I recently traveled to Kenya with the Upstream Collective to train churches in how to send missionaries well. As a former missionary in East Africa, this was a full circle experience—not simply because of what I taught, but because of what I learned. Once again, East Africa has deeply formed me. In light of that, my reflections over the next several weeks will draw from this journey to Kenya. Karibu!
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What I saw and heard during my visit to Kenya made something clear: Africa’s place in God’s global mission is not merely part of the past or a hope for the future. The Spirit is working through his people. A mighty gospel river is already flowing.
But before we ever thought about the gospel flowing through us, someone carried it to us.
I grew up on a farm near a small town in Kentucky. When I was ten years old, the gospel flowed to me there. I heard that Jesus had died for sinners, risen from the dead, and welcomed me to trust and follow him.
I did not create that message or earn the life it offered. I received it as a gift.
Years later, while I was in college, someone challenged me to consider God’s heart for all nations. I began asking the Lord whether there was a particular nation he wanted me to pray for, learn about, and perhaps one day serve.
The answer that kept returning was a nation in East Africa.
Over time, the Lord opened the way for me to serve as a missionary there. But I arrived carrying an incomplete missionary map. I thought primarily that I was going to a place where Christ had never been proclaimed. And there was real gospel need among those we served. Some were worshiping angels and making sacrifices to trees. Many heard the good news and put their faith in Christ.
But long before my own country existed, the gospel had flowed to this nation. Christians had worshiped Jesus, preserved Scripture, endured suffering, passed their tradition from one generation to another, and then largely forgotten the kernel of the gospel at the heart of their tradition.
This nation taught me to hold two realities together: I saw both great gospel need and a great Christian inheritance. I saw both a mission field and an emerging missionary church. The gospel had not merely traveled from my part of the world toward Africa. It had moved from Jerusalem, through Africa and other parts of the world, and eventually reached a place called Kentucky at the ends of the earth.
The gospel belongs to Jesus, not to the nation or culture that carries it. It flows to us and is received as a gift. It takes root and forms a people. Then the Spirit causes it to flow through those people to others who have not yet received it.
No nation and no continent possesses every gift, resource, or form of access needed for the entire Great Commission. Therefore, the goal is not simply to reverse the old missionary map so that all the arrows that once pointed toward Africa now point away from it. We need the gospel moving in every direction—from everywhere to everywhere—as the Holy Spirit calls and the church responds.
Africa does not need to replace the West at the center of global missions. The West was never meant to be the center. Jesus is the center!
The fundamental question for every healthy African church, then, is not merely, “Do we have enough money?” or “Do we know enough about missions?” It is this: “Whom is the Holy Spirit setting apart among us and how can we send them well?”
As one Cameroonian pastor has said, “Let the church be a gospel river, not a gospel reservoir.”
That is my hope for East African churches—not that the gospel would remain among them, but that it would multiply through them. That churches would form missionaries, missionaries would help establish healthy churches, and those churches would become senders themselves.
I do not wonder whether Africa can become a sender—or whether its time has finally arrived. The Spirit is already sending African believers along pathways of his own design. The question is whether churches and missions organizations will recognize what he is doing, form those he is calling, and steward their sending faithfully together.
My prayer is this:
May the gospel that Africa has received continue flowing among its peoples.
May the Holy Spirit cause it to flow through African believers—to neighboring peoples, across the continent, and far beyond its borders.
And may Jesus remain at the center of it all.