Atheist London Times columnis admits "Africa needs Jesus".

It's not so much what is said, but who is saying it, that makes this story marvelous!

So much of the work that I do is about finding ways to change people's everyday lives for the better - this is a fundamentally Christian thing to do! God does not want 'converts' to Christianity, rather what God desires is the every person should experience the blessing of living in God's Kingdom of grace, mercy, provision, healing, wholeness and eternal shalom! This is what Jesus died for, and this is what Christians, and Christian groupings (such as Churches) should live for...

Of course Africa needs all that Jesus died to bring - but then again, so does America, and Eurpoe and Asia....

Here's the lovely article (I found it here):

Look at this extraordinary article from a Times of London columnist:

But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

Matthew Parris, the columnist, goes on to talk about how living in Africa, he'd observe that African Christians behaved different from their unbelieving countrymen. They had joy and self-confidence. They weren't afraid of the world, especially the unseen world of ancestors and spirits. They'd look you in the eye. Christianity, writes Parris, breaks the mind-forg'd manacles of tribalism and philosophical passivity. He goes on:

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

I have to say that the first thing I thought about when I finished this article was something Maria, a Hispanic Pentecostal immigrant who used to clean our house, told me when I inquired about her faith one day. She said she had been raised Catholic in a desperately poor Mexican village. She left her Catholic faith because, as she put it, the priest never said anything that would help the people change their lives. She was not all that articulate, but what I understood her to be saying was that the Gospel as preached by the priest in her parish conditioned her people to passively accepting their lot in life. The Pentecostalism she had learned gave them a sense that God is here and now and active in their lives -- and can transform those lives.

Interestingly, I'm reading now the galleys of an extraordinary forthcoming memoir by Julie Lyons, whom you might recall from her fearless Bible Girl columns in the Dallas Observer. Julie is white, but she's been worshiping for years in a black Pentecostal church in southern Dallas. Her memoir centers on the life she, a white Yankee chick from the suburbs, found in that inner-city black charismatic church. I was telling my wife last night about Julie Lyons' book, and how she doesn't try to downplay the problems within black Pentecostal Christianity, but how much Julie's book helps me understand why that kind of Christianity -- morally stern, highly emotional -- appeals to the poor, whereas my kind of Christianity struggles to do so (an Orthodox priest once lamented to me that our church in this country is primarily a middle to upper middle class thing). As Julie writes in her book, you might not like the rigorous moral structure proclaimed by her church, but it has brought structure and dignity to the lives of poor people who have struggled mightily for just that sort of thing, against awesome forces arrayed against them. And, again, it is a Christianity that is bold, audacious even. Those believers expect God to work miracles in their lives; church is an occasion to encounter the Holy Spirit and have your life changed, not to be confirmed in your complacency (as Julie believed her Reformed Protestant childhood church was).

There is lots for us Orthodox, Catholics and mainline Protestants to learn from the Pentecostals. And Africa needs Jesus. So does America.

Comments

[Steve Hayes]

In 1973 many church hospitals in South Africa were nationalised. It was a Methodist, former medical superintendent of Bethesda Hospital in Northern Zululand, who documented the drastic drop in the standard of health-care, with he hospitals being staffed by army-conscript medical students.

In the 1960s and 1970s I visited Charles Johnson Hospital (Anglican), and it felt like a nice kind of place to be sick in. It was not just a medical technology factory, it was a Christian community.