Page 200 - LD215 History of the Church in Africa A4 final

A History of the Church in Africa

“Never was there a period when a body of missionaries were in such
a confused and deplorable (and awful to add) degraded condition”
(quoted in Tucker, 142).

Despite these circumstances, Moffat persevered with his plans to take
the gospel inland. Moffat, his wife, and a colleague made the difficult
trek to Kuruman. He chose the site because it was along a river and near
a spring that produced clear water. Given his experience as a gardener,
he envisioned a beautiful agricultural project with plenty of fruit and
vegetables; furthermore, Kuruman would be a model of Christianity
and development. However, the Bechuanas, the target people group,
were not receptive to the gospel. As a result, he did not have many
converts and progress was slow. For one thing, polygamy presented a
problem; another problem was his inability to speak the language of the
people. (Moffat had not taken the time to learn the language.)

It was not until 1827 that, as Tucker notes, “he left Mary with their
little ones, turned his back on his gardens, and went out into the bush
with several tribesmen, and for eleven weeks he immersed himself in
language study” (145). Learning the language of the people represented
a turning point, for after learning the language, he began the translation
of the Bible that took 29 years. In addition, more people understood his
gospel message and the first baptisms occurred in 1829.

So Moffat planted a church. He also started a school and built a stone
church that still stands today. His practice of using the “Bible and the
plough” was a model that other missionaries in Africa used. The Moffats
had ten children, but only seven survived. One of his daughters, also
named Mary, became the wife of David Livingstone. After more than a
half century of missionary work, the Moffats returned to England where
he traveled as a missionary spokesman, persuading young people to
give their lives to missions.

David Livingstone
Renowned historian Kenneth Latourette referred to Livingstone as
“one of the greatest and most influential missionaries in the history of
mankind” (1970, 5:345). By contrast, Jeal asserts that “he failed in all he
most wished to achieve” and that he was a “failure as a husband and a
father” (quoted in Shaw 1996, 169). The objective truth about Livingstone

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