Yesterday I attended the morning service at one of the congregations of the Paz de Cristo (Peace of Christ) church we have here. The pastor is Pastor Martinho Cebola, who works for us at the bookshop and is also on the FIEL book programme. Lucky for me, he was speaking himself (I’m always disappointed when I go and visit a church and a visiting pastor is preaching) and he speaks slowly and clearly, so that I could follow almost everything. Both his sermon and the shorter talk in Makua at the beginning of the service dealt in general with the theme “living as children of God” – being perfect as God is perfect in loving our enemies and dealing seriously with sin in our lives. Not to criticize his preaching method too much (though of course I would have liked an expository sermon) I was struck by hearing, for the umpteenth time in either a Western or African church, a sermon that basically comes down to “what you must do to avoid hell and go to heaven”. Everybody reading this wouldn’t necessarily have had the same problem I did with his point on dealing with the sin that’s keeping us out of heaven (because for me, if you’re saved, your sin is separating you from fellowship with God, but not ultimately from heaven), but hopefully there would be general agreement that the Christian message is about so much more. The last year or so my intellectual journey has comprised books written by the likes of Brian McClaren, Dallas Willard, Donald Miller etc., and my agreement and disagreement with these authors shaped and reinforced my thinking about the joy and freedom of realizing in new ways that the message of Jesus is primarily about God’s glory, secondarily about us having perfect communion with and joy in Him forever, starting at our salvation, and only thirdly or even lower down, the fact that the life we lived after death will be lived in either Heaven or Hell. At least this is the way I sort of see it, glossing over some of the details for the moment. As with any truth that really grips us, to me this all seems so self-evident now – but it obviously isn’t for thousands of pastors and hundreds of thousands of believers, real or misled.
My point is that listening to yesterday’s sermon made me realise how much still needs to be done, by missionaries, writers and other believers. I don’t like a colonialistic attitude about missions, but these are simply the facts: I and the other missionaries in Nampula and elsewhere are here to proclaim Christ, and as far as people still don’t understand who He truly is and what following Him means, a lot of proclaiming still needs to be done. Pastor Martinho went to seminary, reads good Reformed books and appears to seriously study the Word. This is however not true of every Mozambican pastor, and it’s not too hard to imagine what well-intentioned people can make the Word say when they don’t truly comprehend the message themselves. It’s easy to fear hell and pick an alternative, it’s fairly easy to change certain aspects of your life to fit in with a certain norm. But it’s harder (and the reward is so much deeper) to choose joy in Christ above every other joy, daily. And I don’t believe that that is in general where the Mozambican church is right now.
