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

Whose Story?

Most of what has been written about the Heart of Africa Mission was written by Europeans for Europeans. It tells of missionaries arriving, opening stations, preaching, translating and dying. The Congolese appear in it mostly as crowds, converts, carriers and problems. That is not because the Congolese were unimportant. It is because they did not write the books.

This chapter tries to tell the story the other way round, as far as the sources allow. They do not allow very much. The names of most of the Congolese men and women who first carried the gospel through the forests of the Uele and the Ituri have not been preserved in any source available to this book, and it would be wrong to invent them. But the outline of what they did is clear, and it changes the shape of Studd’s story.

How the Church Grew

In the Congo, as in almost every part of Africa, the great majority of those who became Christians in the early twentieth century did not hear the gospel first from a missionary. They heard it from another African: a relative, a neighbour, a fellow worker, a trader, or an evangelist from their own people. The missionaries were few. In the whole of the Heart of Africa Mission, at the time of Studd’s death, there were only about thirty or thirty-five European workers, spread over a vast area. The Congolese Christians were many, and they lived in the villages.

From early on, the mission sent Congolese evangelists out to villages where there was no church. They lived among the people, taught them to read, explained the Scriptures as far as they had them, led worship, and gathered little congregations. Some were former students at the mission stations; some were simply converts who had heard and believed and could not stay silent. Many walked long distances, through a forest where paths were narrow and travel was hard. They depended on the hospitality of villages that had no reason to welcome them, and sometimes they met hostility from chiefs, elders, colonial officials, or rival missions. The accounts say that in time some churches were supporting their own evangelists, sending them, at the church’s own expense, to distant peoples. One later account speaks of a single congregation in Budu country that was sending out no fewer than fifty evangelists, all supported by the gifts of the Christians themselves. The date of that report is uncertain, and it may describe the years after Studd’s death; but the pattern began in his lifetime.

According to the mission’s own accounts, Studd insisted on that pattern. He did not believe that the mission should pay Congolese evangelists from European money, as many missions did. He believed that the Congolese church should support its own workers from the start, as the churches of the New Testament had done. That principle could be applied harshly, and in a poor country under colonial taxation it placed real burdens on poor Christians. But it also meant that the evangelists belonged to the Congolese church, and not to the mission. They were not employees of white men. They were the church’s own messengers.

Words in Their Own Tongue

The gospel spread in the languages people spoke. In the north of the mission’s field, around the Uele, the trade language was Bangala, and Norman Grubb helped to translate the New Testament into it in the 1920s, working, as every such translator did, with Congolese speakers whose names are not recorded. Further south, in the forest, the common language was Kingwana, the Congolese form of Swahili. A translation of the Scriptures into Kingwana was begun by Studd with two colleagues, Stapleton and Lowder, and Luke and Acts were published in 1930. It was one of the last pieces of work Studd did, and he gave it many hours in his final years.

No translation of the Bible is ever done by foreigners alone. Every missionary translator depends on speakers of the language who explain words, correct mistakes, and tell the translator when a sentence makes no sense. Their contribution is rarely acknowledged in print. It should be acknowledged here. The Congolese men and women who sat with Grubb and Studd over the Gospels, explaining their own languages, were translators too.

The Cost of Believing

To become a Christian in the Uele and Ituri in the 1920s was not a simple step. It often meant giving up practices that were woven into the life of a village: rites for the dead and the spirits, consultation of diviners, certain dances and festivals, the brewing and drinking of beer, and marriage customs, including the taking of more than one wife. The missions, Studd’s among them, demanded a sharp break with many of these things, and they did not always distinguish carefully between what was contrary to the gospel and what was simply unfamiliar to Europeans. Some of their rules were wise, and some were not. Converts who kept the rules often found themselves at odds with their families and their elders. Those who broke them faced the discipline of the church.

One more point belongs here. The mission’s own accounts, like those of most missions of the period, describe the Congolese chiefly as converts or as those who had not yet believed. They say much less about the Congolese who chose not to become Christians, or who came for a while and then went back to the ways of their fathers, or who joined the Catholic mission instead. Those choices, too, were real choices made by real people, for reasons that seemed good to them. A church that grows by persuasion rather than force must accept that some will say no. That is part of the dignity of those who heard, and it should be respected in the telling.

There was also the colonial state. The Belgian administration demanded taxes, labour for roads and plantations, and porters for officials. Christians were not exempt. Catholic missions, most of them Belgian, received state subsidies for schools and hospitals that Protestant missions did not, and in some districts Protestant converts found that officials and chiefs favoured their Catholic neighbours. To join a small British Protestant mission was, in a sense, to join a minority within a minority.

And there was Studd himself. The Dictionary of African Christian Biography says plainly that his conflicts in the Congo were not only with his family and fellow missionaries but also with Africans. The details are not recorded in the sources available to this book, and it would be wrong to guess at them. But it is not hard to imagine how a European of his temperament, with his absolute convictions and his impatience, might have dealt with Congolese Christians who did not agree with him about discipline, money or the pace of the work. The Congolese church that came out of his mission learned the gospel from him, and it also learned to survive his severity.

A Church That Lasted

The proof of the Congolese contribution is what happened after the missionaries left. In 1960 the Congo became independent, and in the years that followed it was torn by rebellion and war. In 1964 the Simba rebellion swept through the north-east, including the area around Ibambi, and missionaries and Congolese Christians alike suffered terribly. Many foreign missionaries left and some never came back. The churches did not disappear. They were led by Congolese pastors and evangelists, and they continued to grow.

Today the church that grew from Studd’s mission is known as the Communauté Évangélique du Christ au Cœur d’Afrique, or CECCA 16, one of the member communities of the Church of Christ in Congo. Its main centre is at Isiro, in the north-east. Estimates of its size vary, from about 120,000 members to some 250,000 people involved in its wider community. It celebrated the centenary of the mission’s arrival in 2013. It is a Congolese church, led by Congolese Christians, and it is the most lasting fruit of Studd’s life in Africa.

There is a picture in the book of Revelation that every missionary movement has loved. John sees “a great multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation and of all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, arrayed in white robes, and palms in their hands” (Revelation 7:9, ASV). It is worth noticing what John does not say. He does not say that the multitude was brought there by missionaries, or that they spoke the missionaries’ language. They come from every tongue, and they keep their tongues before the throne. The Budu, Azande, Mangbetu and Mbuti Christians of the north-eastern Congo will be in that multitude in their own right, not as anyone’s converts, but as the Lamb’s own people.

Sounded Forth

Paul wrote to the Christians of Thessalonica, a young church in a Greek city, that “from you hath sounded forth the word of the Lord, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place.” He did not say that the word had sounded forth from Paul. He had preached in Thessalonica for a few weeks. The church there had done the rest, so well that Paul had nothing left to say.

That is the true shape of the story of the Heart of Africa Mission. Studd and his colleagues brought the message to the Uele and the Ituri. They gave their health and their years to do it. But the word sounded forth from the Congolese Christians, in their own villages and languages, through their own evangelists, and at their own cost. Studd would have been the first to say that God gave the increase. He might not always have remembered that God gave it, very largely, through them.