Sydney, Australia
Nancy Njagi knows a thing or two about how best to help her fellow Kenyans. She’s spent 20 years on the front lines of community development, establishing grassroots programs for churches in slum areas and sharing her insights with other African leaders. While completing her PhD in development studies from St Paul’s University in Kenya, she focused her study on empowering the local church and helping reduce poverty.
Today, Dr Njagi is the Africa director of Local Leaders International, an Australian-based Christian agency that supports Bible colleges in the majority world and trains leaders for ministry in their respective cultures. With the goal of supporting the expanding Christian church, LLI equips pastors, church planters and lay leaders through evangelical theological education and governance instruction in over 200 Bible colleges across Africa, Asia and other parts of the world.
Dr Nancy Njagi is the Africa Director of Local Leaders International. PICTURE: Supplied.
With experts agreeing that the majority World is seeing an exponential rise in Christianity, and in some ways is the future of the faith, many believe understanding cultural contexts will be pivotal to such movements. Bible Society New Zealand predicts that by 2025, 600 million Christians will comprise various regions across Africa and that by 2060, six countries within Africa will have the largest Christian populations in the world.
But many development agencies note that understanding cultural attributes and the issues various countries face such as poverty, conflict, environmental crises and food insecurity, is crucial to today’s ministry efforts. LLI executive director Rev Dr Stuart Brooking believes leaders and students must learn to critique culture from a Gospel point of view so that they can be effective.
Consequently, LLI is hosting four interviews with indigenous leaders in an upcoming webinar series. Brooking and six specific experts will explore the nuanced challenges Christians face in four parts of the globe: Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific. Together, they’ll consider how culturally informed theological training can better equip church leaders to serve in their own contexts, and what the Australian church can learn. The hour-long webinars begin on 22nd June and are free and open to the public.
The first episode includes Njagi and Professor Diphus Chemorion, Vice Chancellor of East Africa Christian College in Rwanda, as they discuss with Brooking a new “Generosity Africa Project” and how best to address the “prosperity gospel” across Africa, a view that suggests the Bible says God wants his people to be wealthy.
Local Leaders International logo. PICTURE: Supplied.
“For years we’ve looked on as the prosperity gospel has taken good Biblical truths about God’s blessing of his people and turned it into a false gospel. To listen to the African televangelist preachers, which are regularly playing on the channels around the continent, there is a strange distortion,” Brooking said. “Through the Generosity Africa Project, Bible scholars are devising new textbooks and new courses to help pastors teach their people the Scriptures faithfully. We hope to train thousands of pastors to equip their people to grow in biblical stewardship, generosity and even self-sacrifice as an outworking of following the Lord Jesus.”
The second webinar on 20th July includes Elie Haddad, president of Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Lebanon, who will explore the turbulent Middle East and how best to lead with contextual competence.
Political pressure points for the church in Asia will be the topic for the third webinar on 24th August and includes Dr Joanna Feliciano-Soberano, vice-chancellor for academic affairs of the Asian Theological Seminary, Philippines, and Dr Ashish Chrispal, regional director for South Asia at the Overseas Council.
The fourth and final webinar in the series, held on 2nd September, confronts the question of what it means to emerge from a colonial past in the Pacific with Dr George Mombi, dean of post graduate studies at Christian Leaders Training College in Papua New Guinea.
The webinars, according to the LLI website consider “the importance of culturally intelligent Christian leadership and its implications for the global Church, as the centre of Christendom shifts further away from the West”.
“Every country has the competence to do its own theologising, to build up the church and reach out with a message of Christ appropriate to that place,” Brooking writes. “In Australia, we’re used to competent, well-educated pastors and clergy. But most of the world doesn’t have this facility. To be able to make a difference so that the church is healthy, the mission is sensible, and Christ is honoured country by country, that really is the great joy of the whole thing.”
For more information on the four webinars, head to https://localleaders.org.au/get-involved/webinars/.
