Spurgeon taught ‘Your business when you get to a text is to ask, what is the road to Christ?’ Richard Coombs discusses how good Bible handling is at risk in Kenya and the impact biblical training could have on a church-going country that is under attack.
Encouraging the 60 clergy from the Anglican Church in Kenya to preach Christ from the Old Testament was the aim of the third St Julian’s Annual Conference at which Rupert Shelley (Director of Mission Partnerships) and I were privileged to to speak at in early October. (Meet the clergy here!)
As well as sessions and workshops on how to handle Old Testament narratives, we gave expositions from the Joseph narrative in Genesis 37-50 as worked examples. Imposing meaning onto the text rather than finding it in the Bible passage is as common in Kenya as it is in the UK. The difference in Kenya is that this leads to the prosperity gospel, moralism, acceptance of tribal religious practises and superstition. The St Julian’s Training Centre is showing a better way.
Over lunch, I sat next to a young man who is responsible for training children’s workers in his diocese in Bible-handling skills. He’d been saved from alcoholism in his early twenties when he became desperate and returned to the faith of his youth. He is now passionate that children in Kenya receive a firm grounding in the Scriptures. Thanks to St Julian’s, he now has the vision of showing children Christ in every part of the Bible, especially in Old Testament stories which can so easily be taught as moral examples rather than part of the gospel of God’s grace.
When I asked how he’d discovered the St Julian’s Bible training courses, he told me his vicar had sent him after realising that his Bible-handling skills learned at theological college were lacking. The young man returned from his first course with his approach to preaching completely changed. Instead of using the passage as a runway from which to launch his own ideas, he now tries to teach what’s in the text and apply it to the lives of his congregation. The vicar was thrilled and encouraged him to come to subsequent courses.
The church in Kenya is under attack from many sides: the prosperity gospel, tribal religion and the infiltration of Western secularism. But still, the majority of the population is in church on Sundays and in midweek meetings. Please pray that these courses will strengthen the Anglican Church in Kenya. When the voice of God is heard as the word of God and is taught in the power of the Spirit of God, then the church of God will be built.
Richard Coombs is Rector of St Matthew’s & The Minster in Cheltenham
