Why Africa’s churches already have the mandate — and the means — to reach the nations

Mission is a sign of a healthy church.¹ A healthy church reproduces itself by preaching the gospel, intentionally discipling those who come to Christ, and mentoring and training passionate men within the congregation for the work ahead. Where this pattern is present, a church grows the way a living thing grows, not by addition alone, but by reproduction.

A Church That Turns Inward Begins to Die

The opposite pattern is just as recognizable. A church that has stopped reproducing has usually stopped being salt and light in any meaningful sense. It has turned inward, absorbed with its own needs and its own development, and in doing so it lets its fire go out. This is not a minor loss. Reproduction is not an optional accessory to spiritual growth; it is one of its essential ingredients. A church that only consumes the gospel, and never gives it away, will eventually go stale.

At the root of this is a simple test: does the church actually believe, teach, and live out the gospel it claims to hold? That question, more than any other, marks the difference between a church and a non-church.

What’s Really Underneath the Inward Turn

Why does a church turn inward in the first place? Often the problem runs deeper than discouragement or a lack of resources. It is a deep misunderstanding of what the church is. Membership rolls are filled with unregenerate people. Church discipline is largely absent. Leadership itself has little grasp of the Word of God; many leaders are parroting what they have heard preached rather than mining the truths of Scripture for themselves.

It is no wonder, then, that churches in this condition reach for whatever method seems to be working. The health-and-prosperity movement is the obvious example, or they simply struggle along with a handful of discouraged people in a congregation that has little influence for the kingdom of God in the community where it is located.

This is the honest diagnosis behind the inward-turning church. And it sets up the real question: if this is the disease, what’s the actual cause?

The Real Problem Isn’t Capacity or Cash

It would be easy to assume that the shortage of healthy, reproducing churches across Africa comes down to resources too few trained leaders willing to go, or too little money to send them. It doesn’t.

As Conrad Mbewe, a Zambian pastor and conference speaker, has put it in an email to the author: “It is not the lack of church planters or the lack of money that is the primary cause for the failure to produce healthy reproducing churches. The real disease is that the church leadership rarely challenges the church membership to see the work of missions as of the very warp and woof of a church’s existence. It is seen as the optional extra for the extraordinary churches to do.”

That is the real disease. Not a capacity problem. Not a financial problem. A leadership problem, one that can, and must, be corrected.

Correction Requires a Table with More Than One Kind of Voice at It

Correcting this will not happen by accident. It requires intentional, focused agreement and networking among like-minded leaders, local, national, and international, who are prepared to speak the same message with one voice. That voice cannot be Western alone, it must be African as well. A leadership problem this deep will not be solved by importing a solution; it will be solved by African and Western leaders working from the same conviction, side by side.

A Model Worth Following: The Self-Supporting Church

What does that correction look like in practice? Missiologists Pocock and Van Rheenen, in The Changing Face of World Missions: Engaging Contemporary Issues and Trends, offer a useful observation about how healthy local churches actually take shape in the developing world.

In rural settings, where the culture is informally organized and there is more time available for ministry, vibrant churches should have a number of vocational ministers and pastors serving the flock. In urban, cash-economy contexts, growing churches should support their own preaching ministers and pastors from within.

The ideal approach, in either setting, is indigenous and built on genuine partnership. Because the work is self-supporting from its formative years, new believers come to Christ out of genuine conviction and faith rather than financial inducement. As these churches mature, they can enter into partnerships that nurture existing fellowships and train evangelists not to prop the church up indefinitely, but to help it become a mission-sending church in its own right. National leaders, missionary leaders, sending churches, and (partner churches) all have a role to play in building the kind of structure that lets a national church do more than merely stand on its own. It becomes a redemptive, mission-sending movement.

A Story, Not Just a Theory

This is not merely a philosophy. It has a face, a place, and a name.

In 1999, at a missions conference hosted by Faith Baptist Church Riverside, the preaching of God’s Word stirred the heart of Pius Musonda Chanda, compelling him to obey Christ’s command: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…” (Matt. 28:19–20). From that moment, Pius carried a growing burden for Kwacha Township in Kitwe, a community shaped by traditional religion, prosperity theology, and Jehovah’s Witness influence.

What began with door-to-door evangelism and a Bible study under a mango tree grew, over two decades, into Faith Baptist Church Kwacha, a congregation with its own building, its own pastor, and its own sent-out leaders. FBC Riverside provided materials and financing for the foundation and the slab; the believers of Kwacha owned the labor, digging the foundations themselves. This was partnership, not dependency.

In 2010, Pius was called as the church’s pastor. Under his leadership, the church matured — discipling believers, training leaders, and maintaining a gospel witness in a hard community. A key focus of his ministry was developing indigenous leadership, and in time he discipled Salim Mpambanya, who trained at Central Africa Baptist University and was sent out as a church-planting pastor to a new congregation in Twatasha, Kitwe. 

What started under a mango tree became a church that plants churches. That is not an isolated success story. That is what the mandate looks like when a leadership problem gets corrected.

The Mandate Is Clear. So Is the Path.

None of this is a call for despair. Every diagnosis in this piece the inward-turning church, the weak theological foundation underneath it, the leadership vacuum, the absence of a unified African and Western voice is a diagnosis of a problem that can be corrected, because the underlying mandate has never been in question.

Christ has commanded His church, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to go to all peoples, proclaim the gospel, make and baptize disciples, gather them into local churches, teach them the whole counsel of God, appoint qualified leaders, and multiply churches to the ends of the earth (Matt. 28:18–20; Acts 1:8; Acts 13:1–4; Acts 14:21–23; Titus 1:5; Rom. 15:20–24). That is not a suggestion for extraordinary churches. It is the ordinary calling of every church that bears the name of Christ.

The African church has the gospel. It has men and women who can be mentored and trained. It has, in the indigenous partnership model and in churches like Faith Baptist Kwacha, a proven pattern for building churches that plant churches rather than churches that merely survive.

What is required now is leadership willing to put missions back where it belongs: not as an extra for extraordinary churches, but as the very fabric of what it means to be a healthy church.

1. 9 Marks Ministry.  http://www.9marks.org/what-are-the-9marks/ ↩︎