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What Africa needs to respond to the AIDS crisis, abject poverty, rampant corruption, wars and social injustice is an infusion of Christian values that will touch all areas of life. That’s why the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in the English and Portuguese Speaking Africa region (IFES-EPSA) created the Institute for Christian Impact (ICI), a program for believers to address the African malaise through evangelism and social action.

News from Africa is generally negative. The Economist magazine once dubbed Africa the hopeless continent. To make ICI’s vision a reality, its director Femi Adeleye brought 50 people from South Africa, Zambia, Uganda, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia, and Malawi April 1-6 to Bulawayo to meet with the staff of the Theological College of Zimbabwe. Among those attending were seminary professors and students, evangelical social activists, and civil society representatives active in various social programs, and even some government civil servants. At the conference, each country’s delegates heard speakers on subjects ranging from AIDS to joblessness, then drew up Christ-centered plans to relieve suffering once back in their homelands.

To view mission as comprising both sharing the gospel and social action is relatively new to Africa. While ecumenical churches have had strong social action components, they often have helped meet physical needs without evangelism, while evangelical churches often have shared the gospel without social action.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has hit Africa hardest of any other region of the world. More than 20 million of the world’s 33 million people living with HIV/AIDS are in Africa. Stella Kasirye of World Relief Malawi led a discussion of Southern Africa’s AIDS crisis. This region has Africa’s highest infection rates. Half of Bots-wana is feared HIV-positive. South Africa already has 5 million infections; one-third of all women receiving prenatal care are HIV-positive. Kasirye urged delegates to move beyond statistics and think of individuals involved: a mother, a child, a sister or a brother.

“What are the factors that predispose our youth to HIV/AIDS so that our youth ministries are relevant?” she asked. “How many of our churches take children’s ministry as important?” Recently UNAIDS, the UN agency dealing with HIV/AIDS, estimated that African countries need $1.5 billion to scale up their effort to combat the disease.

Among action points members identified to become involved in are patient care, awareness campaigns for schools, and a call for abstinence and behavioral change. The window of hope is the generation not yet infected by HIV/AIDS. “Most of our programs start with teenage upwards, but how do we protect these little ones below teenage?” Kasirye said.

“To be human one needs to work,” said David Zac Niringiye, Africa director of the 200-year-old Church Mission Society. Niringiye presented a study on the historical and biblical mandate for Christian mission. “Unemployment is a major distortion.” To be unemployed debilitates a person, he said. “You lose a sense of who you are. Work is at the heart of being human. So issues of unemployment become critical issues for Christian mission.”

Knowledge Chikondo, director of World Vision Zimbabwe, and Caesar Molebatsi, director of Youth Alive in South Africa, led a poverty discussion. “When a community is set in a downward spiral of its assets being eroded, that is a poor community,” Molebatsi said. “A person is considered poor if his or her living standard falls below an acceptable norm according the prevailing social cultural values in their society.”

Economic empowerment is a way to curb this downward spiral. Chikondo said that one way is through Pundutso, a microfinance institution that funds people in communities without strict collateral that other lenders demand. “Many jobs have been created [through this program],” she said.

Molebatsi, an evangelical activist who’s been compared to Tony Campolo, spared no criticism of what he believes are the continent’s roots of misery: “The cause of poverty in Africa is mainly a lack of urgency by the African leadership. The Bible teaches, a little slumber, a little folding of arms and poverty slips in,” Molebatsi said. He called on the church itself to share its wealth with the poor to help relieve suffering. “The Church in South Africa and probably Zimbabwe has zillions of hectares of land. I believe that the church should repent of that,” he said. “To democratize resources means that you do what is right with what you have amassed before. This is tough.”

Molebatsi, a “redistributionist,” favors what he calls “democratizing resources.” While Molebatsi didn’t outline a church land redistribution program, it could involve giving away parcels, allowing communal farming or resettling landless people on church-owned tracts.

ICI tackled questions of governance, democracy and ills of corruption that have stalled Africa’s progress. “Politics is about life,” said Musyimi Mutava, general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Kenya. Mutava lectured on Christian witness in the public arena. He called on believers to consider political involvement, a space he believes Christians must occupy as a mission field. “We can’t say it is outside God’s jurisdiction, that it is secular, it’s terrible, (or that) out there God is not interested. Politics affects how the people of God live. How can we say God is not interested?”

University of Zimbabwe political science professor and evangelical John Makumbe said corruption worsens the plight of the poor. “Development-oriented agencies are fully aware that lack of transparency, more often than not, results in the diminishing of the scarce resources that would otherwise have been for the alleviation of poverty and human suffering,” he said. “In other words, lack of transparency threatens the sustainabil-ity of development projects and programs.”

Damage to Africa’s environment must be stopped. “Greed and a wholesome environment do not go together,” said Mbarara University professor of zoology Jonathan Baranga. “Wildlife and man are supposed to co-exist, but when there is competition between the two, we know who is going to win. I am appealing to man: We either reduce our appetites, care for our environment, restore nature in a people-centered ethic, or we should consider ourselves lost. However, Jesus Christ came to seek and save the lost.”

While doing every action point discussed at ICI could radically change Africa, ICI leaders simply hope that delegates will go home and try at least one thing. Because of the grave level of Africa’s AIDS crisis, leaders expect immediate activism, and many delegates pledged to act in this area. Follow-up seminars may help delegates check progress made on their commitments.

“Christians will need to build strategic alliances in order to marshal the resources necessary to engage in social action,” Mutava said. “The material and non-material support needed to engage is enormous. Our present and past experience has taught us a lot. We need the support of one another.”

July 20, 2001