Keep sharing good news without ads.
Source: https://www.sermonindex.net/speakers/peter-hammond/the-greatest-century-of-missions---making-disciples-of-all-nations/
Making disciples of all nations. Yesterday we began by looking at church fathers in North Africa. Today we're getting an overview of the greatest century of missions, making disciples of all nations, putting feet to our faith.
The inspiring lives of the 19th century missionaries refutes the anti-Christian propaganda that is predominant today. Educational institutions and many governments around the world are enamored, infatuated with Islam and other Eastern religions.
From so many sides, we are being bombarded with guilt, manipulation and disinformation. But facts are stubborn things. And the inspiring lives and the incredible achievements against all odds by bold and brave missionaries of the 19th century exposes the fallacies and the fraud of these malicious and ignorant accusations against the church.
Isaiah 5 verse 20, Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight.
The greatest century of missions, the 19th century, exposes the reality of heathenism, which confronted these pioneers of the gospel. It kicks the legs out from under those Marxist myths and slander of the saints and those that seek to rewrite history.
The spectacular achievements of God-fearing Christians in confronting cannibalism, child sacrifice, widow burning and slavery needs to be understood. The missionaries of the 19th century steadfastly resisted Islamic slave trade and set many tens of thousands of captives free.
We need to make these eye-opening exposes of what Africa and the Middle East and Asia were really like before the advent of the gospel became widely known, and how much we are all indebted to the sacrificial services of those dedicated disciples who laid down their lives and who laid solid foundations for the future.
When pioneer missionary to Persia, Henry Martin, sought to present the Persian New Testament to the Shah, he was challenged with an ultimatum to declare that Muhammad is the prophet of God. Henry Martin boldly refused, and he asserted and said that Jesus Christ is the son of God.
His Muslim opponents were outraged and had threatened to have his tongue torn out for blasphemy. When Robert Moffat first applied to the London Missionary Society, he was rejected. His proposal to marry Mary Smith was also refused by her parents.
Yet Robert persisted and persevered, and on his first missionary expedition to South Africa, Robert Moffat succeeded in bringing to Christ the most notorious bandit and murderer in the country. Finally, Mary Smith's parents relented and gave permission, and she sailed to South Africa, and they were married.
And for the next 50 years, the Moffats became one of the greatest husband-wife teams in missionary history. Robert Moffat succeeded in being the first to translate the whole Bible into an African language, the Tswana language, Afro-Tswana.
The first printing press north of the Orange River, Robert Moffat brought it there to Kuroman. The church at Kuroman built to accommodate 800 people. You'll see Robert Moffat's the third name down, and you can see his son-in-law, David Livingston, further down to some of the missionaries who served at Kuroman, a very strategic mission base.
Robert Moffat also is the first to proclaim the gospel in what today is Zimbabwe, in Matabele land. He was a friend of both Lubangula and Mzilikazi, and shared the gospel with them in Bulawera. When Britain was the greatest economic and military power in the world, Queen Victoria was asked by a visiting African prince, what is the secret of England's greatness?
Queen Victoria presented this African prince with a Bible, saying, here is the secret of England's greatness. All the great cathedrals, all the magnificent achievements in art and architecture and science, the Bible is the source.
Samuel Zwemer chose to oppose Islam, and he resolved to engage the enemy on the soil of Arabia, the birthplace of Muhammad. If we want the 21st century to be the greatest century of missions and revival, then we need to learn for the Christian pioneers whom God used to make the 19th century, 1801 to 1900, the greatest century of Christian bonds so far.
In 1801, Protestant Christianity was concentrated in Europe and North America. Except for some small Christian enclaves, Asia was almost untouched by the gospel. There were significant Christian communities in Egypt, in Ethiopia, in Sudan, and a small number of Dutch settlers at the southern tip of Africa, the Cape, where our mission has our headquarters.
But otherwise, Africa was un-evangelized. However, by the end of the 1800s, Christianity was a world religion, with churches established in almost every country on Earth. How Christianity became the first truly international religion in just one century is an amazing story.
What inspired these incredibly effective missionary pioneers and the successful strategies which they used needs to be prayerfully examined if we are to be more effective in world evangelism. While the 20th century can boast greater numbers of missionaries in the field and greater numbers of converts, the 19th century saw far greater depth of impact for the gospel, especially when you consider the very limited resources available to these pioneers and the overwhelming difficulties and dangers and obstacles which they had to overcome.
The missionary pioneers of the 19th century, the 1800s, clearly presents the most inspiring examples of Christian courage and perseverance against all odds. The incredible adventures of these soul winners, these nation builders, these culture shakers, it makes for exhilarating reading.
The exploits and the achievements of these extraordinary Christian heroes and heroines has been mostly forgotten in the countries which they were sent out from. And for this reason, it's perhaps appropriate that this book celebrating some of the adventures and sacrifices and achievements of these missionary pioneers comes from Africa, because it is we in Africa who have benefited so greatly from the 19th century missionary movement.
In this time of secularism and skepticism, some may be surprised to hear how much these missionary pioneers are honored in Africa. Dr. David Livingston, for example, has two towns in Africa named after him, Livingston in Zambia and Livingstonia in Malawi.
Other towns in Africa which were named after Europeans like Stanleyville, Salisbury, Elizabethville, Fort Victoria, they've had their names changed. But Livingston and Livingstonia remain as a tribute to a man who brought faith to the hearts of Africans and who struck fear in the hearts of the slave traders.
Livingston is known as a liberator in Africa. Similarly, while statues of many colonial figures like Cecil John Rhodes have been toppled and removed, statues and monuments to missionary pioneers like David Livingston retain their prominence and reflect the deep respect which Africans still have for these missionary pioneers.
There have, of course, been many concerted attempts to discredit the memory of early missionaries. The atheists, the communists, the Satanists, Karl Marx, for example, declared the first battlefield is the rewriting of history.
And from the time I was first converted, 3rd of April, 1977, I've heard the most vicious slanders against the 19th century missionary movement, even in missions conferences. One of the first missions conferences I ever attended, near Rustenburg, a missiology professor from Stellenbosch University declared, the missionaries did not believe that black people had souls.
They taught that Africans were the firewood of hell. Now, at that time, I was a new convert. I didn't know much about anything, but what he said, Dr. Nico Smith, sounded so outrageous, so self-contradictory that I actually stood up in a plenary session of this missions conference, very unacceptable, but I didn't know better.
I stood up in this conference, hundreds of people, and challenged Nico Smith and said, which missionaries taught this? Did David Livingston or Robert Moffat teach us? Well, Professor Nico Smith looked a bit surprised, and he said, no, not them.
Did C .T. Studd teach these things? Did Mary Slessor teach these things? I challenged him, and he began to look uncomfortable, said, no, no, not them. Well, which missionaries believed and taught this?
Because I don't understand why anyone would come to Africa as a missionary, many of them dying of diseases in the field, if they did not believe the people in Africa were souls for whom Christ died. Didn't many of the missionaries die bringing the gospel to Africa?
Why would they have done that? Anyone recognize whose grave this is? Which country this is in? This is in Zambesia province in Mozambique. It's the grave of Mary Moffat or Mary Livingston, one of the daughters of Robert Moffat, the wife of Dr. David Livingston.
She died during the Zambezi expedition in Mozambique and is buried in Zambesia province at age 36. Why would she have come to Mozambique if she didn't believe the people of Mozambique were souls for whom Christ died?
Well, university professor Nicholas Smith never answered my question. He drifted off into some anecdotes about some heartless church members whom he knew who had bad relations with other races. I wondered what on earth does that have to do with the missionaries of the 19th century who opened up Africa to the gospel, often at the cost of their own lives.
Do you know that the average life expectancy of a missionary to Africa in the 19th century is eight years? West Africa, two years. Some died within three months of arriving. Although I didn't know much about God's law at the time, I had this uncomfortable feeling that I had just heard someone bearing false witness against Christians of another era who weren't present to answer their slander.
It seems cowardly to make a football out of your spiritual fathers. And I've seen this at a lot of missions conferences. People who criticize people better than them who sacrificed and who achieved a lot.
And what on earth have these critics ever achieved for the gospel? What have they sacrificed for the gospel? Arrogant slanderers, arrogant gossips, arrogant bearers of false witness. I've always been interested in history.
And when I was converted to Christ in 1977, I was overwhelmed with the conviction that I was called to missions. I've never doubted in 42 years my call to missions. Throughout the last 42 years, I've never doubted that call.
I've always been something of a bookworm. So I naturally gravitated towards history books. And as my knowledge of missionary history increased, I was astounded at the general ignorance of the church concerning our own heritage.
We should know our roots and our heritage. I was also most disappointed at the tendency of so many speakers at so many missions conferences to disparage the missionary pioneers who laid the foundation of the church in Africa.
I could not help wondering if these speakers really thought that we could have done a better job had we been in their positions. With the few resources they had, facing overwhelming obstacles and dangers which they confront, would we have even ventured into the field?
It's like these armchair critics. They sit in their armchair, and they criticize the sportsman in the field or the referee or whatever. Can they do better? Hindsight is all very well, but missionary pioneers do not have the benefit of the hindsight of anyone who's gone before because they're the pathfinders.
The ones who go in front, well, who do they have to learn from? You know, for us, we've got the Bibles and the languages. We've got the dictionaries. We've got all sorts of branches. There's roads and railways.
But they went before there was any of that. As I ventured into the mission fields of Mozambique and Angola and Sudan, my respect for these missionary pioneers has only increased. I was retracing much of Livingston's travels.
I was reading, actually, his book, Missionary Travels of Livingston, while retracing much of his steps in the Shiri Valley of Malawi and the Zimbizi Valley of Mozambique in the mid -1980s. I was doing primary research for what became the Killing Fields of Mozambique book.
In 1989, when I was captured by communist troops in Mozambique and flown by Russian pilots in Soviet Mi -8 helicopters like these to Tet, I was intrigued to see how Livingston's description of Tet back in the 1850s could so accurately be applied to Tet in 1989 as well.
The devastation from Arab slave traders, which he recorded in the Zimbizi expedition of 1858 to 1864, could have also described the scorched earth campaigns of the communist Fulima government and their Soviet allies in the 1980s.
On another occasion, I was going down some of the worst roads I'd ever experienced in the Shishiki area. I remembered some of the trials and tribulations of David Livingston in that very area. As I've regularly had to remind our young volunteers in our mission who complain about the bad roads, we drive where Livingston walked.
And he had to walk across an Africa that had no roads, no bridges, no shops, no hospitals, neither was clean water available. As Livingston reported off his first mystery journey, I've drunk water swarming with insects, thick with mud, putrid with rhinoceros urine and buffalo dung.
Hacking his way through dense rainforests, walking for days in pouring rain, drenched with all his equipment, either rusting if it was metal or rotting if it was canvas, Livingston persevered across the continent of Africa.
Hostile tribes demanded exorbitant payment for crossing their territory. His life was often in danger from Muslim slavery. You know, I wondered about all these people walking with piles on their heads.
What was this for? It was for taxes and customs. Every chief required payment for crossing their territory. When I first went to Mozambique, I thought that it was the Portuguese who had taught the Mozambicans about customs and immigration and fees and visas and all this.
No, you find out from Livingston and Henry Morton Stanley, it's always been like that. In fact, it used to cost more. And these huge bales on the heads of the people following Livingston were cotton and beads and cloth to pay to cross the territories of these different chiefs and to be able to barter for food and so on.
So no, it was nothing for the comfort. It's not like they were carrying Livingston's bath or something. They were carrying essential supplies just to pay to be able to cross the territory of all these customs officials.
So it's not something new. It's something that's been around for centuries. David Livingston was mauled by a lion, charged by a rhino, laid low with fever on over 60 occasions. The afflictions which Livingston was caught to endure while opening up Africa for the gospel and opposing the Islamic slave trade tested the limits of human endurance.
Leeches, maggots, putzi flies, cholera, pneumonia, sunburn, huge sores, tropical ulcers, malaria plagued him. Yet his indomitable spirit rose as he set his heart to accomplish goals which seemed humanly impossible.
He persevered and as a result of his sacrificial labors, the slave trade in Central and East Africa was exposed and eradicated. Livingston's steadfast example was used by the Lord to inspire many hundreds of men and women to devote their lives to African missions.
Mary Slessor, for example, went to Calabar, what is today Nigeria. Dr. Kenneth Fraser was inspired to go to Mouragland in Southern Sudan, where the church continues to be bombed, besieged, bombarded, churches bombed, and yet they stand firm amidst the fire.
Their faith has been under fire and yet they've been steadfast through the flames because the Christians in Mouragland have been steadfastly discipled in the teachings of Kenneth Fraser and the Bibles that he translated and made available.
Canon Ezra, this is Canon Reuben, one of the oldest men in the district, who actually was in the Equatorial Corps which fired the first shots of the war back in 1955 when the first civil war fighting against the Arabs who were trying to destroy the South, rebuilding a church that had been destroyed by helicopter gunships.
We smuggled in hundreds of thousands of Bibles and books and ran conferences in the forest with the moral Christians in Equatoria where these people continue to build a strong Christian community despite persecution by the Islamic Arabs.
Easter Sunday at La Rue, the slave traders' tree. Under this tree, the Arabs used to tether the moral people and tie them up and take them off to the Nile River and up to Khartoum where they're sold into slavery.
When Dr. Kenneth Fraser, the missionary, came here, he said, this will be the redemption tree. He turned the slave tree La Rue into the redemption tree. They're still holding Sunday Scripture Monday. Here we are on Easter Sunday celebrating the Lord's resurrection and you can see just beyond the trees there, there's the roof of the church that's been destroyed three times and rebuilt each time.
These people know what they are celebrating and what they're fighting. 140 bomb craters around this church. Church been destroyed three times, bombed 10 times, rebuilt each time. The Bible that they carry was translated first the four Gospels and Acts by the missionary, Dr. Kenneth Fraser from Scotland.
But then the rest of the Bible was translated by his disciple, Canon Ezra Rewiri, who was killed by the Arabs in an ambush on the way to having this Bible printed. His last words were, my work on earth is complete, see this is printed.
And he entrusted to his deacon, Bulund Uli, the Bible, which he later got to us and we got the first 10 ,000 copies that were printed, delivered into Sudan, delivered to these people under fire. First 3 ,000 Bibles in the Mora language being delivered to the church that will not die, the birthplace of Christianity in Mora land, Fraser Cathedral in Loi.
Church in Kotobe, which has been destroyed many a time. Here we are close to where the Bible translator, Ezra Rewiri, was killed by the Arabs in an ambush on his way to getting it printed. I was leading an evangelism explosion team from Coleridge Presbyterian Church, Dr. James Kennedy's church, to this area and we were delivering these Bibles and running an evangelism explosion clinic, a week-long clinic at this place when we were bombed on Sunday morning.
If you were to die today, do you know for sure that you're going to heaven, we asked. We trained the people in the EE questions, doing door-to-door evangelism, ministering amongst the people in these areas and on the Sunday morning, while we were going through this, if you were to die today, do you know for sure that you're going to heaven?
The cry went up, Antonovs! And everyone fled out the church. Well, I've had a lot of false alarms. I mean, a plane flying over here doesn't mean it's going to bomb you in a remote area. There's nothing around except the church, nothing for miles.
So I was the last to walk out of the church. You can see the roof comes very low down. There's no door. The thatch is very thick and so it very much keeps the noise out and of course everyone was screaming so I wasn't hearing anything, but as I bent double to go out from under the thatch and my head came out from under the thatch, I could hear the screeching, the high-pitched screams of the bombs.
And I knew there was no time to take another step. I couldn't get to the trench or the bomb shelters. All I could do was lie flat as the bombs explode. Five 1 ,000 kilogram bombs exploded in succession, all within 100 meters of the church.
And you can see some of the Americans with me from Coleridge Presbyterian Church, sent by James Kendi, diving for cover on top of other people already in the trenches, which were full. Well, the plane went around and came back a second time.
They dropped another three 2 ,000 kilogram bombs, 2 ,000 pound bombs or 1 ,000 kilogram bombs. So eight 1 ,000 kilogram bombs were dropped all in this area the size of a football field, all within 100 meters of the church.
One bomb landed just 17 meters from where I was and I felt something hit my side and I thought that was it. But it must have been tree bark or something because when I brushed myself off later, there was no blood, no broken skin, but I had cracked ribs.
So every time I laughed or sneezed or coughed for the next six weeks, I knew all about it and it was very painful. There's not much you can do for cracked ribs, but it takes about six weeks for it to heal.
Well, the incredible thing was the trees were full of shrapnel, but we were not. Not only did we not lose anyone, I walked around looking for injured and people I assumed would be killed. I mean, all the pillars of flames and amount of shrapnel flying through the air and everything that went up coming down, crashing on top of it.
I thought that we would have a lot of dead people. There wasn't one person killed or one person seriously injured. Not only did we not lose people, we gained people. There were more people in the church service after the bombing than there were before the bombing.
There was every danger they might come back and bomb us again. Quite about 300 people in the church that day. And the highlight of the service was presenting the Bible, the first complete translation of the whole Bible into the moral language.
And as I presented it to the congregation, I said, do you realize we're only a short distance from where the Bible translator, Ezra Leary, lies buried, killed by the Arabs on his way to getting printed?
How much clearer is it that the Bible is a message of life and death? Some people hate the word of God so much they're willing to kill to stop it. Others love the word of God so much they're willing to die to advance its message.
What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul? What can a man give in exchange for his soul? I remind them of the teaching of, the example in English history. William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English.
Do you know he couldn't translate the Bible into English in England? The Bible in England was illegal in English. He had to do the Bible translation in Germany, just print it in Germany and smuggle it from the Netherlands into England, bales of cotton.
Do you know the first 6 ,000 New Testaments printed in the English language were all intercepted and burned? Only two survive today. One of the original William Tyndale New Testaments in English was sold recently for over 5 million pounds.
Most valuable book in the world probably. An incredible thing that he was burned at the stake for the crime of translating the Bible into English. Do you know how many people have died that we can have the Bible in our own language freely available?
The message of the Bible is the most important message of all, it's a message of life and death. Well, this is a five-hour church service. Can you imagine? Here's Chaplain Moses, Chaplain John, and I outside the church that was bombed that day.
People came from all over. This is where one of the bomb craters, created some of the shrapnel. If you come to our mission headquarters, Livingston House in Cape Town, we still got some of the pieces of shrapnel that was thrown around us that day at this church where we were bombed.
Soldiers came to see the church that was bombed, but which still stood. This is the group of chaplains and pastors who completed the Evangelism Explosion Clinic. Nobody left. We finished clinic that week, even though there's every chance the bombers might come back.
One of the trees that was blown over in the bombing, which still stood. The trees were full of shrapnel, but we were not. One of the soldiers said, this happened to show the power of God. Another man said, the Bibles of the Christians are more powerful than the bombs of the Muslims.
Indeed, they are. This is another time, another place. If this bomb had exploded, it would have taken the church and the compound we were meeting off the map. Praise God, the people of Maryland now have the Bible, the whole Bible in their language.
This is the greatest gift anyone could have asked for. Chaplain Peter Jonathan, one of the first chaplains we trained back in 1996. He's still there. These are some of our good friends in Sudan who've been bombed along with us.
We've been through the fire and the flame. Jeffrey Kianga, one of our good friends up there. He's been with us from the very beginning of our work in Maryland. Today, there's a lot of schools in Sudan.
We helped plant 100 primary schools and a high school and a few Bible colleges in Sudan. And we've been taking Bibles. In fact, you should continue to pray for South Sudan, which now is a free and independent country.
Jesus said, on this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Modern detractors of the 19th century missionary movement like to brush aside the historic realities which a missionary is set to confront.
And they prefer to paint Africa before the coming of the gospel as idyllic and utopian. Kenneth Kahunda, one-time dictator of Zambia, wrote in his book, A Humanist in Africa, that people of Africa knew nothing about suffering until the missionaries arrived.
Ruined everything with the gospel. Kenneth Kahunda's parents were God-fearing Christians. He writes of his despising his parents who were trained in living stonia in the reformed faith. And he writes that he did not believe that man is sinful.
He said, my parents believed in the depravity of man. I believe in the goodness of man. Now this is the dictator who didn't give his people a choice for 26 years while he oppressed them. They had elections where they had, and I've seen them in these election slips in the museum.
UNEP, Kenneth Kahunda, box, yes. Not even a no box. One candidate, one party, one box, one option, yes. This is the elections they had under Kenneth Kahunda. For UNEP, you just have a chance to say yes.
Not even no. Zambia, smack in the center of Southern and Central Africa. Surrounded by some very troubled countries. There was a time when Zambia was the premier frontline state for the communists. They hosted the terrorists, the MPLA who attacked Angola and fed people through buzz saws and sawmills.
They supported Fulimo terrorists who were going into Mozambique. They support Zon and Zapu who were shooting down airlines, eating survivors, burning Christians and churches, murdering missionaries in Zimbabwe.
They hosted ANC, PAC, SWAPO, all the terrorist movements, the Marxist revolutionaries who murdered tens of thousands of people in neighboring countries. Zambia was once the bastion for all the terrorism going throughout the whole of Africa, Southern Africa and Central Africa under Kenneth Kahunda.
My first mission to Zambia in 1987 ended up in Lusaka Central Prison. There you can see the main gate, central machine gun tower. The only entrance into prison, the main central compound was just under that, a very small low door here to Dakbo.
My cell was cell 11. Cell 11, presidential detainees. It looks quite nice today. They've put fresh paint. It didn't look like this then. It hadn't been painted probably since the British left at the time.
Today it's got nice clean doors. It didn't look like that to me. We had to go through the narrow part of the door. Never saw the big doors open. It doesn't look too bad today, but at that time obviously we couldn't have cameras.
This is later Lusaka Central Prison had been much cleaned up and these people had, some of them even had some blankets. When I was locked up, the cells were 25 feet by 15 feet. 25 feet by 15 feet. They put 60 to 65 people in a cell.
When the British built this prison, there was electricity, there was plumbing. In fact, Kenneth Gohinda when he was locked up in here for his revolutionary activities, he had his own cell where he put 65 people in a cell.
He had a cell to himself. He had a bed with sheets and pillows and he had sofa and couch and he had gramophone and a desk and access to books and library and he had three cooked meals a day, he had electricity at night.
He believed in the goodness of man. So when he ran it, where the British put 80 prisoners max, he put 1 ,200 prisoners in Lusaka Central Prison and they had no plumbing, no electricity, no access to libraries, no plates.
He didn't, we didn't get cooked meals. The only food we got in the Lusaka Central Prison was provided on your hands. They had a big cooking pot, big enough to fit a family of missionaries in and the only things that were cooked there was sadza, stiff porridge basically, starch.
There was no protein. The only protein we got in the prison was from the flies that fell into the pot. There were no plates, there was no bowls, served on people's hands. Had to eat sort of like a dog.
There was no eating utensils because Kenneth Koenig believed in the goodness of man. So he had a one-party state and he could put 1 ,200 people in the prison and do you know most of the people in that prison had never had their day in court.
They were remand prisoners. Some people had been there eight years and they'd never had their day in court and you could tell the difference because the prisoner had a prison uniform and remand prisoners were still in their normal civilian clothes, which of course were in tatters.
That's just Kenneth Kohundez and in Lusaka Central Prison, I, in October 1987, I and three other frontline missionaries were imprisoned in Zambia. We'd been arrested at Kazengula Ferry coming in from Botswana because we refused to bribe some Zambian officials.
The place was so corrupt. There were 34 roadblocks you had to go through to get from Kazengula Ferry through to Chapata on the border of Malawi and each roadblock was a law unto themselves. You could do anything.
They just wanted to steal things and you had to pay bribes and it was lawless. We spent excruciating weeks of abuse at the hands of the Zambian security forces in filthy cells, blindfolded, handcuffed, interrogated, incarcerated in overcrowded Lusaka Central Prison, first in Livingston Prison and then later Lusaka Central.
Now, friends of ours ensured that the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was informed of our plight just before her departure for the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver. It was October 1987 and all the Commonwealth countries were coming together in Vancouver for the Commonwealth Conference and Kenneth Kohundez was the chairman of the frontline states.
He was the host to all the revolutionary and terrorist groups out there and he was making it his number one priority to attack Margaret Thatcher for refusing to put sanctions on South Africa because remember, disinvestment, sanctions.
The Americans had sanctioned South Africa, everyone did, but Britain was one of the few countries that didn't and so here's outrage. How can Britain refuse to place sanctions on South Africa? So Kenneth Kohundez was leading the pack in the attack on Margaret Thatcher.
Margaret Thatcher responded by asking, well, why does Zambia not place sanctions on South Africa herself? Kenneth Kohundez responded, Margaret placed many Zambians out of work. Well, exactly, responded the British Prime Minister and as South Africa is one of our most important trading partners in Africa, many British citizens would be placed out of work if I was to impose sanctions on South Africa.
Quite a sight for the many South Africans themselves who'd be placed out of work. She then went on to relate how Zambians were eating maize, mille-mille, grown in the Orange Free State. How Zambian airways was maintained by South African airways.
How Zambian railways was maintained by South African railways. In fact, South African railways' locomotives were pulling Zambian railways' carriages. How South African veterinarians cared for Zambian cattle.
If a Zambian was bitten by a snake, the snake bite serum came from Pretoria. How many hundreds of thousands of Zambians were migrant workers in South African, how many hundreds of millions of pounds this put back into the Zambian economy and how much it benefited the public treasury and so on.
Kenneth Kondo then declared that because of South Africa's human rights abuses, Britain should impose sanctions on South Africa. At this point, Margaret Thatcher produced our information. Who are you, she said, to talk about human rights abuses?
You are the unelected dictator of a one-party state. You have four British missionaries being held without trial as presidential detainees in Lusaka Central Prison, tortured and abused by your own security forces.
And she gave our details. Now, I am South African, born in South Africa, raised in Bulawera, but because my father fought all six years in the Second World War in the British Army, I have a British passport too, which I use for travel, it's a lot easier.
And especially at that time, you couldn't do much with a South African passport. I could get to countries I wouldn't be able to get in the other way. So because of my father's war record, I have a British passport.
So I was technically British, and therefore Margaret Thatcher was speaking up for me. And the only mission we ever did, where we had all four of our missionaries were British passport holders. Unusual.
Well, Kenneth Gonder, after being confronted with these facts, and I mean, we were being tortured and abused. Heads in buckets of urine, suffocated. They call it waterboarding. Well, waterboarding would have been nice, to have clean water, like the Americans have used.
But to be waterboarded with urine and feces and filth, that was something else, suffocated. And all the different tortures we saw in this prison. And of course, we weren't treated as badly. In fact, the Zambian security force says, you've got a British passport.
We're gonna have to let you go sometime. We can't break bones and burn your skin like we do with our own citizens. But we know what you don't like. Of course, they took away our shoes, put us in filthy conditions.
They suffocated us. They knew where to punch, where it wouldn't leave any bruises, just in the stomach. They knew they couldn't treat us like they treat their own citizens. In fact, in the Sarko Central Prison, the presidential detainees cell, cell 11, there was one South African, 26-year-old Isaiah Moya.
He had over 20 pussy sores on his body, because he, they would take an iron bar in the fire, and then they'd push into his skin. And he had these pussy sores that would swell up and then burst and swell up and burst.
He had lent money to ANC exiles. And then instead of paying him back, they just accused him of being a South African spy. He didn't need proof or things like that. He was thrown into prison, never had his day in court, being tortured, just because he had lent money to an ANC exile who thought it's easier to call him a spy than to pay him back.
And then there was an Indian Hindu man who owned a whole lot of businesses and mines, and they confiscated him and threw him in prison. There was a Malian businessman, a Muslim, tall man from Mali, who they just threw him in so that they could confiscate his goods and his money.
There was a major from the engineers who had been trained in Sandhurst, Zambian army engineer. He was in prison because he had said, you know, sanctions will hurt Zambia more than they'll hurt South Africa.
For that unpatriotic statement, he was a presidential detainee as well. Everyone in our cell had a different story. And we could tell Kenneth Kunda was a humanist who believed in the goodness of man. That's why he could do so many tortures of men.
Isn't that interesting? Reformed Christians who believe in the depravity of man do the most charity and kindness to help people. Those who believe in the goodness of man, the secular humans, the atheists, they can torture people just for their opinions.
Well, Kenneth Kunda, apparently the first thing he said when he got off the presidential aircraft and he landed in the SAC was, get those missionaries out of here. And when my name was called, I'd already gone through six interrogations.
Each interrogation could last six hours or so. So when I came, when I was called, I put up my hands expecting them to put the handcuffs on before I was allowed through the small door out to interrogation or whatever.
And instead of putting handcuffs on me, this man of smart suit shook my hands and said, he's from the president's office. He's come to release us, take us back to Livingston, reunite us with our vehicle and send us off through Kazangirli Ferry back to Botswana and so on.
And on the way, we passed by the Freedom Monument. This is a picture taken on another occasion. Of course, we didn't have cameras with us. They stole all our cameras. They stole thousands of rams worth of equipment.
The police stole during interrogations that we never got back. But I couldn't help but notice the freedom statues behind bars. It's very significant. Poor people in Zambia, they're told that they're free, but they were free to vote for one party, one candidate.
We made a lot of friends in prison. One was General Godfrey Meander. Godfrey Meander was a military general who ended up in the same prison as us, Lasalka Central, because he had opposed sanctions and had said that Kenneth Kondo was undermining the country.
He later became Minister of Information, Minister of Education, and he became Vice President even under Frederick Chaluba. In fact, Frederick Chaluba looked to him as his mentor. He is the spiritually mature older Christian who guided the new convert, Frederick Chaluba.
Frederick Chaluba was also in the same prison, but I don't remember meeting him. I don't remember seeing him, but he was apparently in the same Lasalka Central prison when I was there. In 1991, Zambia became officially a Christian country.
First free elections, first multi-party options, and Kenneth Kondo's party lost big time. There was five votes against Kondo for every one for him, so landslide, and he was swept away. The new government, of course, we knew them because they'd been in the same prison as us, and I went from being a prohibited immigrant, PI to a VIP, where I would be whisked through at the airport and the border post.
I wouldn't have to go through customs and so on and have officials coming through because now I was their friend and Minister of Education asking us to run biblical worthy seminars in the teacher training colleges and to help them with different projects, and we had the opportunity, ministering on radio and on TV and meeting with the president and helping with a whole range of things.
This evangelist, Bishop Wani Bernali Ferri, Bishop Bernali Ferri of World Baptist Evangelist Association, he's the prison chaplain who had visited the prison and saw us there, and he blew the whistle.
Shortly after that, there's newspaper headlines, Church 4 held in Osaka Central, and he basically helped to get us out by getting the word out of that we were locked up in prison, became a good friend, one of our board members, Bernali Ferri.
Well, when I took to God Free Me Under, the pile of books, I brought a whole lot of great books on biblical economics and so on, crime and punishment, he groaned. He said, I love books, I love reading, but the demands of high office don't allow much time for reading.
Don't you have a small book that summarizes all of these? And so I wrote Biblical Principles for African Heroes arriving at Parliament. Biblical Principles for Africa has gone through many reprintings and expansions, and it's translated to Afrikaans and into French, and it's been delivered to the Congo.
But here's another good friend, General Ronnie Shikapasha. Ronnie Shikapasha's an Air Force general. He's actually head of the Air Force in Zambia. He was crippled in a car accident, told he'll never walk again.
His wife got converted to Christ. He got converted to Christ, he got healed. He became Minister of Information, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Home Affairs. Many years, good friend, visited.
He organized many meetings for us, and he took me to visit President Levi Mwanawasa in State House. Levi Mwanawasa was from a Jehovah's Witness background, so he had never been accepted to go into politics.
So his church actually excommunicated him because for Jehovah's Witnesses, you're not meant to go into government. So he was actually without a church at all, and we had a good hour sharing the gospel with him, praying with him, opening the Bible.
And he gave his life to Christ, joined the local Baptist church in Lusaka, was baptized at Lusaka Baptist, and he was a faithful member there till he died in suspicious circumstances when he was in charge of, he was the chairman of the SADC countries.
And he is the first one to take a strong stand against Mugabe's abuse in Zimbabwe. Next thing you know, he dies very suspiciously. I heard it straight from military leaders in Zambia. There's no doubt that President Levi Mwanawasa was murdered, probably by the CIO, but Zambia couldn't afford a war with Zimbabwe, so it was just covered up.
But Zambian military believed that their president was actually assassinated. He was only 56 when he died. Well, I've been to Zambia many times, good friends. My son, Calvin, I've taken with me to minister in Lusaka, and I wanted the people in Zambia to see that even a young child, Calvin at this stage was only eight, can memorize scripture well, and so Calvin would be giving the evangelism explosion presentation, EE, Way of the Master, all the way through.
Even on TV, he did this in Zambia. They really loved this little guy. He met Rony Shikapasha and many others. Here I'm showing them where we used to swim the river in Tangola. And Calvin was comfortable enough to take school assemblies and to show pastors, fraternals, we were showing them how just repetition, your son can learn Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, evangelism explosion, Way of the Master, and many batches of scripture just by repetition and investing in the young children.
Fathers need to bring up their children in the Lord. Now, according to people like Kenneth Kohunda, all Africans lived in peace, harmony, tranquility, and prosperity before the missionaries arrived to the gospel.
I don't believe in the depravity of man, said Kohunda. Now, you might expect such ahistoric ramblings from committed Marxists like Hitler Hunsby, who was Mugabe's hitman for the farm invasions in D .F. 2000.
This is a dentist. He used to get MDC opposition people strapped into his dental chair and drill out their teeth as torture without any anesthetic, of course. Now, he was a vicious man. He died of AIDS shortly after this thing began.
But you might expect that sort of thing from Hitler Hunsby. But incredibly, all too many Christians, because of their ignorance of history, repeat these allegations even in Christian publications and at missions conferences.
When Mary Schlesser arrived in Calabar, she was horrified to discover that a woman who gave birth to twins was regarded with horror. The belief was that one of the twins must have been fathered by an evil spirit, a demon.
So the mother had been guilty of a great sin if she'd given birth to twins. This was the superstition. At least one of the children was believed to be a monster, so both twins were killed. Their backs were broken.
They were crushed into Calabasher water pot. They were taken out, not by the doorway, but by a hole broken in the back of the wall, which was at once built up again. They were thrown in the bush where they were left to be eaten by insects and wild beasts.
Mary rescued many twins like these and adopted them. She soon had a large family. Mary found Calabar in a grip of rampant witchcraft, drunkenness, and immorality, and slavery. She intervened to prevent a witch doctor pouring boiling oil over a woman's spread eagle on the ground.
She stopped it, stood it, a little five-foot-high woman, and she would oppose these things. She saved a lot of lives. Cannibalism and slavery was rife between the tribes. Once, when she was instructed to heal a dying chief, she knew that if she failed, she would be blamed for his death.
First, she got rid of all the witchcraft charms and all the sacrificed chickens lying around the hut. Then she prayed and gave the chief good medicine and nursed him back to health. The wives of the chief were particularly grateful for Mary's success because they would have been killed, the wives would have been killed and buried with the chief if he had died.
And these wives are understandably keen to learn about the book. Samuel Marsden, the pioneer missionary to New Zealand, witnessed the depths of degradation and the hold of superstition over the Maori people when the widow of a deceased chief hanged herself with the applause and approval of her parents and brothers.
Can you imagine brothers and parents applauding a suicide by their own family member? Cannibalism was rife amongst the Maori. One chief declared he had eaten 139 people. He had a bone for every person he had killed and he counted up to 139 bones that he had so he knew he had eaten 139 people.
One woman confessed she had killed and eaten 19 children. Mishmis, the New Hebrides found human sacrifices and cannibalism rife throughout the Pacific. In Fiji, two thirds of all children were boiled and eaten.
Every village had a human butcher. Aged parents were butchered and eaten by their children. Men would even cook their best wife, their favorite wife or child, as a special feast for their friends. John Patton, the Mishmi to New Hebrides, reported on an occasion on Tana when three women were killed in a human sacrifice to secure the recovery to health of the chief.
When Mishmi to the South Sea Islands, John Williams, was criticized for imposing foreign Christian standards upon unwilling communities living in primitive bliss, John Williams noted those were the same communities where laziness, promiscuity, human sacrifice and the burial alive of infants had shortly before been commonplace.
Far from the Mishmis interrupting the peace and tranquility of pagan nations, the Mishmis came to nations that were passing through immense turmoil. When Hudson Taylor first landed in Shanghai in 1854, the country was being torn apart by vicious civil war, the so-called Taiping Rebellion.
Rebels held the city. 50 ,000 imperial troops besieged it. The house that Hudson Taylor was staying in Shanghai was struck by cannon fire. The house next to his was destroyed. That's where he was doing his language studies.
He frequently witnessed people being beheaded. He himself came close to being lynched, hung on occasion. Over 25 million Chinese were killed in two civil wars that raged in 1850s and 1860s in China, 25 million.
Another 10 million died in a famine between 1877 and 1879 in just two years, 10 million died. In the north of China alone. As Dr. George Grant stated in his introduction to my book, The Greatest Century of Mishmis, as Mishmis moved out from Christendom to the outermost parts of the earth, they were shocked to discover all the horrors of untamed heathenism.
They found abortion all too prevalent, infanticide all too commonplace, abandonment all too familiar, euthanasia all too customary. They were confronted by the specter of endemic poverty, recurring famine, unfettered disease, widespread chattel slavery, cannibalism, ritual abuse, patricide, that's the killing of parents, human sacrifice, sexual perversity, pity tyranny, paternalistic exploitation, meaning parents could sell their children to slavery and so on.
Live burials, for example of wives when a husband died, exterminated clan warfare, genocidal tribal vendettas all predominated. These were not exceptions, this was the rule. As Mishmis circled the globe, as they penetrated the jungles, as they crossed the seas, they preached a singular message, light out of darkness, liberty out of tyranny, life out of death.
To cultures endemic with terrible poverty, brutality and lawlessness and disease, these faithful Christian witnesses interjected the novel Christian concepts of grace, charity, law, medicine, and the sanctity of life.
They overturned despots, dictators, they liberated the captives, they rescued the perishing, they established hospitals, they founded orphanages, they started rescue missions, they built almshouses, they opened soup kitchens, they incorporated charitable societies, they changed laws, they demonstrated love.
They lived as if people really mattered. Wherever Mishmis went, they faced a dual challenge, confront sin in men's hearts, confront sin in men's cultures. The obstacles, the dangers, the difficulties that they had to face and overcome was staggering.
By an act of British Parliament, Mishmis were illegal in India. Not just illegal by Indian law, illegal by British law. In China, not only was all Mishmi activity completely illegal, but so too was attempting to learn the Chinese language.
There was a ban on any Chinese teaching their language to foreigners. The Chinese tutors to Robert Morrison, the first Protestant Mishmi to China, carried poison on their bodies so that if they were discovered, they could end their lives quickly and escape Chinese torture.
Because at that time, the Chinese forbade foreign women on their soil, Robert Morrison had to live apart from his wife Mary for most of their lives, once they were separated for six years. America's first foreign Mishmi, Adnan M. Judson, was captured in the high seas, incarcerated in a French prison from which he escaped.
Later he was imprisoned and tortured in death prison in Burma for 18 months. Every night, they would haul up their feet high so that only the shoulders are on the ground and they had to sleep in that position with their head low, their feet high.
Can you imagine what that would do for your back ache? Livingston wrote, we need to be uncommon Christians. That is, imminently holy and diverted, servants of the most high. Let us seek that selfishness be extirpated, pride banished, unbelief driven from the mind, every idol dethroned, everything hostile to holiness and opposed to the divine will crucified.
That holiness to the Lord may be engraved in the heart and evermore characterize our whole conduct. A mission organization wrote to David Livingston asking, have you found a good road to where you are?
If so, we have men who want to come and join you. Livingston replied, if you have men who will come only if there's a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come even if there's no road at all.
C .T. Studd, the world famous cricket captain, the finest cricket captain in the world at that time, he was Britain's champion who brought the Ashes back from Australia after defeating the Australian cricket team.
He gave up his cricket career and he became pioneer missionary to China, then to India, finally to the Congo. He declared, if Jesus Christ be God, and if he died for me, no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him.
As he suffered malaria and other attacks, C .T. Studd wrote, some like to live within sound of church or chapel bell. I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell. In the words of C .T. Studd, Christ's call is to capture men from the devil's clutches and snatch them from the very jaws of hell, to enlist and train them for Jesus and make them a mighty army of God.
But this can only be accomplished by red hot, unconventional, unfettered, holy spiritualism, by reckless sacrifice and heroism in the foremost trenches. The challenge of David Livingstone rings out to us today.
Can that be called a sacrifice? Which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay. It is emphatically no sacrifice. So rather it is a privilege. Studying the sacrifices and the exploits of pioneer missionaries of the 19th century is most challenging and inspiring.
These were ordinary people made extraordinary by dynamic and vibrant Christian faith, which carried them through some of the worst circumstances imaginable. C .T. Studd testified, I once had another religion, hunting the Bible for hidden truths, but no obedience, no sacrifice.
Then came the change. The real thing came before me. Words became deeds. The commands of Christ became not merely Sunday recitations, but battle calls to be obeyed. Ascent to creed was born again into decisive obedience, action of obedience.
Hudson Taylor stated that his life was based upon three facts. There is a living God, he has spoken the Bible, he means what he says, and he'll do all that he has promised. Hudson Taylor wrote of the intense longing for God that gripped him, of the conviction that never left him that he was called to China.
Hudson Taylor agonized in prayer for China. Sometimes he prayed through the night. He wrote of wrestling with his unbelief and how the Lord conquered his unbelief. I surrendered myself to God for the service.
The Great Commission is not an option to be considered. It is a command to be obeyed. One of his famous statements. At the end of his long life, Hudson Taylor could declare that the sun had never risen upon him in China without finding him at prayer.
What a thing to be able to say. I wish I could say something like that. The sun has never risen without finding me at prayer. The battle is the Lord's, he said, and he will conquer. We may fail, we do fail continually, but God never fails.
The pioneer missionaries of the 19th century were inspired by most positive and optimistic faith. They were absolutely convinced that the Lord who gave the Great Commission would ensure that the Great Commission would be fulfilled.
The will of God will never lead you, but the grace of God cannot keep you. When after seven years of laboring in China, Robert Morrison saw the first Chinese convert. Imagine, he's worked for seven years without seeing a convert.
Is he discouraged? Well, at the first convert, after seven years, he wrote, may he be the first fruits of a great harvest. One of millions who will leave and be saved. You know, today there's over 120 million Christians in China.
Robert Morrison's faith was not in vain. His sacrifice was not in vain. The seed he sowed is not in vain. Scotland's first foreign missionary, Alexander Duff, declared, oh, what promises are ours if we only had the faith to grasp them?
What a promise is that in the Great Commission. Go and make disciples of all nations. And lo, I'm with you, even at the end of the world. We go forth amongst the hundreds of millions of people of the nations.
We find gigantic systems of idolatry and superstition consolidated over thousands of years. They tower as high mountains. But what does faith say? Believe, and it shall be. And if any church on earth will realize that faith, to that church will the honor belong of evangelizing the nations and bringing down the mountains.
Is that not the vision of Back to the Bible? When after seven years labor in India, William Carey was able to witness the conversion of their first convert, Krishna Pal, from Hinduism, William Carey declared, the divine grace which changed one Indian's heart can obviously change 100 ,000.
And in fact, there are millions of Christians in India today. William Carey declared, the work to which God has set his hands will infallibly prosper. We only want men and money to fill this country with the knowledge of Christ.
We are neither working for uncertainty nor afraid of the result. Christ must reign until Satan has not one inch of territory. God's cause will triumph. In the words of William Carey's historic sermon, which launched the modern missionary movement, expect great things from God, attempt great things for God.
God is great, honor him with great faith. By God's grace, William Carey was able to successfully campaign against the Hindu practice of Soti, where widows were burned alive on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands.
Carey also entered the practice of burning lepers alive. William Carey established the first newspaper ever printed in any Oriental or Asian language. He introduced the steam engine to India. He pioneered lending libraries to make knowledge available to the common people.
He introduced savings banks. Savings banks? What's this got to do with missions? To let common people be able to buy their own homes. He pioneered forest conservation. 50 years before the government began forest conservation, he was planting forests.
Why? He needed paper. For his printing presses. And he thought, without chopping down, we can't chop down a tree unless we plant two in its place. He established the first Christian college in Asia, Serampore College, which is still training leaders with 2 ,500 students, I think, at the time.
He succeeded in producing and distributing over 200 ,000 Bibles and New Testaments and Gospels in 36 languages, in addition to many books and tracts. Do you know William Carey is the greatest Bible translator in history?
He managed to translate the whole Bible into six Asian languages, and New Testaments and Gospels into another 29. He mastered more than 36 languages. He also knew Danish and Hebrew and Greek. Phenomenal linguist.
He had the gift of tongues, in a real sense. By God's grace, through the ministry of Mary Slessor, the killing of twins ceased and slave trading at Calabar was eradicated and drunkenness and killing and witchcraft diminished and many schools and churches were established.
And most of the people of Calabar came to embrace the Gospel of Christ. The first public Christian worship service in New Zealand was conducted on Christmas Day, 1814, by Samuel Marsden. By 1845, it was reported 98 of Maoris had embraced Christianity.
By the time John Williams was clubbed to death and eaten by cannibals on the island of Eremonga, 1839, he had succeeded in transforming scores of islands by the scriptures he had translated, by the schools he had established, by the churches he had built, and many thousands of islanders had come to salvation in Christ.
John Williams had been converted 25 years earlier by a sermon based on what is a man profited if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul? What shall a man give in exchange for his soul? True to that verse that he had heard on the night of his conversion in 1814, John Williams had found his life by losing it for Christ.
And one of the most encouraging thing is how many of the next generation followed. Frank Patton followed in his father John Patton's footsteps. He became a missionary to Ireland where his father had been forced to flee for his life 34 years before.
During his ministry there, Frank was blessed to see the whole population of Thailand want to Christ. Many missionaries had this epitaph. Before he came, there were no Christians. When he left, there were no human.
Similarly, Robert Morrison had the joy of seeing his son, John Morrison, follow in his footsteps and pour his heart and soul into the work of bringing the gospel to the people of China. All of Admiral Judson's five surviving children grew up to distinguish themselves in Christian service.
Admiral Judson had 10 children, five died in the field, young. The five have survived, served the Lord faithfully. Robert Moffat, who produced the first complete translation of the Bible into an African language, had the joy of seeing five of his seven children actively involved in missionary service, including Mary, who married David Livingston.
His son, John Moffat, established the first mission station amongst the Maddabili in Bulawera. Two of C .T. Studd's daughters, who had been born in China, came out and joined him with their husbands in his Heart of Africa mission in the Congo.
This book, this lady here, Edith Buxton, she wrote the book Reluctant Missionary. She didn't want to be a missionary, but her fiance was the first recruit for her father's Heart of Africa mission, which became the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, and she ended up going to the Congo and writing a most incredible missions biography.
One of the many fruits of William Wilberforce's lifelong crusade against slave trade was that Samuel Ajai Crowther, who was born in Yorubaland in 1807, the year Britain abolished the slave trade, Samuel Ajai Crowther became the first African bishop of the Church of England.
He was born Ajai in Yorubaland. He took the name Samuel Crowther from the name of a bishop who led him to the Lord. At age 13, he was captured by African slavers, sold to a Portuguese trader for transport across the Atlantic, rescued by a British naval squadron in 1822, put ashore at Freetown in Sierra Leone, where he was converted.
From 1809, the British government mobilized its navy, the Royal Navy, to search suspected slave ships, even foreign vessels, on the high seas. For a century, the Royal Navy was dedicated to setting captives free, going far beyond clearing the oceans of slave ships.
They boldly sailed up uncharted rivers and creeks. They stormed slave stockades. They freed captives at every turn for a century. These are just some of the slaves rescued by one Royal Navy vessel at one time.
Great Britain dedicated its resources to fighting and opposing the slave trade, which was mostly run by Muslims. The British spent millions of pounds in suppressing the slave trade. They sacrificed much blood in fighting to set the captives free.
The West African country of Sierra Leone was established by British evangelicals to serve as a haven for freed slaves. Britain invested vast amounts of money into developing Sierra Leone as a free and independent state where liberated slaves could settle.
In Sierra Leone, Trouther was converted to Christ where he received an education both in Sierra Leone and in England. About the third year of my liberation from the slavery of man, I was convinced of another worst state of slavery, that of sin and Satan.
I was admitted to the visible Church of Christ here on earth as a soldier to fight manfully under Christ's banner against spiritual enemies. 1843, Samuel Trouther was ordained as a Church of England minister for service in the Church Missionary Society.
He was a leader of a successful missionary venture that took him and many other slaves back to Yoruba land where vigorous Christianity developed. And one of the first converts that Samuel baptized was his own mother who took the Christian name Hana.
She was the Hana, he was Samuel. Samuel received from the Lord, given back to the Lord. His language Yoruba became the first African language to be used in Church of England liturgy for worship. He translated it into Yoruba.
Yoruba Christianity was distinctly Protestant and evangelical in the Anglican style. Trouther led his converts in burying or destroying traditional charms, fetishes, and idols. In 1830, in 1864, Samuel Ajai Trouther was ordained as the first African bishop of the Church of England in an overflowing Canterbury Cathedral, the premier cathedral in England.
He was directed to undertake a mission along the Niger River, which was to follow up on the Niger expedition of 1841 led by William Wilberforce's successor, Foxwell Buxton, who was the leading anti-slavery leader in Parliament.
This expedition up the Niger River Valley of West Africa was to overcome the ravages of the slave trade there. Of the 145 Europeans on that missionary expedition, 130 were struck down of malaria and 40 died.
Imagine 40 missionaries dying in one operation. Yet the expedition was successful. They established a missionary center at Foro Bay for training liberated slaves to evangelize West Africa, built on the very place where the slave market once stood.
The rafters of its roof were made almost entirely from masts taken from old slave ships donated by the Royal Navy for this purpose. Samuel Trouther became one of the first four students to graduate from Foro Bay College, sub-Saharan Africa's first university.
He diligently labored to bring the gospel to the diverse tribes of the Niger, produced biblical texts, scripture texts dealing with witchcraft and charms. He also dealt with common ground between the Quran and the scriptures and produced gospel presentations for Muslims founded entirely on biblical quotations.
He wrote of his contact with King Ogara of Punda. I asked if he'd like his people to be taught God's book and how to worship God as we do in a white man's country. For it's these two things together which has made England great and that they would bring peace and prosperity to any country which received and embraced them.
The king replied that he was very desirous that war should cease and that his people might trade and be taught God's book and he wished us many blessings. He won many converts amongst the Nuuk and the Hausa tribes and was effective in opposing slavery, witchcraft and Islam.
Bishop Crowder worked effectively at indigenizing an evangelical Anglicanism which is truly African. Today there's more than 18 million Anglicans in Nigeria. That makes 18 times more Anglicans in church in Nigeria than are in the whole of the British Isles and North America combined.
Missions is the lifeblood of the church. It is absolutely essential that our congregations and families be presented with these and many other inspiring examples of those whom God has blessed in extraordinary ways.
We need to read these examples, feeding our minds and souls with examples of excellence. I pray that these few selected adventures, sacrifices, exploits and pictures and achievements will wet your eyes and make you think and have you appetite to read the greatest century of missions and to obtain more missionary biographies.
To start the lifelong habit of making time to feed our bodies, minds and souls with what has been described as the noblest object that can engage the enthusiasm of men, the salvation of millions. May God be pleased to use the greatest century of missions to inspire a new generation of missionaries to expect great things from God and to attempt great things for God.
I want to answer this call with David Brainiard whose journal includes this prayer. Here I am. Send me. Send me to the rough, to the savage pagans of the wilderness. Send me from all that is called comfort on earth.
Send me even to death itself if it be but by in thy service and to promote thy kingdom. You only have one life. It'll soon be past. Only what's done for Jesus Christ will last. Are there any questions?
Comments? Complaints or criticisms?
Any others? Yes, question. Thank you for the lecture. I just wanted to find out because we've been reading this like that. So that's one of the topics that was coming up was the issues when you ran into politics.
So I wanted to understand when they reveal a point of view because there's been a lot of debate that some people, Christians, have pulled out of some of the key positions in society that do with leadership because they know a believer cannot be involved in politics.
But is it right for them to be brought into these issues? And the second question, going back with the history, like you have explained it very well, if I'm not mistaken, we go back to the early 1890s during the Crimean War.
Christians were killed, but why is it every time Christians have been killed, the world has not mentioned about the killing of Christians. The news agencies are silent about it. Thank you very much.
Well, yes, of course, Christians should be involved in political and social issues. We should not allow the church to be abused by political parties for political ends. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't speak to political issues.
So for example, I've written the book, Biblical Principles for Africa. This is us speaking to the world, saying this is what the principles should be, economics, education, crime and punishment, and so on.
But it's one thing for us to influence the world. It's nothing for the world to influence us. We should be the light of the world. We should be the salt of the earth. We should be discipling the nations.
What we shouldn't do is allow the world to be secularizing us and indoctrinating us and manipulating us and abusing us. So some churches correctly react against this and say, Christians shouldn't be involved in politics.
I think they're going, I understand the intention, and the intention is good. The intention is, what they mean is, we should not allow the world to manipulate and abuse the church for political ends. But surely they cannot mean that we do not influence the world as salt and light and that we do not seek to disciple the nations, which is the Great Commission.
So I fear that they've put it in the wrong way. We know what they mean. What they mean is good. Christians shouldn't be abused by politics. Christians should not abuse the church for political ends. But to say we shouldn't be involved in politics is wrong.
Christians should be involved in politics, at least voting our values. And some Christians may even be called to go into politics. Of course, we're afraid for their souls because how many people have gone to politics and have been abused and they've ended up corrupt and doing evil things and being part of evil parties.
And so naturally, many in the church react and it's understandable many would say, let's keep the two separate. Well, the Bible makes it clear. The state is to be a minister of justice. They have a sword and they're to be a minister of justice.
The church is to be a minister of grace. And in a sense, we should keep the two separate and they should be separate. Kings should not be performing sacrifices in the temple. We know this from the Bible.
Similarly, the priest should not attempt to be kings. So when the church tries to act like the state and the state tries to act like church, it's wrong. There should be a separation, just like the mother has duties and the father has duties.
The mother shouldn't attempt to be the father, the father shouldn't attempt to be the mother. Men shouldn't attempt to be women, women shouldn't attempt to be men. We have distinct strengths and weaknesses and different callings and responsibilities.
Similarly with government. Civil government has the sword of justice. They're to fight criminals, they're to protect lives and property, uphold the law. The church is to be a minister of grace. We're not out there to execute criminals, although we can teach that the Bible says these things should be done for these crimes.
We can teach the Bible, but we're not meant to do the job of the government. So should Christians be involved in politics? Yes, but we should resist politics getting involved in the church. So let's put it this way.
We as Christians must be in the world, but we must not be of the world. The boat must be in the water, but the water mustn't be in the boat, or it's sunk. If you want to rescue the perishing, you might need your boat to be in the water to rescue the perishing, but you can't allow the water to be in the boat, because then you're sunk and then you can't save anyone, right?
The church must be in the world saving the lost, but the world shouldn't be in the church sinking the church's standards. And so the clear answer should be that the church should notice the clear distinction and teach the clear distinction between a minister of justice in the state and a minister of grace in the church, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try and do our duty.
So I, as a minister of the gospel, must preach God's word faithfully. As a missionary, part of my calling is to study history and to teach history. I don't attempt to get involved in politics. I've had many individuals ask me if I would run as a candidate for different political parties and I don't have to think for a second.
Answer's no. I am not called to be involved in politics. I preach to politicians. I write about political issues. I will apply the Bible to social problems, but I am not called to politics. I vote. In fact, I've never missed an election.
With all my travels, I've somehow managed to always be here when we've had an election in our country, provincial, municipal, or national. I've always voted. So that's one thing I must do is vote responsibly for pro-life, pro-family, moral party that can uphold Christian principles.
But I'm not called to get involved in politics in a sense of being a member. In fact, in our constitution, I advocated and saw added to our constitution of our mission, no member of our mission is allowed to be a member of a political party.
None of our leaders of our mission can be involved in the political party. And that includes me. And I think that's right. That doesn't mean I don't accept invitations. If I'm invited by the African Christian Democratic Party to go and run a seminar for them or to teach them, I will teach them, no problem.
I mean, I've preached the gospel to the ANC, SWAPO. I've shown Jesus films in Filimo bases, to ZANU-PF. I've been up there, evangelized with SWAPO, PLO, any kind of group, Marxist, Muslim, terrorist, revolutionist, guerrillas.
I will preach anywhere. I've preached in Roman Catholic churches and schools. I've preached in Mormon and Jehovah's Witness places. I've shown the Christian films in schools belonging to cults like the Roman Catholics and others.
So, but that doesn't mean I've compromised the gospel because as a missionary, I'm called to take the gospel to heathen and unsaved. But I must be very careful I don't let them compromise me or make me abuse my ministry for political or cultic ends.
So the fact that we'll go there and preach doesn't mean we agree with them. I'm not Catholic, but if I get the chance to go to a Catholic school, I've even been invited to a debate for the Roman Catholic on the Reformation.
Very glad to do that, very, very glad. I've debated Muslims in the mosque, no problem. But I cannot allow our mission or my ministry to be associated with one political entity. So if the EFF invited me, which I doubt that they would, I would come and I'd do a seminar for them, I'd do services.
Even if I think they are Marxist and I oppose them, I would not turn down an invitation from anyone. So I understand your concern. We shouldn't allow politics to corrupt and manipulate us in the church, but we should speak to political things, what the word of God says.
Yes. Relating to the missionaries in the 19th century, I want to know how were they able to advance the gospel in terms of finance, how they were able to support, because you're coming to Africa or different country, you need support.
So how were they able, because you never made emphasis on that, how were they able to finance this mission?
Right, well, if you take a missionary like Robert Moffat, he belonged to the London Missionary Society. London Missionary Society had various fundraising methods and they supported, not a lot, but he built a magnificent mission base at Kuroman, lovely church, great printing press, paper, printed the Bibles and so on.
And so he was getting support from overseas for his work there. Not so difficult, although sometimes it was hard, obviously. For missionaries like David Livingston, that was a lot harder, because he was traveling and nobody would see him for years.
So how did he survive? He lived off the land. He hunted with his rifle, meat for his men and who was working with him and for himself. And he would, initially, he took a lot of cloth and beads and things that people wanted, mirrors and knives and so on.
And he traded for food or permission to cross the territories. But he was destitute and suffering with no medicines left when Henry Morton Stanley came and resupplied this journalist, Dr. Livingston, I presume, back in 1871 at Ojiji, Tanzania.
So, obviously, they had to live by faith. When he was in the field, he couldn't get resupply. They had to carry everything they needed and then he had to live off the land. And he pointed out what you could make out of a baibab tree's bark and things like this.
He had to repair shoes over and over and was, obviously, living a very simple, humble life. Sometimes just the fish they could catch, game they could shoot and so on. So it was not easy. Now, there are missionaries that have got the tent-making model and you even see today missions like if you go to Kwasi Zabuntu Mission in Zululand, self-supporting farm where they have a commercial farm and they're selling to Silicon Airways and Woolworths, top-class agricultural products to fund their ministry that they're doing and they never take up an offering and they have faith mission.
So there's different models. But when you read the lives of people like Mary Slessor and David Livingston, they struggled, they suffered, but they were often destitute. Mary Slessor, for example, is barefoot most of the time she is working.
She lived a very, very, very humble, poor existence. Mary Slessor, even her family back in Scotland was so poor that she even sent some of the support she got in the field back home to keep her mother and sisters alive because they were so poor in Scotland.
So imagine a missionary who got something like 80 pounds a year. She lived off 20 pounds and sent the rest back home to keep the people, her family surviving. So extraordinary. Obviously they suffered in many cases.