On…the church in Sierra Leone

John giving one of the pastor training sessions

Today we come to the church. What is my experience of the church in SL and how can that affect my view of church here?

The answer to the first question is: limited. We were part of three church services, two at the same church (Grace Community Church in Freetown) and one at the Assemblies of God church in Koidu Town (the church I preached in).

And these couldn’t be more different. GCC is effectively a church run by Truth Mission – the staff preach and lead the services, with occasional help from others. They sing some of their songs from hymnbooks (”Trust and Obey” and “To God be the Glory” where done in both weeks) and other African choruses without. On the other hand, the AOG church was very African and lively, the men and women sat on opposite sides and the offering involved everyone standing up and filing past the collection box!

So it is hard for me to diagnose the church accurately, and much of what I say is based on what other people (mainly Chris Jonah – the head of TM) have said. Here goes: the church suffers from the following (not unrelated) problems:

• Prosperity gospel – this is when people are promised a life of good health, wealth and prosperity as a result of accepting Jesus. You can see how this would be an attractive thing for people living in difficult conditions and who are in need financially, but we didn’t find out what happens when these promises don’t come true. A consequence of this is the distortion of the NT teaching on discipleship being marked by suffering and persecution.
• Verses out-of-context – this is one of the issues we were trying to address in our training sessions. It is common for sermons to focus on perhaps just one verse and for the preacher to give mostly his thoughts with little or no reference to the immediate or broader context. An example of this is Paul’s suggestion to Timothy to drink a little wine for his stomach in 1 Timothy 5, and whether this wine is fermented or not, questions which seem to me to be irrelevant to the gist of the passage. The pastors in Kono were obsessed with this verse and did not stop asking questions about it!
• Lack of resources – most pastors outside of Freetownbg would probably not have access to commentaries, disturbingly one of the pastors did not bring a bible to the training! We hope to be able to send some books out on future trips that TM staff are making to Sierra Leone.

Not to say by any means these are all of the problems, nor that the UK does not suffer from the same problems (Hillsong probably being the closest to the USA/Nigerian prosperity influence).

Nevertheless I feel that the church in Sierra Leone has much to teach us. When we were training the pastors in Kabala and Kono, we saw that each town had a pastors council, led by a “chief” who, amongst other things, organises the training events and provides general oversight of the churches in the town. The unity between the pastors was very impressive – despite representing a plethora of denominations and no doubt very different practices and theology, they view being tied together with other local churches as extremely important.

This seems to me to be much closer to how the New Testament envisaged the church to be organised. Many of the towns/regions in the NT have such a figure (Timothy in Ephesus, Titus on Crete) and others are hinted at (1 Thess 5:12). And even if such a figure isn’t mentioned, I’m sure they met together, not least for the first readings of Paul’s letters!

Therefore I can’t help but be concerned about the UK church in two respects. Firstly, an obsession with institutions. The bible does not talk about churches in different towns, and indeed countries, being linked institutionally. Rather, the churches were linked by people, such as the apostles and their various disciples, and these links were less important than the links within a region or town.

Secondly then, it seems to me to be much more important to focus on being united with geographically local churches rather than churches within the same institution or denomination. I have yet to visit a town in the UK where this works well, but it seems to in Africa. As a passing remark, it is surely troubling that some Anglican ministers are giving so much time to sorting out splits within their institution, with little attempt to work on local links with churches across denominations. And in a day when pastors across the third world are crying out for resources and investment, can we afford this?

A snapshot into my ecclesiology! More to come in the next post.