Podcast: The Growth of the African Church and the Dangers Facing It (Ken Mbugua)

November 12, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Challenges Facing the Growing African Church

Ken Mbugua talks about his testimony and what growing up in a baptist church in  Nairobi, Kenya was like. Ken uses his experience as the director of Ecclesia Africa to discuss some of the challenges that the African church is facing and the ways that church has seen encouraging growth over the last decades.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:30 - Background

Matt Tully
Ken Mbugua serves as the senior pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Nairobi, Kenya, and is a council member for the Gospel Coalition Africa. He’s also the managing director of Ekklesia Afrika, which promotes biblical resources for building healthy churches throughout Africa. Ken, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Ken Mbugua
Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
Today we’re speaking about the amazing ways that God is moving throughout the continent of Africa to grow his church and to raise up Christian leaders and pastors who are equipped to shepherd the flock of Christ. To kick us off, can you share a little bit about your own life, your own ministry, and the work that you’re doing these days?

Ken Mbugua
I was born and raised in Kenya, Nairobi specifically. I became a Christian later on in high school. I felt a burden for the Christian work, church work. I got my Bible training in Zambia at a school called Central Africa Baptist University. I started serving as a pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church in 2010. I became lead pastor there in 2015. I met my wife in Washington, DC while doing an internship at Capitol Hill in 2014. We now have three little humans running around the house: Eden, Zion, and Judah (eight, five, and three). I’m most thankful for the grace of God upon a sinner such as I, and every good thing that I enjoy in my life is clearly evidence of his grace upon me.

Matt Tully
You said you became a Christian in high school. Did you grow up in a Christian home? Were your parents believers?

Ken Mbugua
No. My home was not Christian. My dad would have us go to church. He never used to go.

Matt Tully
Why do you think that was?

Ken Mbugua
I do not know. Not quite sure actually, even now. I could guess and say this or that, but I’m not really sure why. My mom became a Christian when I was maybe nine. I don’t think that changed significantly the influence in the home. I got to see her faith. And it might be because I was dead in my trespasses and sins and just blind to any changes in my mom’s life. Now that I’m a Christian, she’s like a Christian hero, an evidence of the transformative power of the gospel. She’s maybe the clearest example of Jesus I have and I’ve ever had. But I don’t remember any of that, growing up in my home. I ended up becoming a Christian because of my dad’s insistence on going to church.

Matt Tully
What kind of a church were you going to?

Ken Mbugua
I was going to a Baptist church. We chose the church simply because it was the closest church to our house. My dad insisted we go to church, and they had a teen service that was only an hour long.

Matt Tully
So your dad didn’t pick the church even?

Ken Mbugua
No. He didn’t care. I could have gone to a Catholic church and I don’t think he would have cared. In fact, because my mom was now a Christian, she was going to a church that was an Assemblies of God church that was kind of far away, and so my dad, with his wisdom, said, “Go to any church. There’s a church right across the road. You can go there.” I’m like, “I like that idea.” So I ended up there, and that’s where I got to hear the gospel, from a brother who’s now with the Lord, Timothy Joiner.

Matt Tully
And then were you a part of that church after that?

Ken Mbugua
I attended there in my high school life, heard the gospel, but didn’t really believe it. I thought I did. They presented the gospel using the Romans Road, which is good. It’s the Bible. The book of Romans is, of course, an excellent book. But there’s a phrase they kept using: “Once saved, forever saved.” That’s a true phrase as well, but it was a very formulaic approach to things, and it left me knowing the gospel but not understanding the implications of the gospel. And so it made me a false convert for quite a long time. I thought it was a very academic thing. I just say certain words, I believe certain things are true, and I’m saved. And once I’ve said those words, I’m in—kind of a decisionism. So, that was me for four years. And then someone somewhere spoke about the name “Lord” not being Christ’s third name but meaning he’s actually King, and those who believe in him bend the knee. And those implications of the gospel made it clear to me I was not a Christian. And so I can’t remember where I heard that, but the Lord convicted me as I was trying to pray. I’d pray about three times a year, whenever I was in big trouble—about to get expelled from school or something like that. I’d pray, “Help me, and I’ll be a better boy.” I thought to myself, Why would God hear me? I love the stuff he hates. I’m famous for it. And as I’m thinking about it, I just realized, He’s not my Father in that regard; he’s my judge. And if I was to meet him today, I have no reason to have hope that I’d not be cast into eternal judgment or wrath. So, I believed in the same gospel from the Romans Road. I knew that I was a sinner and that Christ died for sinners, that salvation was not by works but through faith. And so those same verses that I’d memorized for many, many years are the same as the Lord used to bring me to himself.

05:52 - A New Generation

Matt Tully
For those of us living in the US, many of us have heard of the incredible growth of the church in Africa over the last number of decades. But I wonder if you could just help us understand what are some of the stats, what are some of the big picture ways that God is moving in Africa that you’ve seen and that you’ve been a part of over the last couple decades?

Ken Mbugua
Africa’s a big, big continent, and there’s a few of us there. We are more than a billion, obviously. Roughly half of those are going to be belonging to countries that call themselves Christian. The population has been growing, and it seems like it will continue to grow. The trends for that over the next couple of decades seem to show that the cities in Africa will be some of the largest cities in the world. So, those trends are there, and I think there’s a lot of credibility to them. When it comes to the church specifically, I always like to say whilst there’s a God who sits on his throne in heaven, we should always be very careful about trends. We want to be careful about presuming on him, assuming that because yesterday this is what happened, it also means tomorrow this will happen. Because we are those who believe in the sovereignty of God. The Lord takes pleasure in changing stories and trends whenever he wants, and things that should have died a long, long time ago don’t, and things that seem to have died, resurrect. So, I don’t know how much I can say about the future of the church in Africa. The population certainly seems to be in a trajectory of significant growth. A couple of things to add to those trends that can help complicate the conversation of projecting stuff into the future is the Westernization of Africa. Western values that have caused the Western population to stagnate and even shrink in some ways, those values are the values being adopted very fast by the younger generation. So, you don’t want to assume.

Matt Tully
What are some of those values?

Ken Mbugua
Values of materialism—stuff is more important than kids. For my parents and my grandparents, there’s nothing more precious than little humans, and so they had as many of them as they possibly could. And now we want a nice car, and we want to take our kids to expensive schools, and we want to live in nice neighborhoods. And we think, falsely, that we have a whole lot more control over our lives. All those are Western ideas. I don’t know how those things they will affect the trends we are projecting into the future. The other thing is the African church has grown, in the past, very culturally. I’ve spoken to you about my dad sending me to church, I don’t know why. And so the church in Africa hasn’t historically (historically, being more recent, not Augustine historically) hasn’t been founded on clearly defined theology. Our denominations are almost just kind of tribal. If you were to ask an average Presbyterian why they’re not an Anglican, I’m not sure they would really be able to articulate that.

Matt Tully
They wouldn’t cite theology.

Ken Mbugua
They wouldn’t cite theology. If you look at the differences, the fallouts, they’re hardly ever theological. I always reference how the big denominations became egalitarian overnight. Without much of a theological debate, feminism hit hard, the culture shifted fairly quickly, and it became the buzzword—equality. In Kenya it was the phrase “the girl child,” and just the church changed. It did not have women pastors, and then it had women pastors. Why? What theological conversation or conviction preceded that? No, that’s not what happened. So, that’s a trend that concerns me about the church in Africa. When we look at the younger generation that’s coming up, being so radically different even from my generation—the Gen Zs. Are they the Gen Zs?

Matt Tully
I think so. It’s hard to keep up.

Ken Mbugua
Yeah. There you go. The Gen Zs, the iced latte with venti and all those things. That group is very different from even us. We have teenagers in our church who will ask questions about gender—the male/female questions that are now in the West. The LGBTQ normalization that’s already happened here.

Matt Tully
It’s so easy for us in the West to assume that these things have not reached Africa, that that’s not the same kind of thing that you all would be struggling with. But that’s not the case.

Ken Mbugua
There are buzzwords, for example. People will celebrate how Obama, when he came to Africa, he was told off by two African presidents to not bring the LGBTQ agenda to the continent. I don’t celebrate that at all, because those presidents are simply playing to the masses. And the masses currently are us guys. We are the ones who are voting for him, and that’s our cultural standard. But the guys who are right now in high school, that’s not their view at all. Netflix has done the job. It has succeeded. Hollywood has accomplished its ambition. They’re coming in with a completely different ideology. These are guys who are now twenty years old, and they have a very different ideology from people who are in their late 30s. So as far as trends go, and you’re talking about the population increase that’s coming by 2050, we need to understand that that population increase will not be made up of the same type of people as the ones that are currently in Africa. Those people are rejecting a lot of the things that their parents have taught them. They are disruptors in every way. And one of those things is religion. They are not following the same path in religion that their parents took, whereas their parents took the same path that their parents took. But we are about to see something quite different. It’s already evident. So, that again tells me the churches that are not really built on strong theological foundations, churches like the Presbyterian church don’t know where they place the Westminster Confession. They can’t trace it anymore. They were given the shorter version to start with, and even that shorter version is not a very core part of their church. Baptist churches, I don’t even know what a Baptist is. Baptists are anything. Baptist are Episcopalian in their structure. You’re like, wait, what does it even mean to be a Baptist?

Matt Tully
What’s the cause of that theological rootlessness that is so prevalent?

Ken Mbugua
I think it has a lot to do with the way the Great Commission work happened. We focused a lot on church planting but not church strengthening. We set the church up for that initial stage. There’s a lot of literacy that needs to happen. I can sympathize with this—we’ve been to other parts of Africa where you feel like what the original missionaries felt like. You’re coming in, you’re having to teach people first of all how to read. And so as you’re setting the church up that way, you set it up with its bare minimum. And I think that’s okay, but the problem becomes we don’t equip it to be able to keep advancing. And so you find that a church that was set up with the bare minimum theological framework in its statement of faith, for example, has not done much to keep developing that and to learn from the rest of the historical church and the church around the world. So, the roots were always weak. They were never really strengthened, as the church kept growing. I think there was, especially in the 1970s, a lot of liberal influences amongst the leaders of the broader denominations that helped to undermine those theological roots even farther, and they changed the focus of those big denominations from being theology to other things—being a voice to the times, being a voice to the government. They picked up a lot of those things—liberation theology had its little influences there. So, the church, as it has matured, has not had a firm grasp on the Scriptures. Things have remained too loose, and my concern with that weakness is the next generation is going to be asking the church questions she has not really thought about. She has been happy to receive people coming in who are not really asking theological questions. They’re doing it because it’s what you do. And this next generation are not coming in. And so when they start asking questions of us, I’m not sure the church is quite ready to answer those. So, I’m not being a prophet of doom, but just to say trends mean very little.

Matt Tully
When you think about your country, Kenya or East Africa in general, two other boogeymen, we’ll say, of African Christianity that have been discussed in the past have been syncretism and then also prosperity gospel. How big of a threat are those to the church today?

Ken Mbugua
Syncretism will always be a challenge to Christ’s bride, no matter what context. I think what happens is the gods we try and mix up with our worship of the one true God just keep morphing and changing. The prosperity gospel, for example, is a type of syncretism. It's trying to worship the one true and living God and also worship the god of Mammon, trying to mix those things up, be as materialistic as possible, was claiming allegiance to the one true God. So that’s something that’s happening there. The prosperity gospel in Africa and the version that it has, which might be the same for you guys here, is going to look very much like witchcraft. You have one person who’s going to tell you things nobody else could about what’s really going on in your life—why you didn’t get that promotion. It’s just the same thing the witch doctor used to do. So you expect that we will always be tempted to make a god after our own image, and that might look like the wildly charismatic stuff we experience in Africa or the prosperity gospel. But we need to, even when we don’t preach the prosperity gospel, it’s the same temptation that I feel like you and I have of opening our Bibles up in the morning and wanting to read our most current situation into the text. I think that impulse that you and I face is the same thing that you see played out in pulpits, and we just kinda formalize that. We actualize that. We develop that further and create the kind of religion that is for you, that is practical. And people will gravitate to that, because it’s what Paul said, “itching ears.” And they load up for themselves the kind of teaches us that they want to hear. So, the prosperity gospel has had an adverse effect on the continent. In one sense, it’s not surprising, because it’s a poor continent, and that message offers people what they want.

17:33 - Misconceptions

Matt Tully
It’s interesting in this conversation so far, because it’s easy for us sometimes to emphasize the differences, the things that make us different from other people in other parts of the world, but there are so many similarities. The root issues that we all face are the same. Our sin, our need for God’s grace, and even just the way that our sin kind of distorts how we think about things, it’s all the same. As you think about your interactions with, let’s say Americans and people in the West, when you talk about the church in Africa and you talk about Christianity and the need for sound theology, what are some of the biggest misconceptions that Western Christians tend to have about your context?

Ken Mbugua
It’s interesting. I read that question, because you had me look at the questions earlier, and the primary answer I had, and I’m sure there are other answers that are also useful, was the comment you just made before asking this question. I think the primary misconception is the Western church sometimes thinks the church in the rest of the world is too different from itself. And that’s a dangerous thing. That’s a dangerous thing on multiple levels. Because one, we know that the most important thing about our identity is what we have become in Jesus. Everything else becomes an opportunity to express what we have actually become. I’m black, you are white, I’m African, you are American, but those differences and that diversity is not the identity. The identity is what we have become in Jesus. And I think the American church, in what actually might be an eagerness to learn and respect the differences, we can overstate the differences. And the danger is sometimes when you overstate the differences, we end up giving a pass on things we should not be giving a pass on. Well, it’s just the church in Africa. Well, we can’t impose Americanness. Or in Africa, that’s a good thing to be careful about. I think that has been done. And that continues to be done in some ways.

Matt Tully
It’s a reaction, perhaps, to real problems that have existed in the past.

Ken Mbugua
Yes. So, let’s be sensitive to that. But that’s not the biggest danger that we face, actually, in our conversation. Your Americanness is not the primary thing that will hurt me. But if you let go of the core roots of the gospel, and even the implications of it, and start excusing ways in which the church you’re interacting with or the brothers you’re interacting with from those things because they’re African, you start losing a center for any type of partnership. I’ve had quite a few interactions with American churches, because sometimes I’m that guy. Hey, Ken, somebody reached out to me from here. Do you mind talking to them, or do you know them? And in many of those interactions, it’s like the type of reasoning one would typically use in interacting with another pastor, even an antenna of, Hmmm. That does not sound good. That does not sound wise. That’s a bit sketchy—it’s like all that stuff is turned off when it comes to interacting with me, because it’s Africa and we don’t want to impose ourselves. Maybe that’s just how they do it. Let’s not judge. And what that does is sometimes the interaction—I can hear of a very healthy charge in America that has had a relationship with a very unhealthy church in Africa that hasn’t moved an inch. And it’s because, Well, they’re Africans. There’s no authority that both of our churches—the American church and the African church—need to bow down to. And that’s kind of how we should approach this conversation. We are different. We have different contexts and different cultures, but the reason we are even talking is because of one King, one Lord. It’s one Bible. It’s one hope. And those things are the ones that we come together under. And so that might be the thing that I would say the church in the West needs to be especially careful about as they interact with us.

Matt Tully
That’s a really helpful correction to the way that we often think. With that said, are there any specific challenges or dynamics to what pastors specifically in East Africa, where you minister primarily, are facing that it’d be helpful for us in the West to understand and to better know what that’s like?

Ken Mbugua
Interestingly, there’s the West and then there’s America, because America is very different from the West. I was talking to German pastors yesterday, and I was telling them when I visited their country, they’re very much like us in the needs that they have. The key needs that make a difference between the church in Africa and the church in America will have to do with resources. God has blessed your country in almost an abnormal way. This is not normal, which is why I don’t even want to call it the West. And the resources are certainly financial, but they’re more than just financial. They will have to do the English language and the fact that—I don’t know, somebody should do a calculation on this—but a vast percentage of available Christian resources are going to be in the English language. And those are resources that countries that don’t speak English don’t have access to. But also the financial muscle that is unusual in history that is almost a phenomenon of the season that we are in, has meant that those resources, whether it’s theological education, the kind of quality of theological education that the church in America can support, it’s wild. Because you’re able to really invest in it—invest in people going to school and paying really high fees to get the theological education. But those theological institutions are all loss-making institutions. And so that takes more money to be able to pay really high quality professors, to be able to continue doing that work meaningfully. So if you think about those things, there are two elements to it. One, I don’t ever want to say we need that for us to continue doing the work in Africa. Because actually, the church has not ever been this rich. So, you don’t just want to look over the fence and go like, Wow! We have to have that. If we had that much money, then the church would be completely sorted. And yet at the same time, we are one church. It’s one body. And so the resources that the Lord has given to America are not nothing. They’re not pointless. I think they are important for the season that we’re in. The Lord knows exactly why he has given this church this stewardship.

Matt Tully
And they’re not just for America.

Ken Mbugua
And they’re not just for America. It is one church. And so in some ways, even the American church keeping its head down and doing the work, they’re still serving us, as you know. The brothers you guys talk to all the time are working hard on writing books. They might not be thinking about the church in the world necessarily, but as he puts out another book on biblical theology, that process was aided by all the resources that are available here in America. But that book that has come out can be of use to the church around the world. So, the only thing there is for us to understand is there’s such a stuck difference in availability of resources, and the only area of continued growth, because the church in America is a very generous church already, I think it has, in many ways, a consciousness of the rest of the world and can to continue to grow in that, is just to do that. To be aware that as we write a book and as we steward our resources, how do we do this in such a way that will benefit the people that are here, and also the people that in the rest of the world, and the generations that are going to come after us. To steward this season, because, I don’t know, America might become broke like Kenya in another 100 years. That would be hard. But you just never know. This might be a momentary stewardship that the church has been given for now, and for the church to steward that as faithfully as possible, seeking the maximum impact for today’s generation, not only in America but the rest of the world and for the coming generations.

26:29 - Ekklesia Afrika

Matt Tully
And this connects a little bit to your work at Ekklesia Afrika. You’re the managing director, as we said before. I wonder if you can just share a little bit about what you do. What does that work entail? What is that organization all about?

Ken Mbugua
It started in 2017. I did my internship in 2014 at Capitol Hill Baptist Church. It was an interesting internship—weird even, in some ways. You mainly just read books. Nobody really tells you anything, because it’s a very Socratic approach that Dever uses.

Matt Tully
You read books and you sit around and talk about them, right?

Ken Mbugua
That’s it. You ask questions, you’ll get a lot of shrugging shoulders: Just keep reading and keep observing and keep chatting, especially with your cohort. And some answers are along the way, but they’re very strict in that model. But what that did for me is just finishing that, I’m going, Wow! Just books could teach me this much? And that gave me some hope that we might not be able to replicate Westminster Theological Seminary overnight—or even ever—in Nairobi, but we can read books. That we can do. And so the simple issue there becomes a church in Africa is starved of theological resources. There is something like an abundance of resources, even too much, but there’s also something like a famine, as Bill Walsh has used that phrase.

Matt Tully
A theological famine.

Ken Mbugua
A theological famine. And that’s where the church in Africa is. And so it seems like there is a very clear opportunity, very low-hanging fruit, of being able to strengthen and equip the church in Africa by providing her with theological resources to help herself with, for her to just not have only the basic information on certain key teachings of Scripture. Som that’s what Ekklesia Afrika has sought to do—to strengthen the church in Africa by providing access to theological resources.

28:27 - The One Million Bibles Initiative

Matt Tully
And that kind of connects to one of the reasons why we wanted to talk with you today. We did a One Million Bibles initiative previously, and now we’re doing another 1 million Bibles campaign. And as we look ahead to this particular work we’re be doing together (we’re partnering with you in doing that work in some ways) can you share a little bit more about how Ekklesia Afrika was involved in the previous initiative? How did you actually get resources into people’s hands throughout the continent?

Ken Mbugua
Speaking of resources and our need for resources in Africa, the Million Bible Initiative is beautiful because there are so many books available. To the writing of books, there’s no end (as somebody once said). And so as we are doing that work, it’s so important to look at the continent of Africa and do a triage of what are the most important things we can ship over there. Because you want to be highly selective. You don’t just want to load up containers with stuff and send it over. That can almost make Africa like a garbage disposal destination for books nobody’s really interested in.

Matt Tully
If they’re not helpful in meeting the needs that are there.

Ken Mbugua
Exactly. But of all the books, like which book could we always say the church in Africa needs other than the Bible? So, just to highlight the fact that the need is real. There actually are pastors who don’t have a complete text of the Scriptures on the continent. And if that’s the case for pastors, then that means it’s the case also for members. Second is to note that in cases where that’s the reality, it’s not simply because they have no place where they can go and buy a Bible. In many cases, there is, to some extent, you can even send somebody who’s going to the city. It’s a direct connection, again, to just a poverty on the continent. And so where the cases of poverty are extreme on the continent, the need for theological resources is real. And it is to the extent that even access to a copy of the Scriptures, a complete one, is not possible for some. Or for others, it’s a good version of the Scriptures—a reliable translation—that is not available. With Ekklesia Afrika, by God’s grace, the network has grown, and continues to grow, of the pastors that we are training, of the churches that we’re trying to equip in Kenya, in Uganda, and now in Ethiopia. And that means that oftentimes we are working in places where there is dire need. We also have friends who will come by Nairobi to get some books that we have that we’ve reprinted from acquiring copyrights from entities like Crossway, and those guys are working in similar places. So, you’ll find that on the continent, when you identify the lack of availability of resources, the next and most important thing that you need to address is distribution. In some cases, the reason the resources are not actually available is because there are no functioning distribution networks. Building a functioning distribution network is one of Ekklesia Afrika’s main goals.

Matt Tully
How do you do that? What are the primary channels through which to do so?

Ken Mbugua
Such a good question. In some ways, what you have to do to develop one network is to give the people what they want, just for me to sound like a marketer. Or another way of saying that is to scratch what itches—to identify a need that is very obvious to people. And there’s no need that you’re going to highlight for pastors anywhere that is as clear to them as, "Hey, you need resources." Nobody else is giving them resources.

Matt Tully
What does a typical pastor have, let’s say in Kenya, how many books or Bibles would a pastor have on his own?

Ken Mbugua
You first of all want to really differentiate pastors in the city and pastors in the rural settings. There’s a divergence there. So, you could have a pastor who has access to a lot. Those are going to be very few. And so average is hard. I would want to do a proper survey. That’s the other thing Africa really needs—data on the church. It’s ridiculous the kind of data you guys have here. It’s wild. I listened to a David Brooks talk yesterday, and the kind of data he was quoting. He’s even saying stuff like, “We are sadder—this percentage of people, that percentage . . . .” Wow. Where’d you get all that information from? So it’s hard.

Matt Tully
It’s expensive.

Ken Mbugua
It’s very expensive. I’m just going to be guessing as I’m throwing out that number to you, but most pastors will have a Bible—most pastors. And that’s why we’re speaking about the pastors in that category who don’t have Bibles, neither do their members, which is why the Million Bible Initiative is so important. Most pastors will have a Bible. And then I’d say they’ll have a collection of random books that are going to be, to varying degrees, useful or not useful. Pastors love books more than they love reading books.

Matt Tully
That must be a universal condition.

Ken Mbugua
It must be.

Matt Tully
That’s true all around the world.

Ken Mbugua
Yeah. You’ll visit a pastor and find, typically he has a collection of books. I don’t how useful they are. Which, again, is the why for the way we’ve approached distributing of resources. That phrase I’ve just used—an effective distribution network. Effective includes not just getting the book to the pastor, but it’s set up in such a way that the pastor in this network is aided to get into the book and understand the point of the book and discuss the book. So we would rather have a slower growing network that is actually helping pastors. Because you could distribute a million books in just like that. Pastors would be happy to pick them, and 5 percent of those might read all the way through. Maybe 25 percent might start reading, and 10 percent might get halfway. This is me completely guessing stuff. But I hope it’s an intelligent guess from what I expect there. So, we don’t want to be involved in work like that. But when it comes to Bibles, because of the broad network that exists, I think Ekklesia Afrika is in a position to be able to know what parts are hurting the most, so that the resources that are coming in and not being wasted. A pastor will be happy to take his twentieth Bible, even though he has so many others. So, we don’t want that kind of distribution that actually hurts. We want pastors who can afford a Bible to be buying a Bible. And so the breadth of the network is useful in us being able to really steward. This person needs it. You don’t need it.

35:32 - Pray for the Church in Africa

Matt Tully
It requires a nuanced understanding of the different channels and the different needs that are out there. That’s amazing work that you all are doing, and it’s such a privilege for Crossway to get to partner with you all and really leverage your expertise and your experience in country as we just equip with the resources. As a final question for you, Ken, if there’s one prayer or a couple things that you would ask American Christians to be praying for as you do your work, as you see the gospel spread in your context, and as you try to equip pastors and leaders with resources, what should we be praying for?

Ken Mbugua
Pray that the Lord will give to the church in Africa an ever deepening hunger for his word. Pray that the Lord would bless the church in Africa with an abundance of gifts—the Ephesians 4 gifts of pastor/teachers who will be used by God to satisfy that hunger as they open up God’s word and accurately teach it. That’s the most important thing you could pray for the church in Africa. If we get hungry not for famous people, big names, apostolic leaders, big church buildings (none of those things are bad), but if there’s a hunger for the word and brothers who are able to teach it accurately, which means to put forth Christ every Sunday they stand up behind that pulpit, we’ll be just fine. So, pray that the Lord would increase those two things.

Matt Tully
Ken, thank you so much for speaking with us today.

Ken Mbugua
Amen. That was a joy.

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January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

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