All right, brethren, I'll just allow for one more minute for those coming in to settle down. The way I intend to proceed as we go through this breakout session, which is really a learning from the history of the church in Africa, will be that I'll probably try to speak for about 30 to 45 minutes, but I really would like to get some questions from you, because I'll be trying to cram about 2,000 years into roughly 30 to 40 minutes.

That's an impossible task. But really, as we learn from that piece of history, we will be as individuals having some thoughts that we may need clarity on, and therefore I would like that to be the opportunity for you to ask. I'm not sure whether they'll bring the microphone to you or whether you'll be able to speak loud enough for us to hear, and then I will answer.

So that's the way that I'd like us to proceed, so that we may learn, because history is God's story. is what God has been doing in history, and He's a principled God, and therefore we can learn from Him. Well, let's pray then as we commence. Eternal and gracious God in heaven, thank you for this opportunity for us to learn together from history, from your story, especially around the continent of Africa.

We pray that as we think about the work of missions, that we may especially learn from the missionary activities of the past, so that we may be enabled to do your work in an even better way as we draw near to the second coming of your Son. Be with us now we ask in Jesus' name, amen.

Yeah, so now when we begin to consider God's work in the continent of Africa, we really need to realize that unlike America, we are dealing with a continent that is integrated to some extent with the history that is there in the Bible. An obvious example is Egypt, where I was last week.

You know that the people of God collectively, Israel, would have spent time in Egypt. But also our own Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, you will recall that from His birth, His parents hid Him in Africa for a season, and then when Herod, who was seeking to take His life, died, He was able then to go back into the promised land.

But even as you get into the book of Acts, again you will notice individuals like the Utopian eunuch who ended up going back into Ethiopia, and it is believed that quite a part of the Christian church in that part of the world comes from there. So there's a lot to be said for especially North Africa and its involvement with the New Testament church.

One or two individuals that are mentioned even in the book of Acts, once you hear the word "Niger," you already know that it is related again to our part of the world. It is said of Apollos, a native of Alexandria, and as you know, Apollos again was an individual that was quite eloquent and played his role, not only in Ephesus but also in Corinth as well.

So really, by the time the biblical literature is coming to a close, there is some way in which the continent of Africa is beginning to have a spillover of the Christian faith that was taking place in what we would refer to as the Middle East. Part of what caused this was really the persecution that was taking place in the Jewish area, and Christians were having to escape for their lives.

Some would have gone in the direction where we have India and Asia in that sense. Others would have been making their way further into Europe, and some would have been making their way further south. But it wasn't long before Alexandria, and those of you who have studied church history will attest to this, in the Nile Delta pouring into the Mediterranean Sea, you have a city there called Alexandria that became by and large the center of Christianity in terms of dealing with quite a number of the major doctrinal clarity that has since come to be appreciated by the church universal.

So you have names like Origen, you've got names like Clement of Alexandria, you've got names like Athanasius, and so on. Names that all of you here, if you've ever bothered to be in the church context, rather in a Bible college context, would have studied. So I can go on quite a bit because there are a number of names that keep coming up.

So the Trinitarian controversy, for instance, is one that would have been settled there. The anthropological controversy in terms of the capacities that are there with respect to sin and salvation in us would have also been settled there. So the church universal in that sense owes a lot to that part of the world.

In fact, as I said last week, I was preaching at a conference in Alexandria, and I remember saying to the 500 or so individuals who were listening that they just don't know how privileged they are to live in Alexandria because of the richness of that history. On one hand, if one was to say what do I learn from that context, it's the place of theological training and theological clarity in the health of the Christian church.

The school that was established in Alexandria helped to provide that foundation. And therefore, we as churches need to be deliberate in ensuring that we are supporting educational institutions that are credible as far as theology is concerned, because on that foundation we build the future of the Christian faith. So when you think in terms of TMU, you think in terms of the Master's Seminary here, when you think in terms of TMAI, the Master's Academy International, and a number of you are coming from backgrounds where you are running seminaries, Bible colleges, perhaps even attached to your church, don't look down upon that.

It's an all-important point. However, it's not long before in the 6th century that Islam came in from Saudi Arabia, flowed into Egypt itself, and cleared the Christian witness and the Christian churches in North Africa. I don't need to go into details about how that happened. I want to keep concentrating on what we learn from what happened.

And basically, the reason why -- we may argue about it -- but the reason why the Christian faith suffered the way it did at the hands of the Arabs that came in the name of Islam, it is said that there would have been at least two or three causes.

One of them was the fact that the church was largely disunited because of the doctrinal controversies that were taking place. And so instead of thinking in terms of what we have in common, the church was largely thinking in terms of what we don't have in common and concentrating on that.

And therefore, when Islam came sweeping through, instead of working together, the Christian church was largely fragmented. The second is the fact that there were a number of what you'd call local tribes in North Africa that would have made up quite a bit of the majority. But because they were of the poorer section of society, like one of them is called the Babas, they were not reached out in terms of bringing the Christian faith to their level so that they would internalize it and the very culture would be developed along biblical lines.

And so it's like the Christian faith was largely for an elite section of society and therefore when these warriors of Islam came through, North Africa was not ready to resist. Now, of course, they also came with negotiations. So if you don't fight back, you will be allowed to still remain as you please.

But in the process, they were still overtaken by an Islamic culture. So generally speaking, that is what is said, so the Coptic church in North Africa was not able to withstand the attacks that were coming. And it is said that by the year 1050, the bishops of the Christian church went right down from about 30 to 40 to about 6 bishops.

And by the year 1300, we were down to actually just one bishop of the Christian church in North Africa. Again, just a basic lesson. I think as churches, we do need to be clear about what we believe. So there is nothing wrong with that. We need to teach our people why we are Presbyterians or why we are Baptists or why we are Reformed.

We need to teach them. But I think we need to also learn to draw the line in terms of we are brethren in the Lord where the Bible draws the line. I've written a small book, it should be in the bookshops there, it's under Crossway, and it's entitled "Unity" and it's "Striving Together for the Gospel." And I tried to argue in that book exactly what I'm saying here, that it's true we ought to have a clear doctrinal position because we are a church, we are churches.

But at the same time, there are areas where we can work together. For instance, book publishing is a typical example. The Bible being published in various languages and so on, again, it's something that we can fairly easily do together. And some conferences can again bring Christians together in a wider area because when the world attacks, it rarely simply attacks one denomination.

As far as I'm concerned, Christians, and if we are fragmented, we are weak at that level. So we need to be clear on that score. And then the second, again a lesson being learned from church history, is that the Christian faith, we must learn to break the boundaries, the social demographic boundaries around us to ensure that the gospel crosses into even the inner cities or the poorer sections of our wider society.

In Africa, for instance, what you call here the prosperity gospel, it's metamorphosized into something that's beyond that in Africa. But it's in the poorer parts of our cities, the congested areas of our cities. And it's easy for us Reformed people, because Reformed you tend to be sort of professionals going upwards, it's easy for us to have a lot of light, doctrinal light among ourselves, and then when you cross into these densely populated areas, there's darkness there.

And we need to realize that that's where trouble comes from. And therefore, we need to ensure that the Christian faith is reaching those areas, transforming people in those areas, so that biblical Christianity is also there. Otherwise, it remains an elitist club, and when political upheavals begin, we are completely powerless because normally those end up with the crowds, and the crowds don't have biblical Christianity.

Okay, so that's the second aspect that we learn from this attack of Islam. Now, if I had a map of Africa here, so I need to imagine that I am on your side of the map, okay? So, West Africa is somewhere here, Egypt and Ethiopia are somewhere here, and then somewhere at the bottom here is where we have Zambia and South Africa and so on, okay?

So the L-shape is a little bit like that. So if you can imagine, what happened was that Christianity was wiped out at the top. Well, they were still there, but completely weak. The Muslims, as they made their way into Spain, that's where they were stopped in their major campaign.

There was another movement that brought the Christian faith back into Africa, but this time it is well after the Reformation and -- well, around the Reformation era, by the way. So it's around the 16th century that new efforts began. And again, we've got some lessons there, so that's why I want us to quickly rush there.

And it was the fact that Europe was looking for materials, foodstuffs and so on that would be used for economic purposes, and they were looking for that from Asia. Previously, they would make their way through the Mediterranean, through the Red Sea, and then make their way to India, for instance, to get their merchandise, their commodities.

But now that place was taken over by Islam, so it was completely dangerous. And so they began to look for ways to -- so here we have the map I was talking about. So you have Portugal and Spain on this side. So they began to look for ways to get to India, and the way to do it is to come down West Africa, come all the way to the Cape, at that time of good hope, and then make your way up until you get to India.

So individuals like Vasco da Gama and others began to, on behalf of the Portuguese king, began to make efforts to survey those opportunities to go and get to India and other places in Asia, sell commodities, get others, bring them back, and so on. So what motivated the discovery of that route was not Christianity at that point.

It's human greed. However, these ships also took with them chaplains and missionaries. As they were making their way around Africa, they would have places where they would stop to have meals, to rest, to offload some items and get others on and so forth, and in those places they began to establish mission stations.

And normally these were chaplains that would be ministering to their own people in those areas. There were two slight weaknesses with that. One was it wasn't really missions, because missions is supposed to be you going to the people that live there in order to reach them with the gospel.

You're not going there to your own people and then try to minister to them. That was the first weakness. The second is that this was almost exclusively Roman Catholic missionaries and chaplains. You know Spain, and you know Portugal. It was almost exclusively Roman Catholic, and it proved to have been a complete disaster, a complete disaster.

The first reason is that they didn't have the gospel. It was a religion of works. So inevitably the religion of works does not change a person from inside out. So it gives people a form of religion, but it does not kill the "me" to establish Christ at the center of one's life.

So it proved a complete failure for that reason. Another reason is that there was already something of the slave trade that was beginning to happen, and there was a lot of suspicion of people with a light skin. And so a number of these missionaries, or chaplains, a mixture of the two, number one were suspected by the local people to be part of these who are coming in in order to grab land and grab our people.

And number two, a number of them were wrongly accused and therefore murdered. So you had quite a number of mission posts that would start and then they would be completely raided, and that would be the end. All the way, remember the map, around West Africa, all the way down to the Cape, East Africa as you are making your way to India.

Just one or two comments about that. Remember we are trying to learn lessons. The first from that period is quite simple, and it's this, that there's no missions without the gospel. You can, in a sense, establish some kind of Christianity by providing health facilities and educational facilities, by providing clothing and food and so forth.

You will get people together. But without the true gospel, you are simply preparing yourself for disappointment. It's a matter of time. So that's number one. Number two is that we need to be clear in our minds as we are engaged in missions, who are we being associated with? Who are we being associated with?

As we shall go on to see when we come to what is called the scramble for Africa, one of the difficulties that the Christian church had in missions was this fear of the people that these are linked with these, and therefore we don't want them. Well, in actual fact, they were bringing the gospel.

There's a saying in Africa, maybe I'm going ahead of myself here, there's a saying in Africa that the missionary came with the Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. It's a very famous saying, and they say that we had the land, they had the Bible. We closed our eyes because they said let's pray.

And when we opened, we had the Bible, they had the land. Now obviously it's not true, but you can see it's this association that had its own serious implications. And I think there are times when riding on the back of secular, non-Christian institutions can apparently make our work lighter, apparently.

But before long we can easily discover that in fact it has become our loss because of associations. So I will sort of jump into that in a moment. But somewhere in the 1800, rather 18th century, there was born what we call today the great missionary movement. You remember William Carey, he didn't come to Africa, he went to India.

But it was round about that time that there was a huge movement among Protestants now, among Protestants, that began to also go into the same world where Roman Catholic missions had failed. The difference is that they came in with the true gospel. And as they came in with the true gospel, a lot of them were missionary societies that involved different denominations working together.

But working together in order to see the churches established. So again, we've got our map. So the first area that really got covered was West Africa, just at the bottom there. You know, you have Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Togo, and other countries there. So that's where you initially had a number of mission stations starting.

And then you had the West Africa where you have the Congo, you've got Angola, and so on. Again there, along the shore, the coastal region, again you began having different mission stations being established. And then you had South Africa itself as well with the British and Dutch missionaries. And then as you begin to go up Mozambique, and so on, Tanzania, and Kenya, and so forth, you had other mission agencies that were establishing mission stations.

The greatest challenge that was there then was the slave trade. Because what it did is it made the people to fail to be established in one place. One of my favorite missionaries is David Livingstone, and I've read his biography a few times and even taught on it. And one of his greatest frustrations when he left the Cape, there was Robert Moffat there, he married Robert's daughter, and they made their way.

He wanted to bring the Gospel into the interior of Africa. And he found that he would settle in one place, begin to minister to the people there, and then in the middle of the night the place would be raided, the following day there's nobody. The people have been taken.

Or, sometimes it's not even being raided, it's just rumor does its rounds that we will be raided, and then the people would disappear. It really frustrated him. And hence one of the things that David Livingstone did was to go back to Britain and he was pleading with Christians there to come into Africa.

But he didn't just want them to come as missionaries, in other words to bring Christianity. He also wanted them to bring commerce into Africa. Because he felt that if commerce came in, then the governments that are benefiting from that commerce would deliberately also want to come in and protect those areas.

And so they used to be called protectorates. And once they do so, then the social lives of the people would stabilize. So he would speak in terms of commerce and Christianity, commerce and Christianity, because of the fact that he realized that that was what was going to help bring about the social stability.

Well, it began to happen, and the result of that is what was called the scramble for Africa. Because Britain, Germany, Spain, Portugal, I mean all these countries, just Belgium, they just rushed in. And on one hand, it helped to stabilize, because now people just couldn't come through as bandits with guns and ship slaves away.

The places were now protected. The people that were there were now getting into employment at a very basic level and getting more and more established. Roads were being developed, railway lines were being developed, postal systems were being developed, schools and hospitals were being developed, and so on. Not really necessarily for the benefit of the people that they found there, but it was necessary even for their own people that would be living in those places.

So that was a huge period that took place from about 1878 to the year 1900. Now inevitably, it had positive and negative effects on missions, and then I want to just quickly comment on that. One was that it became easier to do missions work, because you now had roads, you had railway lines, you had postal systems, you could ask for supplies from Europe, and the supplies would arrive through the supply chain.

It's bringing other things, and it would also bring your Bibles, your medical equipment, and so on and so forth. So it made missions easier. The downside to it was the fact that, for instance, in the areas that were under Portuguese and Spanish control, for instance, Protestants were not welcome there.

Because each country that had its area ensured that its state religion is the one that was being encouraged. And so even now, when you go into various parts of Africa, you can't miss the fact that you can see the development that took place is parallel with the kind of church that was established there through missions agencies.

So on one hand, it meant that those areas that were Protestant were jealously guarded by the state that was over the place, and therefore the Christian church would grow and multiply under that particular banner. So there were positives and negatives, simply because the Christian church is in a new world.

Those of you who've done church history will appreciate that we often say that God in His wisdom brought the Christian faith to its fruition under the Roman Empire, because the Roman Empire provided the network, provided the language, provided so much that then the Christian church just roared on top of it.

The Apostle Paul and others benefited from that. Well, that's exactly what was happening in Africa as well. So there were positives and there were negatives. Another positive was that whereas previously the world wasn't interested when missionaries were dying like flies, they're not interested, but now that they were coming in to get the wealth in order to ship it to their countries, well when their own non-Christian employees were dying like flies, well they began to seriously try and find the answer to this fever that was killing their people.

In due season it was found that it is malaria, it was found that it was caused by a mosquito, a particular kind of mosquito, and in the process they found the medicine for it and that helped missionaries to live longer on the continent. So there were some benefits that were coming out of the scientific revolution.

I think the lessons from there must be pretty obvious. We cannot completely divorce ourselves from the world, from what's happening in the political economic sphere. We can benefit from it. I mean think of the internet. I don't think the guys behind the internet who were thinking about spreading the gospel were there.

Maybe. But I doubt it. But look at the impact it has had in the world, and I'm speaking about Africa. Prior to the world of the internet, Africa was largely swept over by the prosperity gospel through cable TV. We didn't have the money, those of us who were reformed, we didn't have the money to compete.

So it was junk that was being piped across the continent. Well, 10, 20 years ago, people began to download the MacArthur, Piper, Paw Washer, Samoans, and it's young people doing so through their cell phones, and the situation on the ground has changed. It's amazing. So there are these benefits that come from developmental scientific changes that are happening in the world where we are not wrong to connect with that and begin to benefit from that.

So that's definitely one area that we need to be innovative. So sometimes I go to places where I find people have a very negative view of David Livingstone. They say, "Ah, he wasn't a missionary, he was just an explorer," they say. Well, let me tell you something, Zambia, which is the country I come from, became independent in 1964, and at that time all its major cities were named after individuals in Britain or cities in Britain.

In 1964, the first indigenous Zambian government changed all those names to African names except one, just one, and that was 61 years ago when they decided this one we won't change to an African name, and it is the city called Livingstone. It's the only city in the whole country of Zambia with a foreign name.

And this is now 60 years later, nobody ever says, "What are we still doing with this explorer?" The reason is because they appreciate what this person did when he opened up Central Africa to commerce and Christianity. It stabilised our lives. It helped us to live with one another as well because we recognised we are all made in the image of God.

He's not the one who was preaching to us, but he brought in the missionaries and we are beneficiaries. Now I need to rush on to just one extra point and then I need to allow for at least 10, 15 minutes in case you've got some questions. We fast forward to the more recent past.

When the foreign missionaries began to work all over Africa, one of the things that they were jealous about, or careful about, was to separate African traditional religions from Christianity. So anything that smelled like African traditional religions, they kept out. Even just the drums that were being beaten were kept out.

In fact, there's somebody who drew a picture which was obviously a cartoon and it was of a missionary. He drew the map of Africa as if it's on the ground. And so it was a missionary dragging a piano from the coast and sort of taking it into Africa in order to kick out the African drum.

Obviously it's comical. But to some extent, there was a loss and a gain. The gain was that it helped the African church or converts to clarify in their minds that this is something new. So there was being willing to throw away the baby with the bathwater so that we don't make this mistake.

And therefore when the initial prophets on African soil were coming up, they were rejected and they were, listen to me, excommunicated. And so they began their own cults, and there were quite a number across Africa, I could give you their names. But the evangelical church was protected for at least 50 years, maybe even 100 years.

But in the second part of the last century, so that's 1950 going onwards, because of the Pentecostal movement that had begun on this side, inside the evangelical world, well, the door got opened for prophets in the churches. In evangelical circles, and a floodgate has since opened, a major floodgate that has made it extremely difficult for the evangelical church – now I know in America that phrase can be anything, but I'm speaking in terms of gospel-centered churches – to be able to say that that undermines the sufficiency of Scripture.

So if I was to speak in terms of a recent lesson that we need to learn, it is the wisdom of the pioneer Christian missionaries that came into that part of the world to protect Protestantism from being swallowed by African traditional religions. At the moment, one of the most popular views of a pastor is that he's a man of God.

Now that's supposed to be innocent, isn't it? But the man of God, meaning he's the guy who is the equivalent to the village witch doctor, he exudes with strange powers so that he takes away all your problems, basically. If you're failing to get married, go to him, he'll do dabra kadabra and you'll get married.

If your business is failing, go to him, he'll do the same dabra kadabra and your business will pick up. Just the same way in which you go to the witch doctor and he moves a few bones around and supposedly fixes your problems. So it's an area that today we desperately need to be biblical about.

So let me explain what I mean by that. It's not enough if someone tells you that I've established 200 churches in my part of Africa. People go, "Wow!" Find out what is it that is believed there. What is it that's being taught? And sadly, if you were to go and listen to what's going on there, there's very little resemblance to the Christianity of the Bible.

It's African traditional religion sprinkled with a little bit of Christianity. That's not missions. That's not missions. And especially the fact that as I'm speaking right now, there is a growth of the Christian faith on African soil. The numbers are staggering, by the way, and that Christian faith is now being exported back to the Western world.

Sadly, we are exporting what is even more dangerous than what you exported to us in the recent past. And there's need for those of us who are of a Reformed conviction, not only to be shocked about this, but to say to ourselves, "Let's get into action. Let's do something about this.

Let's help establish sound churches where the Spirit of God is clearly working. Let's establish training for pastors so that they are really grounded as the converts are multiplying." I mean literally, the Christian church is galloping while we are still tying our shoelaces. Let's do our part so that we have a healthier Christianity coming from Africa in the near future.

Well, brethren, there are ten more minutes, and I would hate to make you lose those ten minutes with me just continuing to rumble along. If there's an area some of you are already ministering in various parts of Africa, you may want to ask a question or two. I'd like to answer those questions.

There may be no microphone, but we are men. There is -- oh, there we are. So anybody, just walk or he gets to you or whatever. Ah, there we are. Question. Can you hear me? Yes. Zambia is a Christian nation in its Declaration of Independence similar to -- the Declaration of Independence is similar to ours.

How do you find that nation being called Christian? Is it as unhealthy as the rest of the nations in Africa, or is it more healthy? All right. So the way Zambia ended up with the phrase, "Zambia is a Christian nation in its Constitution," was largely a reaction. So what happened was towards the end of the 1980s, Eastern sort of Asian religions like Buddhism and Hinduism and so on, quite apart from Islam, were beginning to find inroads into Zambia, and it was largely through the political structures.

You know, these religions, especially Islam, tends to be quite political. So when the new government came in in 1991, there was already -- well, part of the reason why the previous president lost was because people were already beginning to see these inroads and it was making them very uncomfortable.

So part of the campaign by the opposition was the fact that when we come into power, we'll make sure that these guys are kicked back where they belong. And so as soon as that new president came in, who was Frederick Chiluva, he made the declaration literally within a month of him becoming president, and then parliament enacted in terms of putting it into our Constitution.

So it was largely a reaction. And so a number of years later when he would be asked, "What do you really mean by this?" it was clear that he didn't quite know what to say except the fact that, "I'm just saying that 85% of Zambians claim to be Christian." That's the way he began to justify it.

It has not changed anything in terms of the number of people getting converted, the number of churches being established, because Zambia already is a very open country to the Christian faith. The best schools in Zambia are run by churches by far; 60% of our health facilities are run by churches.

The government recognizes that. And so there is a lot of goodwill in the Zambian context, I would say. So it's there in our Constitution, but it doesn't make anybody more Christian than they already were. In terms of swearing in court or in parliament, it was still being done on the Bible, which is still done even today, except, of course, if you are a Muslim, you can sort of do it in another book or not at all.

So that's the way that I would put it, yeah. We do have an open door, however, in terms of reaching our politicians because of that, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Pastor Mbiwe. My name is Alan, and I serve at a local church in here in Himosa Beach, and we have outreaches in different parts of the world.

And I'm involved in our missions, and one of the things that I've noticed is a lot of people that want to associate with us for whatever reason. And what are the things that you would describe as ways to vet people that want to associate with you? And I know you have to, you know, you look at doctrinal things, you look at what is their teaching, but I'm interested to know because you've established a, you know, a seminary, and I know Voddie Blockham has been involved with you.

But in Africa, does your seminary, do you provide resources for people wanting to, from the West, that want to get involved with people in Africa, pastors in Africa, training resources for them? Because we see one of the problems is training as well. A lot of the pastors are under-trained, and so they don't have the means and the scope to vet people even in their own situations, churches that they should be associated with.

So I'm just asking, do you have resources for that, for people, for churches over here that want to do that? Because there's a lot of people that want to associate with us, but we kind of are very careful about that because we see a lot of abuse. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, thank you. Let me try and just answer that in a minute or two. I think first of all, with respect to training in Africa itself, we tend to think in terms of a pyramid or a triangle. So first of all, there is grassroots training, seminars, symposiums, sort of block classes, and some of them are just about exegesis of texts and turning that text into a sermon and so forth.

So there's a lot of that happening at the grassroots level because, as you rightly pointed out, there's so much happening that if we try to limit our training to seminary training, it will be a drop in the ocean. So there's a lot that's happening at grassroots level. And then, but we are mindful that we need to train the kind of leaders who will lead the leaders.

And that's where this sort of, the tip of the pyramid comes in, where we are looking, which is what we do at the African Christian University, we are looking around the continent, seeing who are these guys who are sort of coming to the top so that we can train them and send them back.

And that way, what the Lord will do with them, we don't know, but at least we are helping countries to then have the best trained pastors that we can. Now some of them are training out in the West and coming back, but others train here and they stay, so we have the guys that we are training on the ground.

Now as to who do you associate with? My answer to that question is always, the way you do it even here in the West, it's who do you know who you can trust, who then knows someone else, who then knows that guy? Because that's safer than you simply getting an email from someone and they are claiming all kinds of things.

Because yes, they tend to know who you are and what you want to hear, and that's what they give you. And a lot of Americans have ended up very disappointed when they finally got into the ground and found what they were supporting, they would not even want to be named next to that.

So think in terms of, you probably know one or two brethren that are already doing something in Africa. Try and get a name from them that they already trust and know and then work your way to that. For instance, I met somebody here who is working in, trying to get work going in East Africa, at least three countries.

And I said to him, send me, I gave him my business cards, shoot me an email, and what I'll do is I'll give you somebody in Uganda, somebody in Kenya, somebody in Tanzania, and you can, you know, continue working along those lines. So that's what I would advise all of you, and I'm sure you do it even in America with respect to, you know, ministries and churches here, you can do it with us as well.

Good. I think you'll be the last one, brother. We've got two minutes. I'll make my question quick then. Okay. My question is, what can we do here in the West to partner with our brothers on the continent in terms of training, development, you know, what are some practical things we can do here with all the resources we've been blessed with so that we can be a blessing to you on the continent?

Thank you. The first is this, among yourselves, we don't need to have all of you traveling to Africa, but in your little sort of circle of pastors, fraternals, and churches that relate, at least get one of you to actually come and visit because it's difficult to describe what the Lord is doing on the ground, what the opportunities are there, but when you come, you mingle, you lecture in our different levels of pastoral training, you come back, you are able to then speak to your friends in your fraternals and say, "Look, these are the needs that I saw on the ground.

These are the kind of things that we can be able to do." And there's no shortage in terms of needs for -- especially those of you who are pastors and others who are lecturing in Bible colleges, to come and, you know, minister in our churches. Usually we have the wrong guys coming, and you guys are still on this side of the ocean.

So to do block classes, for instance, in our various colleges and seminars and so forth, and I can assure you what has often happened is this, and Vaud is a typical example. He now sees the needs on the ground, and because one of his legs is on this side, he's able to see what this side can do on that other side, which we don't see.

And so I'd like to encourage you to do that. And if any of you would like to attempt that, please get in touch with me. Let's talk about it, because you may think that there's hardly anything that you can add to the African context. Well, the extreme charismatics are not thinking like that.

They're literally filling up aeroplanes and crossing over, and sending a lot of free junk to Africa. So I would like to encourage you to think like that. Come over, see for yourselves, then you can come back and you'll be the ones saying, "I saw those gaps. This is something that we can be able to do to strengthen the hands of the right guys on the African continent, so that as we are sending missionaries across Africa, even into North Africa, because for us it's the same continent.

It's on land. Guys get there. That we are strengthened. The church is more biblically based." Well, brethren, I don't want this to turn into African time. I'm told here you stick to time, so let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, thank you that history is your story. You have worked around the world, you've worked in Africa, even in attempting to summarize two thousand years of African church history.

We can still see a few lessons percolating to the top. We pray, Lord, that we may learn from both the positives and negatives in that history, and that today, with the baton in our hands, help us, O Lord, to be faithful, to catch in ourselves the wind that is blowing, so that we can make much of the opportunity for the good of the church and for the glory of God.

We pray this for Jesus' sake, amen. Thank you.