Missionary Minds

Whether we like it or not, technology is moving us to a more cashless society. The Payments Association of South Africa is currently implementing strategies to make South Africa cashless by 2030. It remains to be seen if such an ambitious goal is reached in such a short time. The justification for this move toward a cashless culture is that it is much safer for all concerned and it is less expensive for businesses if they do not handle cash. The banking sector certainly agrees with this. But while there is a great deal of truth in such rationale, there are numerous pitfalls to a cashless society. Here are but a few challenges in this rush to a cashless destination.

Despite the influence of Christianity and Islam on the continent, Africans still attach tremendous honour to their ancestors. Ancestor worship is deeply engrained into the African belief system, its influence reaching the heights of political power. Remembering ancestors and requesting from ancestors are very different. Scripture allows the first but not the second. Here are five reasons why.

We thank those that prayed for us during our latest missionary survey trip. It was successful in every way, all of this due to God’s grace and the prayers of his saints. Here are six brief lessons I learned.

As we prayerfully plan for 2024, with our long lists (actual or mental) of goals and resolutions, where does Sunday night church fit in? Thanks to American pragmatism (the church growth, seeker-friendly movement) and rampant secularism, evening worship services have largely vanished. It is a once-holy habit that has now almost disappeared in today’s Christianity. One pastor remarks, “...It can be downright difficult to get the family out the door once on a Sunday, not to mention twice; and your neighbours will be convinced that you’re crazy for doing it.” Here are five reasons our churches must recapture Sunday evening services.

Ousted from the South African presidency in 2018 because of corruption, Jacob Zuma regained great political fame this past December in his announcement of forming a new political party—this all amidst his corruption trial!  So also spiritual leader Shepherd Bushiri from Malawi, while awaiting extradition orders in Malawi for financial crimes committed in South Africa, enjoyed a renewed following in his recent 2023/2024 Crossover event. Many more stories like these can be told, and they demonstrate that the price that the humble pay for the mistakes of these leaders can be very high indeed.

Applications for firearm licenses in South Africa have quadrupled over the past decade, according to a recent report written by William Brederode on ⁠News24⁠. Between April 2022 and March 2023, over 139,000 new applications for gun ownership were filed with the South African Police Service, compared to just over 33,000 in the same period from 2011 to 2012. South Africa has seen a 77% increase in murders in that same time span, rising from 15,554 in 2011/12 to 27,494 in 2022/23. In an increasingly crime-ridden SA, is more legal gun ownership good news?

the COP28 Climate-Change Conference is underway in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in Dubai. Every year for the last 28 years, at this time of the year, the United Nations hosts the COP meetings with up to 70,000 people flying in from all over the world for the two-week extravaganza. The goal of COP and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change is to meet to discuss ways to limit CO2 emissions. But what does COP28 have to do with Africa? One of the topics of discussion at this year’s COP28 conference concerns negotiations by wealthy oil barons, in the UAE, buying up land rights in Africa to plant trees on protected land to serve as carbon offsets for wealthy polluters in the West and Middle East.

It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth. Many confuse the issue of cannabis (“dagga”, etc) by co-mingling two different aspects of the debate — medical versus recreational use of marijuana. In truth, while related, these are two separate ethical issues that Christians need to approach differently. This episode of TARIF addresses three of the many flawed arguments based on smoke-screen logic that are used by the pro-pot lobby to convince the public of the benefits of recreational dagga.

A godly father can never fully be replaced as the leader and shepherd of the home. But should the father be deceased or absent, single mothers mustn’t despair. This episode goes into detail about the hope that single Christian mothers can find from the scriptures concerning the spiritual futures of their children.

Parental authority in training and bringing up their children has faced attacks in most parts of the Western world, yet we are now beginning to see this tidal wave on the family hitting the shores of Africa. We must have a clearly laid out view that no academic curriculum is ‘a-theological’, because any form of teaching or philosophy will find answers either in man or in God. Most postmodern institutions have based their curricula on the philosophies and doctrines of the British biologist, Dawkins, who claimed “that atheism was the only possible position for educated men and women and that religion, in all its forms, was little more than dangerous and delusional superstition.”