Fighting for the True Gospel in Africa
- Updated Mar 17, 2017
Although the gospel is embraced in many places in Africa, it is often mixed with superstition and apostasy. One church is helping to counter the heresy with truth.
Charles Karuri, a pastoral assistant at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of those helping to promote the true gospel.
Karuri said the “prosperity gospel” is prevalent in Africa and “apostles” or “prophets” often promise supernatural healing, or claim to be able to reverse bad fortune, restore marriages, and break curses.
“These are the very things the witch doctor back in the village had been doing long before the prosperity message arrived on our shores,” Karuri said.
“Those that faithfully preach the gospel continue to be less and less the face of Christianity as they are overtaken by numerically superior, flashier, noisier, and more outwardly successful prosperity churches,” he added.
Karuri’s church is one of the few working to counter the false gospel with the true gospel. One resource they are using is a book titled Prosperity? Seeking the True Gospel.
The Gospel Coalition notes, “The book helps believers understand and address the issue of false teaching and the prosperity gospel in particular.”
There are other churches in Africa that also see a problem with the kind of prosperity gospel theology so prevalent there and are undertaking similar work to teach the true gospel.
Photo courtesy: Thinkstockphotos.com
Publication date: March 17, 2017
