Sub-Saharan Africa: Doing church where your neighbour wants to kill you!

The Five Great Global Dilemmas of the Suffering Church! Part Three

As we have been arguing, it is always important to provide global templates for understanding, even if the exercise inevitably runs the gauntlet of oversimplification. Here comes our monster – a characterization of the essential and defining dilemmas facing the global suffering church. If anyone wants to help, they had better make it their priority to deal with these!

There are five and they take us around the planet.

1. How do you church when there is no place to hide? That’s China, and North Korea.

2. How do you do church when most everyone wants to leave? That’s the Middle East.

3. How do you do church when your neighbour wants to kill you? That’s sub-Saharan Africa.

4. How do you do church when your government has changed the culture you no longer feel welcome in the place of your birth? That’s India.

5. How do you do church when you have to pay a cartel to keep worshipping? That’s Latin America.

We’ve done the first two, now its Sub-Saharan Africa’s turn.

Two immediate megatrends define this area. One is staggering growth. When the 1910 Edinburgh conference on mission took place, African Christians numbered barely 9% of their own continent. Few paid much attention except to the stories of white missionaries like David Livingston and Mary Slessor who evangelized “darkest Africa.” And few paid attention to a little known church growth scholar called Donald Magavran writing a paper in the 1950’s from India predicting that by the year 2000 Africa’s Christians would number 300 million. Everyone thought him so wrong no one would publish his paper at the time to spare him embarrassment. Magavran was wrong all right. He had underestimated the number by 100 million! Africa’s Christians are set to double again in size by 2050 (up from the present 600 million), and that is why, according to the Pew Research Center, they alone will keep the world’s proportion of Christians at around 31%.

The other is fearful violence. One source of this is tribal antagonism. The world’s fastest genocide occurred in Rwanda in 1994 when one Christian tribe – the Hutis – turned on their Christian Tutsi neighbours and slaughtered nearly a million of them in three months. Said a young woman I interviewed later, “One day the pastor next door was kind and gracious. Indeed we had played happily together as children. The next he was calling us ‘cockroaches’ and hunting us with a machete. I saw him hack my husband to death, and to this day he believed he was doing God’s will as he did so.” How do you do church when your neighbour wants to kill you continues to be a present challenge in Rwandan churches, when you might be sitting behind or in front of fellow Christians who killed your loved ones?

Christian values also struggle to overcome ancient tribal antagonisms in the new country of South Sudan, which became independent of Sudan in 2011. Much of the reason for the secession was security for the two persecuted and largely Christian tribes of the Dinka and the Nuer in the extremist Muslim state of Sudan. But after the founding of the new nation, these two tribes were at each other’s throats, with a bloody civil war from 2013 to 2018 leaving millions displaced. Expect to see a rise in violence again as its leader, the Dinka and President Salva Kiir is reportedly extremely unwell as his rivalry with the Nuer leader Riek Machar continues.

It was a second source of violence especially from 2010 that caught international headlines - massacres of Christians in the northern part of the Sahel states by Islamic jihad movements, boosted by the arrival of their fighters ousted from the Middle east, carrying fat saddlebags of money to procure arms and offering expertise in running criminal enterprises. A group called Boko Haram in northern Nigeria terrorised Christians in mainly remote villages so successfully even Westerners recognized the name, though more jihadi groups have mushroomed throughout the region and are now believed to number over twenty. The most high-profile case was the brazen capture of 276 mostly Christian girls from a high school in Chibok in the north on14^th April 2014. Twelve years later over eighty are still missing.

It has also been the scale of the killing that has garnered international outrage, since it became clear that more Christians were being slaughtered in northern Nigeria than in the rest of the world combined. The IIRF Violent Incidents Database put the numbers at 22,835 killed during the 2019-2025 period and the numbers of Muslims killed by these groups is not so far behind.

The scale caused the Trump White House to promise military action last November to stem the “existential threat” to Christians, and there have been a few attacks mainly by drones since on insurgent camps. According to a well placed local leader, “It’s a bit better for there being more technical personnel from the USA in the arena who are assisting the Nigerian military to use the latest technologies to track the insurgents even into neighbouring countries, but there is nothing game changing yet.” Now in the country’s middle belt Fulani farmers have also been radicalised and despite western downplaying of the religion as a factor, are killing more Christians now than Boko Haram. In fact, so unimpressive has been the government’s inability to provide some semblance of protection that there is even a clamour for the Christian leader, Goodluck Jonathan, to return in January’s Presidential election, even though ironically he was the one under whose watch the Chibok kidnappings took place.

In response to all this, a dreadful failure of Christian NGO’s is obvious – a neglect of the region’s most vulnerable churches, which are in Francophone Africa. Christian NGO’s mainly focus on English speaking countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia, and are thick on the ground in Christian majority states such as Uganda and Kenya. But in countries like Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, where the church constitutes a tiny percentage of the population, they are rarely to be seen. According to a pastor in Niger, “Its much harder here – our main work is to try to have a sustainable church and be counselled for trauma, but the few organisations that help (and bless them for not forgetting us) love to rebuild our churches but little else.” He added, “It’s like they can only help with the hardware, but what about the software of strengthening Christians?” Francophone Africa is made up of failed states run by juntas, and Mali is the latest where the leadership looks very shaky, as Russian troops supposed to guard the leaders have been fleeing.

The persecution scenario is not the only one, however. There is an oft quoted line that “85% of Africa’s pastors have no theological education,” which may be true, and so the need for training in which to grow wise in God and in the Scriptures is still the crying need, yet recent trends in fund raising have tended to focus purely on humanitarian assistance. As a Christian fundraiser in the USA said, “Christians here want a hard ask in the present climate – “show me how my money saves a life’ and consequently training is taking too much of a back seat.” This is a pity as Islamic NGO’s are awash with funding and they are careful to focus on long term theological training and cultural change.

In macro terms, the world’s largest and fastest growing church is heading for more persecution, not less. Shame it is not the biggest arena of global engagement for Christian organisations.

And many African Christians – often because of their rural location – are vulnerable like few others in the global church to suffer the violence of their newly radicalized neighbours.