The Church in the Forest

“For from you hath sounded forth the word of the Lord, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place your faith to God-ward is gone forth; so that we need not to speak anything.” — 1 Thessalonians 1:8 (ASV)

Around 1921 or 1922 Studd moved his base to Ibambi, in the forest country to the south. He lived there for the rest of his life. Most of what’s been written about his mission shows Congolese people only as crowds, converts and carriers. That isn’t because they didn’t matter. It’s because they didn’t write the books. This chapter tries to tell it the other way round, as far as the sources allow.

Around Ibambi lived the Budu, a farming people whose villages were scattered through the Ituri forest. To the north and east were the Mangbetu and Azande, with their own kingdoms. In the forest lived the Mbuti hunters, with long traditions of their own. They had their own beliefs about God and the spirits, their own elders and ways of settling disputes, and a deep knowledge of the forest. Their world had already been turned upside down by slave raids, the Congo Free State and now Belgian rule.

Life under the colony was hard: a head tax payable in money, forced labour on roads, compulsory cotton, and state gold mines that drew in workers recruited under heavy pressure. A man who walked days to hear the gospel might have to leave the next week to work on a road. So when people heard that God loved them, that the poor and despised were welcome in his kingdom, and that one day every wrong would be judged, many heard it as good news for themselves, not as a European message.

Most people didn’t first hear it from a missionary. When Studd died, his mission had only about thirty or thirty-five European workers spread over a huge area. People heard from a relative, a neighbour, a fellow worker, or an evangelist from their own people. From early on, Congolese evangelists went out to villages with no church. They taught people to read, led worship and gathered small congregations. They walked narrow forest paths, depended on villages with no reason to welcome them, and sometimes faced hostile chiefs or officials. In time some churches sent out their own evangelists at their own cost. One later report speaks of a single congregation in Budu country supporting fifty, though it may describe the years after Studd.

According to the mission’s own accounts, Studd insisted the Congolese church pay its own evangelists, not rely on European money. In a poor country under colonial tax, that put a real weight on poor believers. But it also meant the evangelists belonged to the Congolese church. They weren’t white men’s employees. They were the church’s own messengers.

The gospel spread in people’s own languages. Norman Grubb helped translate the New Testament into Bangala. With two colleagues, Stapleton and Lowder, Studd began a translation into Kingwana, the Swahili of the region, and Luke and Acts were published in 1930. No foreigner translates the Bible alone. Congolese speakers explained words and corrected mistakes. Their names weren’t recorded. They were translators too.

Believing cost something. Converts had to give up many village customs, and missions didn’t always separate what was against the gospel from what was merely unfamiliar to Europeans. Some said no, or came for a while and left, or joined the Catholic mission. Those were real choices too, and they deserve respect.

And there was Studd himself. A modern Christian reference work says plainly that his conflicts were with Africans as well as with missionaries and family. The details aren’t recorded. The Congolese church learned the gospel from him, and it also learned to survive his severity.

It lasted. After independence in 1960 came war, and in 1964 the Simba rebellion swept through the area. The church didn’t disappear. Today it is CECCA 16, centred at Isiro, led by Congolese Christians, with between about 120,000 and 250,000 people in its community. Paul told the Thessalonians the word had “sounded forth” from them, not from him.

One thing to do this week: ask someone who came to faith outside your own culture or country how the gospel reached them, and who brought it. Thank God by name for the people in their story.