Utumishi Blog

Thanking God for the East Africa Bible Expositors’ Fellowship last week in Kisumu. Great joy and encouragement to meet with brothers from 6 nations, learning from Titus together, talking honestly, finding out about what God is doing through some great ministries across this region.

Some stuff I learnt personally from other participants, preachers and facilitators:

• It is good to stare in the face the ‘brutal facts’ in our E African context that challenge faithful Bible teaching and the practice of hard lengthy labour on the text: 1) The attitude “I know the passage already”; 2) Congregations that are easily impressed, so I can get away with cutting corners; 3) Wanting to be popular / wanting to hold onto people who are deserting to the prosperity / hyper-pentecostal churches so I am tempted to copy what they are doing; 4) Wanting quick easy fixes; 5) Hobby-horses and the temptation of sermon recycling; 6) Taking too many preaching invitations; 7) Lack of deep, honest relationships where feedback can be given and received; 8) Poverty, especially in the rural areas, where the pastor has virtually no pay, where the congregation wants him to support them (rather than vice versa) and the pastor is overwhelmed by his own needs and those of others. In the face of these big challenges ways forward proposed included: a) Continual reminders of the great Saviour God whom we serve, his charge to ‘preach the Word’, and the absolute necessity and power of faithful preaching of Christ crucified; b) Continual reminders of servant leadership – serving others and not ourselves; c) Fellowships like the EABEF where we can be encouraging one another, spurring one another on, supporting one another spiritually, emotionally and materially; d) The need to think of many rural pastoral placements as mission placements where the pastors are sent, supported and resourced as mission partners by urban churches; e) The need to keep the focus on the local church – fellowships and para-church organisations simply as encouragers of the local church.
• There is a great value in a multiplicity of teaching voices – where there is a great deal of theological consensus and unity in the gospel but at the same time some range of style, emphasis and perspective: a) because we don’t want to create clones of our own imperfect theology but rather provoke people to search the Scriptures for themselves; b) the plurality of elders (Titus 1:5); c) many counsellors (Prov. 11:14); d) avoiding guru status (Matt. 23:8).
• From Determine Dusabumuremyi: Before we come to the mechanics of sermon preparation and delivery there is a need for a deep heart work in the preacher. He needs to be awed by the ‘theatre’ in which he preaches – presence of God and coming of Christ (2 Tim 4:1) – and humbled by the greatness of the words and task with which he has been entrusted – words of eternal life to raise the dead. He needs to soak in the passage until he is personally convicted and formed by it; seeing himself as first and foremost a terrible sinner receiving glorious grace (Isaiah 6). And then he needs to feel the divine indignation at what is crippling the church (cf. Gal. 1:6; 3:1; 4:19-20; 2 Cor. 11:2). So perhaps there is another ‘C’ – Captured by the Word – that produces the 5 C’s.
• One of the big problems with the ‘hyper-grace’ movement (“Sin boldly”) is that there is no process of conviction and humbling. The exposition of Psalm 32 showed us not only the great, great joy of having our sins forgiven but also the way forgiveness is connected with a deep humbling in which I see the awfulness of my sin and feel the crushing weight and admit “I am a sinner” not in a bold, flippant way but in seriousness and sorrow, having been brought to the very end of myself, finding myself face down in a muck of my own creation, and then how the humbled, forgiven, beloved sinner is, as a result, a teachable, guidable disciple.
• The area of specific application to attitudes and behaviour (the imperatives of the message) is just as weighty as the area of gospel truths (the indicatives of the message) and requires just as much serious thought and preparation as the latter. Because the gospel is so weighty the application is weighty. Though there is danger in being too specific, often giving examples, telling stories and painting pictures of what this might look like in practice can be very helpful here.
• The focus of faith is the forward-looking confident hope and longing for the appearing of the crucified saving God-man (Titus 2:11-14; 1 Thess. 1:10).
• Our unity is around the gospel not around a particular method of text to sermon.

Some resources and links:

• Digging Deeper into Titus
• PTW Rwanda
• GBUR Rwanda
• Proclaim Africa
• Biblica Uganda
• Living Word Uganda
• GLA Uganda
• BUILD
• iServe Africa
• AICMAR Kenya
• SIM Ethiopia
• TnT Ministries – youth and children’s ministry resourcing
• ACFAR – great resources on apologetics including some in E African languages