the Soviet Union ended up with the worst of both: a society far from perfect, and a people who had forgotten how to be good. 

We should not pretend that we could not see the same thing with a lifeless, politicized dystopian Christ-ian nationalism as we saw with a hollowed-out Soviet empire. What a tragic end it would be to wind up with a society as debauched as ever and a people who have forgotten how to be saved. 

The way forward is what it’s always been. As Luther said in his Heidelberg Disputation, “The theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. The theologian of the cross calls a thing what it is.” Sometimes that means nailing a word or two to the castle door. Sometimes that might mean letting goods and kindred go. The whole of the Christian life is about repentance. That repentance must be about the renewing of our minds and the renovation of our hearts, not just the laundering of consciences that are no longer bound to the Word of God. 

Now, as always, every day is Reformation Day. 

Russell Moore is CT’s editor in chief.

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Called to Kenya’s Chinatowns

by | Sep 12, 2024 | Uncategorized

Daive Njuguna’s first Chinese class at the University of Nairobi was the most fun he’d ever had in college. The teacher was a jovial young woman from China who cheerfully corrected her students as they struggled to pronounce ni hao (hello) and qing (please) and xie xie (thank you). Njuguna laughed throughout the class.

He was only vaguely aware that the Chinese government was funding the course via the Confucius Institute, part of Beijing’s “cultural soft power”  offensive to broaden its global influence. 

The videos that Njuguna’s teacher played in class were designed to impress students with the superiority of the Chinese way. But what Njuguna thought as he watched those videos was These people really need the gospel.

That was in 2018, a few months after Njuguna had heard on the radio that the Chinese government persecutes Christians and had begun praying for them. He knew there was a growing, if largely out-of-sight, Chinese population in Kenya. 

So he also prayed, “Lord, I want to get more involved with the Chinese. But where are they?”

Within the past decade, thousands of Chinese workers have migrated to Kenya. They have built expressways and railways and condos and malls; opened supermarkets and eateries, selling tongue-numbing Sichuan pork and grilled lamb skewers; and established themselves as hawkers of toys and electronics at one of Nairobi’s largest open-air markets.

Kenya keeps no official count of its Chinese population, though estimates range from 20,000 to 40,000 to 50,000. According to the Joshua Project, about 4 percent of them identify as Christian, which makes them one of the most unreached communities in a country where roughly 85 percent of people claim the Christian faith. 

Another student, Wanjiku Maina, also had trouble meeting Chinese people, even when she went looking for them on college campuses. In 2016, Maina had written in a notebook, I would like to reach out to Asians, and use language teaching as a platform. At the time, she was doing a year-long internship with the Mission Campaign Network, a local organization that mobilizes Africans, and she had had her heart set on becoming a missionary in Vietnam. But during one of her classes, a presenter suggested there were unreached people in Kenya, maybe even among her neighbors.

That switched Maina’s perspective. She started praying, “God, is Vietnam something you placed in my heart? Or maybe I just want to go abroad?” 

Meanwhile, she was reading the news about China’s mega construction projects in Africa and was amazed to see Chinese companies operating, of all places, in her grandmother’s rural village, building a dam. She saw memes about Chinese people too. Dogs are disappearing, one joke went, implying that they eat canines. Maina didn’t pay those stereotypes any mind. Her prayers turned toward her country’s Chinese community.

It didn’t make sense to Maina and Njuguna that they should feel a special affection for Chinese people. They didn’t know the language or the culture. They didn’t have a single Chinese confidant. Many Kenyans do business with Chinese companies and labor in their factories, but the two communities rarely mingle. At work and in public, they eat separate meals at separate tables. It’s a widely accepted fact, I was told when I visited Kenya in 2023, that Kenyans and Chinese are not friends. 

Kenya’s growing Chinese immigrant population ranges from an estimated 20,000 to 50,000.

By many estimates, China has exported more than a million of its citizens to the African continent—traders, managers, farmers, doctors, and restaurateurs who are spread from Mozambique to Senegal to Liberia. If you want to make big money fast, the thinking in China goes, set sail to Africa. 

China has touted itself and its people as better partners for Africa than paternalistic Westerners and their one-way charity. Whereas Americans and Europeans sought to conquer and ravage Africa, the Chinese government claims, it seeks “partnership” and “cooperation” based on “equality and mutual benefit.”

Still, many Africans, remembering the colonial days, have watched the influx of fortune-seekers with unease. The Asian superpower clearly wields the upper hand, as many African nations have become deeply indebted to China. (Kenya now spends more than half of its national revenue on debt, much of it owed to China.) Since President Xi Jinping launched his ambitious Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, financing and building massive infrastructure projects across the globe, China has expanded its presence in almost every country in Africa.

Though Kenya’s Chinese community is small, China’s influence in Kenya is everywhere. Kenya was an early participant in the Belt and Road Initiative. A Chinese company built the controversial Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway, which cost $4.7 billion and is losing money, and the $764 million Nairobi Expressway, which opened in May 2022 and stands almost empty because most locals cannot afford the tolls.

The Chinese embassy in Kenya boasts that the more than 400 Chinese businesses operating in the country have provided 130,000 jobs for locals. But that hasn’t quelled local fears of unfair competition from Chinese migrants who arrive with more capital and better import networks. Kenyans complain that Chinese employers only hire them for menial jobs and pay them a fraction of what they pay Chinese workers for the same roles. 

In March of 2023, hundreds of Kenyan traders marched in Nairobi, carrying signs calling for the government to “Stop China Invasion!” and chanting “Chinese must go!” Such fears and resentment have mixed with reports of racist behavior by Chinese employees that have gone viral online.

And yet, amid such fraught international and social dynamics, there’s Njuguna, whose eyes light up when he hears Chinese being spoken. “I can’t help it,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Oooh! I can’t wait to go talk to them.’”

And although both communities tend to self-segregate, there’s Maina, who now spends more time with Chinese than with Kenyans. Five years ago, she didn’t eat seafood. Now she can pick apart a whole gingery steamed fish with chopsticks and suck the pink flesh from a whiskery, wok-fried shrimp.

Wayne and Irene, an ethnic-Chinese missionary couple from Malaysia, call Njuguna and Maina “black pearls.”

“Pearls are precious, but black pearls are even rarer,” Irene said, a reference not to the Kenyans’ skin color but to the valuable gemstone. Njuguna and Maina “are the kind of black pearls that you can’t just find in any churches.”

They should know. Wayne and Irene, who asked that only their first names be used to protect their ministry from interference by the Chinese government, had been trying to get Kenyan Christians to engage with Chinese immigrants since the couple moved to Nairobi in 2014.

In February 2016, they founded International Fellowship, a multicultural community that offers Chinese ministry training and bilingual Sunday services and that they hoped would be a model for other Kenyan churches. To promote it, they visited a dozen churches and helped organize 80 hours of training on Chinese language and culture. People showed up, curious. But when it came time to commit, “they disappeared,” Irene said.

Once, after Wayne led a seminar at a church, a young man approached him and said, “Wow, I never once thought that the Chinese might need the gospel too!”

Wayne asked him why not. The man replied, “Because the Chinese are rich! They make our watches, computers, and headphones.”

“The idea of missions is still trapped in the paradigm of from the rich to the poor, from urban to village, the haves to the have-nots,” Wayne said. Many locals see the Chinese community in Africa as better educated and more powerful, perhaps even more “blessed.”

Adding to the cultural gulf is the fact that many Chinese expats don’t plan to stay in Kenya permanently. They work long hours, often including weekends. One middle-aged hot pot restaurant owner from Fujian Province told me that he and his wife work seven days a week, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. When I asked if they interact with any locals, he shrugged. “We have no time outside of work,” he said, adding they hoped eventually to go back to China. Why make friends?

Daive Njuguna

In August 2018, Maina visited International Fellowship’s Sunday service. The 25-year-old was late, so she slipped into a seat at the back.

Maina, who is quiet and has a kind face, had been looking for ways to meet Chinese people when someone told her about the fellowship. About 30 Kenyans and Chinese filled the tiny, warm room; Maina observed them in awe.

At the end of the service, a Chinese woman stood to give her testimony in Mandarin, while Wayne interpreted in English. The woman said she was returning to China soon, and she thanked the congregation for all their care and love—life in Kenya would have been so lonely without them, she said.

At the time, Maina had been meditating on Psalm 146:9: “The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.” As she looked around at the Chinese worshipers, she saw not the privilege that other Kenyans saw, but vulnerability and isolation. Maina sensed God whispering to her, “Yes, I’ve been watching over them. I’ve been taking care of them.”

After that first Sunday service, Maina joined International Fellowship’s prayer meetings, where a small team gathered every Thursday morning at a Chinese family’s house. This is it, Maina thought, her excitement growing. This is home.

The following year, when Wayne and Irene visited a large church to promote International Fellowship, Njuguna was in the audience. The lanky 23-year-old with aviator glasses felt his heart flutter as he listened to the presentation. Afterward, he beelined to the missionaries. “I also want to reach out to the Chinese!” he said. “I did not know there were people who did this.”

And just like that, Wayne and Irene had found their two black pearls. “God called them,” Irene said. “It had nothing to do with us.”

At 4 foot 7, Maina is so petite that she rolls up the bottom of her jeans. She can fade into the background­—until she opens her mouth and speaks fluent Mandarin, perfectly hitting every intonation. 

When Maina first told her parents she wanted to be a full-time missionary to Chinese people, they were displeased. Her father is a pastor, her mother an elder and Sunday school teacher. They had approved of their daughter’s involvement in ministry during university. But when Maina began talking about becoming a missionary to Vietnam, they grew alarmed. All they knew about Vietnam was the bloody American war movies. And what about getting a real job? Their daughter was smart, with a degree in linguistics. Why throw all that away? “Don’t go,” they begged her.

And then, all of a sudden, Maina stopped talking about Vietnam and began talking instead about becoming a missionary to Kenya’s Chinese community.

It filled her parents with new anxieties. How was she going to raise funds to support herself as a missionary in Kenya? They worried she would fall into “a life of begging.”

But she was hooked from her first encounter with International Fellowship. “I want to be part of this,” Maina resolved that day. 

To learn Mandarin, she attended a training center called Discovery Chinese Cultural Center, run by a Christian Kenyan woman who partners with International Fellowship. Maina began there in 2019 and studied for two years, then turned to self-study. As her parents feared, she struggled with finances. The center’s director offered her extensions on her tuition payments.

Maina also began teaching English to a group of Chinese women every Tuesday. It was more social club than English class. Maina would instruct them on basic vocabulary words—“This is a bus. This is a car.”—and the women followed along, repeating “bus” and “car” for a few minutes before dissolving into giggles and reverting to Mandarin chatter.

That didn’t bother Maina. It was to her gain, listening to their melodious Chinese, studying their facial expressions and the ways their personalities bloomed when they could freely express themselves. She doesn’t know if these women learned any English, but her own Mandarin improved. Wayne says Maina is the best non-native speaker he’s met in Kenya.

Friends of friends began hiring Maina for private tutoring. Then Chinese businessmen hired her to teach them English and Swahili. Without any advertising, she amassed enough students to rent a tiny tutoring space in Nairobi and support herself.

Sometimes, Maina flips back to her old notebook in which, seven years ago, she had journaled about her desire to reach Asians and teach. “God is good,” she said. 

Her parents no longer ask when she’s going to find a job. They see her working. And they see God working.

Wanjiku Maina

In June 2023, Maina was hired by three Chinese visitors working for a company that sells stonecutting machines. She interpreted for them at a trade show. She accompanied them on a safari ride where they fed the giraffes. And toward the end of the trip, they stopped by a factory that uses the company’s machinery.

The factory boss, an agitated Indian man, complained that the machines weren’t working properly and demanded that the Chinese team fix the problem. But neither party could understand each other, so Maina stood in the middle, trying to translate difficult technical words between English and Mandarin while everyone’s patience wore thin. 

Meanwhile, the Kenyans who worked directly with the machines told Maina in Swahili that their boss was confusing the machine with another model. “We’ve been telling him this,” they told her. “But he refuses to listen to us.”

Maina felt the misunderstanding could have been resolved in ten minutes, but it took her hours to explain the mistake to the boss and the Chinese team. It was like “two bulls fighting,” she recalled, “and the Kenyans are the grass. The Chinese and the Indian are up here”—she raised a hand up to her head, then lowered it to her belly—“and the Kenyans are down there.”

What Maina and Njuguna do as missionaries seems simple: They meet Chinese people, they befriend them, they look for ways to share the gospel. It is 101-level relational evangelism, sometimes called incarnation evangelism or friendship evangelism. But how do you befriend someone who might not see you as an equal?

Njuguna remembers the dirty expressions he received when he visited Chinese homes. Not realizing he could understand them, his hosts would mutter, “Zhe ge ren shi shenme?” What’s up with this person? Some told him to stay outside. Once, Njuguna accompanied some Chinese friends to a Chinese home for a meal, and someone barked in Mandarin, “Don’t give him our utensils!” Njuguna’s friends had to borrow a plate and spoon for him from neighbors.

But Kenyans also discriminate against Chinese. Kenyan officials are known to target Chinese immigrants and harass them for bribes. Wayne says he regularly gets stopped and fined by police for offenses such as having a dirty license plate.

When Maina and Njuguna intentionally break those kinds of barriers to befriend people, that’s the gospel coming alive, Wayne said. “We believe that the gospel brings reconciliation. The Chinese and the Kenyans are not friends. But we believe the possibility of friendship develops in Jesus Christ.”

In 2021, a Chinese family that attended International Fellowship invited Njuguna to move and live with them in Eldoret, a town in western Kenya. They hired Njuguna to help manage their sheet metal factory.

At times, relations were strained. The family talked to him in a commanding tone and expected him to work on holidays. “They treated me as if I were a tool,” Njuguna said. He didn’t tell them they paid him too little to treat him that way. Instead, he told them, “Guys, I’m your friend. I’m here to help you and work with you. But you can’t use me like I’m a fork.”

He held his ground, but he also empathized with the Chinese family. They had struggled since arriving in Kenya. The husband had been jailed for 10 hours over some purported issues with his immigration paperwork. (The issue was resolved after he paid them.) A landlord had cheated them out of almost $5,000.

“So by the time I met this family, there was a lot of hurt,” Njuguna recalled. “They didn’t trust anyone. Within Chinese circles, they all say the same thing: Don’t trust the Kenyans.” Though the family was friendly to Njuguna, he sensed an underlying tension. He felt that Chinese people tend to treat relationships as transactional. But what if a Kenyan were to display the unmerited grace that Christ modeled on the cross and love without expecting anything in return?

Njuguna offered to help the family recover the $5,000 from the landlord. They were wary—they didn’t want more trouble—but Njuguna insisted. “Who says you can’t get justice just because this isn’t your country?” He called a lawyer, and eventually the family got their money back.

That was one barrier broken down.

The second crumbled inside their home. The family’s then eight-year-old son, Jason, had been diagnosed with ADHD. When his behavior turned unruly, his parents beat him. They were so busy with work that they barely noticed Jason hanging out with kids who spewed profanity and watched violent television shows. But Njuguna had bonded with Jason—who called the Kenyan man shushu, or uncle. “Let me take over the disciplining,” Njuguna told the exhausted parents. They consented.

Njuguna disciplined Jason the way his mother disciplined him: with love and prayer. He set firm boundaries and explained the reasons for any consequences. He prayed with him after each discipline session. “I saw him like he’s my son,” Njuguna said.

After more than a year in Eldoret, Njuguna felt convicted to return to Nairobi to serve as a full-time missionary among the Chinese community. His father, a pastor himself, tried to dissuade him. So many young Kenyans are hungry for secure jobs like his in Eldoret, he told Njuguna. Maybe God had provided it for a reason.

“I feel like God is calling me to do this,” Njuguna said.

His mother told him, “Whatever God is calling you to do, do it.”

Kenyans and Chinese alike frequent the restaurants in Kenya’s Chinatowns.

Njuguna plays the guitar. In March 2023, two months after he returned to Nairobi, a Chinese restaurant hired him to perform live music on Saturday nights. Njuguna saw it as an exciting outreach opportunity. He made some phone calls to talented friends, including a vocalist who could sing Chinese pop songs. 

Every weekend, at a courtyard next to an outdoor grill piled with caramelizing meat skewers, they played traditional Chinese folk songs and Christian hymns. The restaurant patrons were thrilled. They recorded with cell phones, tipped generously, and made offers to hire the band for other gigs.

Once, after the group played a Swahili hymn about prayer, a man approached with his hand on his heart. “That song!” he exclaimed in Mandarin. “It touches me. Can you play it again?”

But Njuguna clashed with his band members. Some of them wanted to draw bigger crowds by playing popular songs with sexual content that Njuguna felt
was inappropriate.

“It would be like preaching water and drinking wine,” Njuguna said, quoting a common Kenyan saying. Within six months, Njuguna shut the band down. It was clear his friends saw the music ministry as a moneymaking gig, and if they were going to be in constant conflict, it was better to end it.

“It’s not easy,” Njuguna told me. “Finding that one person with the same desire so we can work together is so hard.” 

After being the recipient of foreign aid and missions for so long, many Africans think “mission work is for foreigners,” he said. A local missionary who feels called to reach the Chinese must compete for interest in Kenyan churches already pulled in many directions by many needs.

For two years, Njuguna had been pestering his pastors about how they could reach the Chinese community. He interned at Mamlaka Hill Chapel, a nondenominational church with more than 1,000 members and a main campus near the University of Nairobi, home to the Chinese government’s first Confucius Institute in Africa. Most of the institute teachers lived in a gated apartment complex a mere five-minute walk from the church.

Njuguna told pastors: People from one of the least religious countries in the world flew 5,000 miles to live a stone’s throw from a church whose mission statement is “to build godly communities that will impact the nations for Christ.” Could the church not see what a providential opportunity this was?

On a Sunday afternoon, I sat in a pastor’s office with Njuguna and several other Mamlaka leaders, lunching on pilaf and chicken drumsticks.

It’s not that there’s no interest in cross-cultural missions, senior pastor Samuel Ithiga told me. Mamlaka had recently sent a team of 27 Kenyans to Germany and another couple to New Zealand. “Never thought of the Chinese, though.”

“Why not?” I asked. The Chinese community was at least a decade old, wasn’t it?

The pastors nodded. Many of their members do business with the Chinese. One pastor lives on Ngong Road, home to several Chinatowns. In fact, he said, he’s often awakened in the night by drunk Chinese men singing loud karaoke next door. They don’t even have the decency to sing well, he joked. Ithiga said he is on a soccer team with a friendly Chinese man who isn’t a Christian and is hungry for friends.

“The Chinese are a very unique ministry,” said assistant bishop Richard Munala. “We want the church to [reach Chinese people]. But we need someone who can teach us how.”

“The only thing I know about the Chinese is kung fu movies,” interjected one pastor. Everyone laughed.

“It’s still very new to us,” Ithiga said. “It needs a champion, somebody who sort of helps the rest of us see, Oh look! There’s an opportunity here.”

When Njuguna first started talking about his heart for Chinese people, the pastors thought, “Wow, good for you,” Ithiga recalled. “But then he kept coming to us and telling us, ‘I’m not taking any jobs. God is telling me to be more serious about this.’ Then it was like, whoa. It’s getting scary,” Ithiga joked. “What are you doing? Go get yourself a job!”

Then Njuguna brought his friends from International Fellowship. The pastors took Njuguna’s vision more seriously when they saw that he had partners behind him, people like Wayne and Irene and Maina. It was a “no-brainer” after that, Ithiga said. Mamlaka Hill Chapel commissioned Njuguna as their full-time missionary to the Chinese community. 

Chinese immigrant restaurant owners frequently employ local Kenyans.

On July 9, 2023, the morning of his commissioning service, Njuguna knew exactly what he was going to wear. 

About five years ago, when he was praying for his Chinese neighbors, he spotted a shirt at a secondhand market. It was a black pullover tunic, with a western collar, long fitted sleeves, and a hem that reached down to his knees. It wasn’t quite a Kenyan kanzu, nor was it an Indian kurta, but it vaguely reminded him of a changshan, a long robe worn by men in China in the early 1900s. So he bought it.

Since then, Njuguna has learned that people don’t wear black changshans, as they’re typically burial attire. But on commission day, Njuguna resurrected the shirt from his closet. It seemed fitting that he should wear it that morning as a symbol of his love for the Chinese community.

During the service, Ithiga announced that Mamlaka Hill Chapel would be pursuing a new mission field. “What God is doing in our times is he’s sending the Chinese people our way, so that we may create friendship, create understanding with them, and hopefully get to share our faith,” he told the church. “And God has raised a Moses from our midst.”

Njuguna walked up to the stage with a nervous grin.

“It’s not like you’ve ever gone to China,” Ithiga said to Njuguna, launching an onstage exchange. So how did he develop a heart for Chinese people?

But he had been to China, Njuguna replied. “I’ve gone to Chinatown, China City in Kilimani . . .” He listed all the bustling Chinese hubs in Nairobi, and the congregation chortled. Everyone knew these places, even if few had set foot in them.

“A mark of a great church is a church that’s fulfilling the Great Commission,” Munala said as he got ready to anoint Njuguna. God has raised Njuguna as their “champion” to reach out to Chinese communities in Kenya, “not only so we can feel good that we have someone out there doing mission work to the Chinese, but he will be the door for us—all of you, you and I”—he pointed with his Bible at the congregation and to himself—“to do ministry to the Chinese.”

Then the pastor dipped his finger in oil, drew a cross over Njuguna’s forehead, and prayed over him.

As Njuguna knelt, face solemn, his parents stood beside him, also somber. His father, a man of few words, didn’t say much. His mother spoke for him when she told her son, “We are so proud of you.”

Standing onstage too was the entire core team from International Fellowship, representing six different countries: Malaysia, China, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Kenya. Wayne and Irene beamed. Njuguna had waited two years for his church to embrace his mission, persevering when people told him he should give up.

“What a beautiful picture,” Ithiga marveled, looking at the people onstage. “People from different nations, standing right here saying, ‘We want to reach the Chinese for the kingdom of God.’ And I love how this will be like at the end of the age when we are standing there, people from every tongue and nation, praising the nation of the Lord.”

Then he added, “And we, Kenya, will not be left behind.”

Sophia Lee is global staff writer at CT.

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