Rev. Alan J. Meenan
I got in yesterday afternoon after a long journey: flights from Lagos to Paris to New York to Los Angeles! Nigeria is a fascinating place. While I have seen many parts of Africa, this is my first time to West Africa.
Lagos is a large city. Soon it will reputedly be the third largest city in the world. It is the largest black city and the second largest city in Africa (soon to overtake Cairo). About fifteen million people live there, although no one knows for certain. There were days, frankly, when I thought fifteen million were there on the streets!
It is a very noisy, bustling, busy place, with an infrastructure that really is not able to cope with the population. Imagine, for example, Los Angeles without any traffic lights. Imagine there are no emission control standards. Imagine that there is no city garbage disposal. You begin to get a taste of this great city. Nigeria itself is a fascinating place. Nigeria is home to one of every four black persons on the face of the earth. Some 150 million people, at least. While Lagos itself is not among the most attractive cities in the world, Nigerian people are immensely fascinating.
God is doing an amazing thing there. The Church in Nigeria is growing at nearly 3% every year. Everywhere you look you see evidence of the Christian faith. So much so that many missiologists today believe that the Great Expansion of Christianity Southern Korea saw in the seventies and eighties has now spread to Nigeria! Nigerians wear their faith upon their sleeves, and do it proudly. Every other car in Lagos has some bumper sticker proclaiming allegiance to Jesus Christ. Trucks have slogans painted on them. Shops are named after some Biblical event or some Biblical principle.
Billboards that ordinarily in Los Angeles would announce the latest shows, in Lagos announce preachers and churches. Billboards are filled with invitations to church and to hear particular preachers of the Word. One church boasts 150,000 members in Lagos alone! Another church, Faith Tabernacle, has the largest church building in the world. It seats 50,400 people, all, by the way, on white plastic deck chairs with arm-rests! Last Sunday I was preaching at Glory Tabernacle Church in Lagos, the congregation there that morning numbered 3,000 people. It was somewhat different from Hollywood Pres. People were literally rolling on the floor. The altar was full of people praying, even during the time of worship before the sermon ever began and at the conclusion of the service. The worship was spirited, uplifting, exciting, brash, loud, and tempestuous. When the Pastor called the congregation to prayer, it was like a thundercloud had descended upon the congregation.
On the way back to Lagos from that church, the pastor took me into the campgrounds of Redeemer Christian Church. There I saw a building that extended one kilometer in length! They just kept adding building after building to it because there were no sides! If you could imagine 80 football fields all put together, you begin to get the size of this building. It keeps growing. They just keep adding another section to it. The first Friday of every month, half a million believers gather there for an all night prayer meeting. Not a worship service, but just to pray. Half a million people! I would not have believed that had I not seen it with my own eyes.
Once a year in the nearby campground they have a one-week preaching congress, which attracts somewhere between 5 and 7 million people. It is almost one square mile. The platform alone seats 4,500 people. Of course, with that many millions of people gathering to hear a preacher, the people at the back can’t see him. So they have huge screens erected all over the camp, so that everyone can see what’s going on.
For those of you involved in our Lighthouse Ministry, a church by the name the City of David has a Lighthouse ministry. Every week they serve 30,000 poor people, plus another 5,000 enter the Muslim area in Northern Nigeria. Nigeria has become one of the major mission sending countries of the world—some 4,000 missionaries have left the shores of Nigeria to carry the Gospel into other places. It is a place where one can tangibly see the work of God. Not only in the amazing conversion rate, but in a country that is so Christian that every where you look you see crosses, slogans, bumper stickers, and everything else that tells people where their hearts are.
It is a land where many miracles are happening. So much so that people no longer talk too much about them because they are very commonplace: people who are healed from various sicknesses, people who are raised from the dead, people who have demons exorcized. There are some Nigerian believers who have lost count of the number of people that have been used by God to raise others from the dead.
In the seminary chapel service this last Wednesday, one such story was told in the course of events, without it being singled out as something extraordinary. The story of a Muslim family in a country in West Africa called the Gambia. The woman was very ill and was taken to the local hospital where the doctors attended her, but to no avail. She died. The doctors pronounced her dead. The family left the hospital grief stricken to make arrangements for the funeral. While they were gone, a friend of the family, who knew the Christian group in the village, asked one of the Christian missionary brothers to come and pray for the woman. He came and prayed. Asking God to raise this woman from the dead in order that he might glorify himself in that village and that many might believe. God did just that, to the astonishment of the doctors. The family when they came back with all the burial arrangements made, she was sitting up in bed talking happily. That woman became a believer in Jesus Christ! That woman’s family became believers in Jesus Christ! That entire village became believers in Jesus Christ! I tell you, truly amazing things are happening!!
I ask myself why do we not see those things in the west? I think, truth to tell, we have been taught not to expect the sick to be healed. The church has done a grave disservice in not telling you of the supernatural power that is available through the Savior of the Christian faith! We are taught not to expect demons to be cast out. Probably, most of you don’t even believe in demons. You are, after all, sophisticated Westerners. Certainly the dead have been raised from the grave or from death itself. Generally, we in the West, relegate that kind of thinking to the lunatic fringe of the Christian faith.
Yet in Nigeria, one of the great movements I see there is among the intelligentsia of the country. Some of the leading pastors in the country include a man I met who before he became a pastor, was professor of the Philosophy of Mathematics at Lagos University. Or another pastor who was a neurosurgeon called by God to become a pastor. There is tremendous movement of God in the University campuses across Nigeria. Day by day, thousands of students are turning to Christ.
Interestingly, the Muslims of Nigeria are having a hard time. They’re dropping their normal practices, often to adopt Christian practices, but applying them to the faith of Islam because they think there is something that Christians are doing that is breeding such success. They think that if they emulate the Christians, they will find the formula of discovery whereby they can stem the tide of the explosion of Christianity in Nigeria and also stem the tide of seeing their own people leave the Muslim faith and embrace Christianity, which they are doing in droves!
It was in that context that I want to look at the words of Isaiah the prophet in chapter 43. Look at verses 15, 16, and 17, “I am the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King: Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick.”
History attests to the power and the ability of God. Isaiah begins with the most basic premise that God is a God who is able to do far more abundantly above and beyond anything that you can even begin to imagine. I am the Lord. I am the Holy One. I am the Creator God. I am the King. I am the Redeemer. All of these indicate that God is a God who is able. Israel believed in that great ability of God to see them through. It was the one thing that kept them going in the midst of difficulty.
Isaiah was writing at such a time of national disaster, when all hope had lapsed. People continued to cling to the idea of a God who is able to do far more abundantly above and beyond anything that they could begin to dream of.
One senses that spirit of exhilaration and excitement in the Church in Nigeria today. The one thing that was a constant rebuke to me was the confidence with which they prayed. When they were called on to pray, they prayed with unshakable confidence. They prayed expecting God to do something, anticipating that God would really answer their prayers. There was nothing perfunctory about their prayers, as a result: miracles.
I wish I had time to tell you some of the many stories that I heard as I sat down over dinners. I listened to story after story of miraculous interventions in the lives of people and how the strangest things had happened to them that delivered them from death. The Provost of the seminary in which I taught has even today the scars of four bullet wounds that he received during the uprising and the civil war in Nigeria, when his entire village was herded into the assembling place in the village and rebels opened up with their machine guns. Somehow he managed to survive. God had a tremendous journey for him to undertake because he established one of the first indigenous missionary societies in Nigeria. The stories go on.
A pastor said to me, “Miracles are commonplace inNigeria. They are happening all the time. We just take them for granted. When Christians come together and pray, miracles will happen. We believe. Dead people rise from the dead. They just expect it.”
I said, “We don’t have that expectation in the West.”
He said, smiling, “Oh but you don’t need any miracles in the West do you. You have doctors, nurses and welfare systems.” Here is the promise of better things to come, in verses 18 and 19 - “Forget the former things and do not dwell in the past, for I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up. Do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” Remember the people to whom Isaiah is speaking are a people who have failed to realize their potential. They are people who have become slack in their diligence, and who reneged on their commitment. God is saying, whether the past has been good or not; there are better and greater things coming.
Dare to believe your faith. Dare to ask God for miracles. Dare to believe that he can answer. Live as the ancient Israelites did in that kind of faith, as the prophets and apostles did. As they shout from the pages of the New Testament that we follow God who is able to transform human society and human life. As St. Brendan, the old saint used to say, “To show us wonder upon wonder and every wonder true” - always reaching forward for something else. Have we lost that? Where is that craving for something more, something greater?
When David Livingston was found dead on his knees in central Africa, his diary was found opened by his side. His last entry read this way: “My Jesus, my Savior, my Life, my All, anew I dedicate myself to you. New discoveries and new dedications right to the end: from strength to strength, from glory to glory.”
The Church in China today is mobilizing itself. In 1978, there was one church in Shanghai, it was a window dressing to show the world that China still believed in freedom of religion. What nonsense! Today, with the collapse of the Maoist regime, Christians number themselves as 100 million believers in China. They have pledged to use the old silk trade routes to carry the gospel back to Jerusalem for the Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist strongholds of India, Pakistan, Burma, Iraq, and Iran. They have already started sending 100,000 missionaries. What amazing things God is doing in the world!
When the church leaders of China were confronted with the fact that they might be persecuted, of the 39 initial missionaries that they sent, only 3 came home, 36 were arrested. Don’t you realize that regimes, these Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu strongholds will not tolerate Chinese missionaries? What will you do when opposition becomes severe? The Chinese leaders said, “We will press on!” then they added, “It’s only western missionary societies that pull all their missionaries out when trouble comes. We will stay the course. For God has called us as a people to get the message back toJerusalem.”
What is God calling you to do and us to do, as a Church? To keep the machinery well oiled to keep going through the motions? We do that well here. There is nothing wrong with what we do. But in the midst of the good things that we do here, I believe God is calling us as a people. He’s saying to us, “I want to do a new thing. I want to do it inAmericaas I am doing it inAfricaorChina. I want to do it here as well.” At one point in the middle of the service last Sunday, they took the Nigerian flag and someone started waving it. They began to sing, “Nigeriafor Christ!” I wonder if we are praying a revival upon this country that we love. If not, can we begin?
I got in yesterday afternoon after a long journey: flights from Lagos to Paris to New York to Los Angeles! Nigeria is a fascinating place. While I have seen many parts of Africa, this is my first time to West Africa.
Lagos is a large city. Soon it will reputedly be the third largest city in the world. It is the largest black city and the second largest city in Africa (soon to overtake Cairo). About fifteen million people live there, although no one knows for certain. There were days, frankly, when I thought fifteen million were there on the streets!
It is a very noisy, bustling, busy place, with an infrastructure that really is not able to cope with the population. Imagine, for example, Los Angeles without any traffic lights. Imagine there are no emission control standards. Imagine that there is no city garbage disposal. You begin to get a taste of this great city. Nigeria itself is a fascinating place. Nigeria is home to one of every four black persons on the face of the earth. Some 150 million people, at least. While Lagos itself is not among the most attractive cities in the world, Nigerian people are immensely fascinating.
God is doing an amazing thing there. The Church in Nigeria is growing at nearly 3% every year. Everywhere you look you see evidence of the Christian faith. So much so that many missiologists today believe that the Great Expansion of Christianity Southern Korea saw in the seventies and eighties has now spread to Nigeria! Nigerians wear their faith upon their sleeves, and do it proudly. Every other car in Lagos has some bumper sticker proclaiming allegiance to Jesus Christ. Trucks have slogans painted on them. Shops are named after some Biblical event or some Biblical principle.
Billboards that ordinarily in Los Angeles would announce the latest shows, in Lagos announce preachers and churches. Billboards are filled with invitations to church and to hear particular preachers of the Word. One church boasts 150,000 members in Lagos alone! Another church, Faith Tabernacle, has the largest church building in the world. It seats 50,400 people, all, by the way, on white plastic deck chairs with arm-rests! Last Sunday I was preaching at Glory Tabernacle Church in Lagos, the congregation there that morning numbered 3,000 people. It was somewhat different from Hollywood Pres. People were literally rolling on the floor. The altar was full of people praying, even during the time of worship before the sermon ever began and at the conclusion of the service. The worship was spirited, uplifting, exciting, brash, loud, and tempestuous. When the Pastor called the congregation to prayer, it was like a thundercloud had descended upon the congregation.
On the way back to Lagos from that church, the pastor took me into the campgrounds of Redeemer Christian Church. There I saw a building that extended one kilometer in length! They just kept adding building after building to it because there were no sides! If you could imagine 80 football fields all put together, you begin to get the size of this building. It keeps growing. They just keep adding another section to it. The first Friday of every month, half a million believers gather there for an all night prayer meeting. Not a worship service, but just to pray. Half a million people! I would not have believed that had I not seen it with my own eyes.
Once a year in the nearby campground they have a one-week preaching congress, which attracts somewhere between 5 and 7 million people. It is almost one square mile. The platform alone seats 4,500 people. Of course, with that many millions of people gathering to hear a preacher, the people at the back can’t see him. So they have huge screens erected all over the camp, so that everyone can see what’s going on.
For those of you involved in our Lighthouse Ministry, a church by the name the City of David has a Lighthouse ministry. Every week they serve 30,000 poor people, plus another 5,000 enter the Muslim area in Northern Nigeria. Nigeria has become one of the major mission sending countries of the world—some 4,000 missionaries have left the shores of Nigeria to carry the Gospel into other places. It is a place where one can tangibly see the work of God. Not only in the amazing conversion rate, but in a country that is so Christian that every where you look you see crosses, slogans, bumper stickers, and everything else that tells people where their hearts are.
It is a land where many miracles are happening. So much so that people no longer talk too much about them because they are very commonplace: people who are healed from various sicknesses, people who are raised from the dead, people who have demons exorcized. There are some Nigerian believers who have lost count of the number of people that have been used by God to raise others from the dead.
In the seminary chapel service this last Wednesday, one such story was told in the course of events, without it being singled out as something extraordinary. The story of a Muslim family in a country in West Africa called the Gambia. The woman was very ill and was taken to the local hospital where the doctors attended her, but to no avail. She died. The doctors pronounced her dead. The family left the hospital grief stricken to make arrangements for the funeral. While they were gone, a friend of the family, who knew the Christian group in the village, asked one of the Christian missionary brothers to come and pray for the woman. He came and prayed. Asking God to raise this woman from the dead in order that he might glorify himself in that village and that many might believe. God did just that, to the astonishment of the doctors. The family when they came back with all the burial arrangements made, she was sitting up in bed talking happily. That woman became a believer in Jesus Christ! That woman’s family became believers in Jesus Christ! That entire village became believers in Jesus Christ! I tell you, truly amazing things are happening!!
I ask myself why do we not see those things in the west? I think, truth to tell, we have been taught not to expect the sick to be healed. The church has done a grave disservice in not telling you of the supernatural power that is available through the Savior of the Christian faith! We are taught not to expect demons to be cast out. Probably, most of you don’t even believe in demons. You are, after all, sophisticated Westerners. Certainly the dead have been raised from the grave or from death itself. Generally, we in the West, relegate that kind of thinking to the lunatic fringe of the Christian faith.
Yet in Nigeria, one of the great movements I see there is among the intelligentsia of the country. Some of the leading pastors in the country include a man I met who before he became a pastor, was professor of the Philosophy of Mathematics at Lagos University. Or another pastor who was a neurosurgeon called by God to become a pastor. There is tremendous movement of God in the University campuses across Nigeria. Day by day, thousands of students are turning to Christ.
Interestingly, the Muslims of Nigeria are having a hard time. They’re dropping their normal practices, often to adopt Christian practices, but applying them to the faith of Islam because they think there is something that Christians are doing that is breeding such success. They think that if they emulate the Christians, they will find the formula of discovery whereby they can stem the tide of the explosion of Christianity in Nigeria and also stem the tide of seeing their own people leave the Muslim faith and embrace Christianity, which they are doing in droves!
It was in that context that I want to look at the words of Isaiah the prophet in chapter 43. Look at verses 15, 16, and 17, “I am the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King: Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick.”
History attests to the power and the ability of God. Isaiah begins with the most basic premise that God is a God who is able to do far more abundantly above and beyond anything that you can even begin to imagine. I am the Lord. I am the Holy One. I am the Creator God. I am the King. I am the Redeemer. All of these indicate that God is a God who is able. Israel believed in that great ability of God to see them through. It was the one thing that kept them going in the midst of difficulty.
Isaiah was writing at such a time of national disaster, when all hope had lapsed. People continued to cling to the idea of a God who is able to do far more abundantly above and beyond anything that they could begin to dream of.
One senses that spirit of exhilaration and excitement in the Church in Nigeria today. The one thing that was a constant rebuke to me was the confidence with which they prayed. When they were called on to pray, they prayed with unshakable confidence. They prayed expecting God to do something, anticipating that God would really answer their prayers. There was nothing perfunctory about their prayers, as a result: miracles.
I wish I had time to tell you some of the many stories that I heard as I sat down over dinners. I listened to story after story of miraculous interventions in the lives of people and how the strangest things had happened to them that delivered them from death. The Provost of the seminary in which I taught has even today the scars of four bullet wounds that he received during the uprising and the civil war in Nigeria, when his entire village was herded into the assembling place in the village and rebels opened up with their machine guns. Somehow he managed to survive. God had a tremendous journey for him to undertake because he established one of the first indigenous missionary societies in Nigeria. The stories go on.
A pastor said to me, “Miracles are commonplace inNigeria. They are happening all the time. We just take them for granted. When Christians come together and pray, miracles will happen. We believe. Dead people rise from the dead. They just expect it.”
I said, “We don’t have that expectation in the West.”
He said, smiling, “Oh but you don’t need any miracles in the West do you. You have doctors, nurses and welfare systems.” Here is the promise of better things to come, in verses 18 and 19 - “Forget the former things and do not dwell in the past, for I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up. Do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” Remember the people to whom Isaiah is speaking are a people who have failed to realize their potential. They are people who have become slack in their diligence, and who reneged on their commitment. God is saying, whether the past has been good or not; there are better and greater things coming.
Dare to believe your faith. Dare to ask God for miracles. Dare to believe that he can answer. Live as the ancient Israelites did in that kind of faith, as the prophets and apostles did. As they shout from the pages of the New Testament that we follow God who is able to transform human society and human life. As St. Brendan, the old saint used to say, “To show us wonder upon wonder and every wonder true” - always reaching forward for something else. Have we lost that? Where is that craving for something more, something greater?
When David Livingston was found dead on his knees in central Africa, his diary was found opened by his side. His last entry read this way: “My Jesus, my Savior, my Life, my All, anew I dedicate myself to you. New discoveries and new dedications right to the end: from strength to strength, from glory to glory.”
The Church in China today is mobilizing itself. In 1978, there was one church in Shanghai, it was a window dressing to show the world that China still believed in freedom of religion. What nonsense! Today, with the collapse of the Maoist regime, Christians number themselves as 100 million believers in China. They have pledged to use the old silk trade routes to carry the gospel back to Jerusalem for the Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist strongholds of India, Pakistan, Burma, Iraq, and Iran. They have already started sending 100,000 missionaries. What amazing things God is doing in the world!
When the church leaders of China were confronted with the fact that they might be persecuted, of the 39 initial missionaries that they sent, only 3 came home, 36 were arrested. Don’t you realize that regimes, these Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu strongholds will not tolerate Chinese missionaries? What will you do when opposition becomes severe? The Chinese leaders said, “We will press on!” then they added, “It’s only western missionary societies that pull all their missionaries out when trouble comes. We will stay the course. For God has called us as a people to get the message back toJerusalem.”
What is God calling you to do and us to do, as a Church? To keep the machinery well oiled to keep going through the motions? We do that well here. There is nothing wrong with what we do. But in the midst of the good things that we do here, I believe God is calling us as a people. He’s saying to us, “I want to do a new thing. I want to do it inAmericaas I am doing it inAfricaorChina. I want to do it here as well.” At one point in the middle of the service last Sunday, they took the Nigerian flag and someone started waving it. They began to sing, “Nigeriafor Christ!” I wonder if we are praying a revival upon this country that we love. If not, can we begin?
