The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele

The terrible scourge of Female Genital Mutilation and what Christians are doing about it - with Bishop Mwita Akiri

• Mwita Akiri, Judith Calf, Tim Swan • Season 6 • Episode 35

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Plus how the Tanzanian Church has been built through the labors and prayers  of Australian Christians, and why prosperity gospel preachers are as wicked as witch doctors!

We are joined by Bishop Mwita Akiri from Tarime in rural Tanzania, Judith Calf who served as a missionary in theological education in Tanzania for 20 years, and Tim Swan who leads the Anglican Aid Ministry here in Australia.

To support Anglican Aid projects in Tanzania: https://anglicanaid.org.au/locations/tanzania/

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Speaker 1:

The pastor's heart and today, how can we help girls in rural Africa out of the terrible scourge of female genital mutilation and why prosperity gospel preachers are as wicked as witch doctors. We're also talking the impact of education and theological education. It's Dominic Steele and we're joined by Bishop Mowita Akiri from Tarime, in rural Tanzania. Along with Mwita, our guest is Judith Carff, who has served as a missionary in Tanzania in theological education for 20 years, and Tim Swan, who leads the Anglican Aid Ministry here in Australia. Bishop Mwita Akiri, it is lovely to see you again and I wonder if we could start with your pastor's heart and before we get to female genital mutilation and education, all those kind of topics. I was with you at a dinner in Tarimah last year. It was the Archbishop of Sydney and the ministers of your whole diocese and a little group of us from Australia, and you just made a speech then from the bottom of your pastor's heart and I just wonder if you could take us to that moment and what you were saying.

Speaker 2:

Sure, thank you, dominic. On that day I did say that the church in Tanzania is a product of sweat and blood and sacrifice of Australians. History goes this way that at the beginning of course there was a movement from the UK, united Kingdom, people going to Uganda, going to Uganda, and then obviously Uganda was the focus. But evangelical Christianity in Tanzania was kind of a by-product of that, because people have to stop on the way as they went to Uganda. And then that was the work of CMS UK which started evangelical Christianity in Tanzania, evangelical Christian in Tanzania.

Speaker 2:

But after the First World War there was a recession and CMSUK was kind of having difficulty with the funding and wanted to withdraw from Tanzania. There was a talk of the mission being handed to another mission Lutheran or Anglo-Catholic UMC at the time University of Central Africa. But the missionaries on the ground stood their ground. They said no, we're staying. And then 1926 is when CMS Australia took over the mission in Tanzania and that was a game changer. The work continued in the areas of evangelization, education and so forth. And then the first bishop of Tanzania, george Chambers from Australia, comes in leading a diocese which is 640,000 square kilometers. It's only a single bishop for that area. Australians come in and the schools multiply, churches multiply. So surely that's why I mean when I say without Australia, the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church would never have been there, because the mission would have been handed to another mission, maybe Lutheran or Anglo-Catholic, and so we are a product of, as I say, blood and sweat of Australian Christians. That is why the church in Tanzania, particularly the Evangelical Wing, is there today.

Speaker 1:

So I mean hearing you say that. I mean I remember becoming Christian in 1986 and starting to pray for people in Tanzania and that kind of thing, but had no idea that Australian Christians had played such a significant part.

Speaker 2:

They did, they did, and I think we tend to forget because, I mean, things have changed. Unconcerned communion, people have different allegiances and alliances, but for those of us who've done a bit of history, and even as we grew up, I mean, what was the church? In fact, it wasn't even Anglican Church. People called it CMS. So CMS was the church Right.

Speaker 1:

And CMS at that time, although there are still some… so I'm going to go to CMS this summer, yeah so CMS is the church.

Speaker 2:

You're either CMS or UMCA for the American community there. Umca, as I said, university of Michigan, central Africa, that was David Livingstone and then it changed to USPG, but in my side of Tanzania, the area where I grew up in. So on Sunday, well, if you met someone asking you what church do you go to, I'm CMS. Right, and CMS simply was CMS Australia, because by then although there were missionaries from UK still operating there and of course by 50s Crosslinks, which was kind of a sprinter group or people who felt that CMS UK was not evangelical enough and started in 1922. But the dominant kind of group was Australia, cms Australia.

Speaker 1:

You were telling me at one point there was 100 or something Australian missionaries serving in Tanzania.

Speaker 2:

Perhaps even more, because you know. You talk about schools, you talk about hospitals, you talk about churches being planted, pastors it was all Australia. And where could you not find Australians? Everywhere, everywhere, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And one of those people was Judith Carp. Yes, I joined a long legacy.

Speaker 3:

You don't go to serve the Anglican Church in Tanzania without knowing you are walking in the steps of men and women who have given greatly to serve God's kingdom purposes in Tanganyika and then Tanzania as it became, and I had that incredible privilege to do that.

Speaker 1:

And that sense of standing alongside all these other Aussies over there.

Speaker 3:

Yes, I think by the time I got there the numbers were starting to decline a little bit, but it was more standing alongside the fruit of their labour, but also the fruit of the labour of every Tanzanian evangelist and pastor. Because, yes, there were Australian missionaries, but they were one. But the growing Tanzanian church from the very beginning also took the gospel. I had the privilege in the year 2000, at the turn of the millennium, to do a celebration walk that the original Tanzanian evangelists walked in the area where I was serving in the Kagero region, and we had to walk for three days just to get between centre and centre, and that was to celebrate the gospel. Yes, partnering with Australian Christians, but being carried by Tanzanians who had heard the gospel were then saying this is not just for the missionaries to do, this is for us to do. And that's been the privilege to see somebody like Bishop Mwita, and then the hundreds of evangelists and pastors, the thousands, the tens of thousands and more that have been a product of God's great work in Tanzania.

Speaker 1:

And Mwida. We sometimes today hear some of the negatives of colonialisation, but actually there are lots and lots of positives of this relationship that you want to speak about.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we know for a fact of history that missionary enterprise preceded colonial enterprise.

Speaker 2:

The missionaries were there before the colonial governors and officials were on the ground. So people tend to confuse that by thinking that it was the missionaries who brought in the colonialists, which is not, because Africa at that time, remember, there was exploration explorers from Europe, travelers. You know, you have Henry Mott on Stanley, you have David Livingstone and a lot of them. So now how would you pacify the country and then preach the gospel? I mean, they needed peace, they needed to work with African chiefs and kings, be able to make the countries governable. But then there are this thing which has got a lot of impact on how the West is seeing mission today, which is to say, oh, you know, colonialists came and the missionaries were there, they were all together. They destroyed African culture, they took over the countries. But things are more complex than that, because in places that I know Tanzania, east Africa, west Africa some of the great defenders of the local people were the missionaries.

Speaker 2:

There were some injustices, of course. I mean it wasn't a kind of a nice steady expansion of empires, if you like. There were some ills. There were some very bad things that happened at the time. Places like Congo maybe experienced more of it, you know, like people being slaughtered. 1905 to 1907, the Magi Magi uprising the water water, the magic water, in southern Tanzania. Over 120,000 people were killed and they had this belief that if they sprinkled water and went to the witch doctors then the bullets would turn into water. That's why it was called Magi Maji. Maji is water.

Speaker 2:

But despite all of that, the reason why the missionaries were there was to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. And the colonialists were there alongside. You know, they were there together, but their roles were very different these ones who came as missionaries to preach the gospel, to spread the light of God, and the others, obviously pacifying the country, taking over territory from the chiefs. But we don't have to confuse the two. I don't think, from what I know, that really would hold the water that missionaries were there. You know, destroying culture, working with colonelists no, there were some bad things, but the missionaries were for the people and the gospel and they were good dependents of the people that they were having in churches, if you like, in some cases challenging the colonial officials about certain policies, for example. But the things that were more complex than that, yeah, than this simplistic kind of conclusion that the missionaries were there to work with the colonialists to destroy Africa.

Speaker 1:

Now last year, after the Rwanda GAFCON conference, I went for a week-long trip through Tanzania, which is where I met you and you gave that speech that I just referred to. But that same night you were kind of giving us an overview of what we might experience next, which was we were going to go to the Serengeti National Park, but we were going to go and see a safe house in Serengeti where girls were taken to protect them from female genital mutilation. And let's dig into that problem in your district, because it is a big problem in your district.

Speaker 2:

Yes, it is. Every two years there's this drama of female genital mutilation and it doesn't happen only in my district, it happens in the whole of, you could say, the eastern part of Mara region. Mara is the eastern part of Lake Victoria and west of the Serengeti, the whole of my diocese, and then Diocese of Mara, the Serengeti district, which is bordering Serengeti National Park. The same ethnic group lives in both areas districts, and initially you think about this as a cultural thing. Okay, it's culture. You circumcise the girls, it's a rite of passage. You're a child and how do you become an adult? Both the boys and the girls get circumcised, so they kind of make that shift from being a child to being an adult.

Speaker 2:

But over the years we've come to realize it's more than that and during the conference, probably showing some of the well, at least one video which shows you that, the, what we call traditional practitioners or performers, these people who are performing the circumcision, they get paid for that. And then there are traditional priests who have to cleanse the land, make sure that once the circumcision is done no one is going to die, because some people would bleed to death. So they also have to have animals slaughtered. It's a kind of sacrifice. So the economic equation has come into that. So religion and economic equation that this is a moneymaker for those who are performing the circumcision. Once the girls who are 11, 12, 13, 14, maybe slightly more or older, once they get circumcised. The next thing is marriage. So children who are under age of 18 get married and they have children. They feel like they're adults. You know a 13-year-old child or 12 circumcised who are circumcised. They feel like they're maybe 30, 40, 50 because they have to get married.

Speaker 1:

So it's. On the one hand, it's I mean, when you say, when somebody says female genital mutilation, my gut reaction of horror is about cutting, and that's part of the story. But there's also that immediately you're going to get married. Yeah, judith, do you have anything on this?

Speaker 3:

I didn't work in this particular part of Tanzania, but it happens across various cultural groups and some of the religious groups in Tanzania. One of the things is almost, I think, a question what makes a woman as well? And so for some of the cultural groups that needs to be defined through a circumcision practice that we can call genital mutilation. But also, becoming a woman means you have to have a child, and often you perhaps even have to have the child before you get married to prove that you can actually be worthy of marriage and having a child. So there is that sense in that when you are now at the age of 14, 15 or 16, you may have had primary school education. You may not have, but these days it's more common that you will have. So that's going to take you to the age of about 12 or 13. Until recently, for most Tanzanians, and particularly for Tanzanian young girls, that was the end of your schooling. There's been great effort by the Tanzanian government and I have seen that over the last two to three decades of incredible increase of access for secondary education in Tanzania. But for many of the girls who are now young women nothing to do after school You've had a process that says you're a woman. To prove that I'm a woman, I need to have a child. That may actually not even be with a person that you marry, that just may be somebody that the village decides is the person that needs to get you pregnant so that your family can say, yes, she'll be able to bear children for you. And so what that does to the opportunities. Therefore, think of also what it also does for the children who are born in these circumstances. So, yes, there is the life of the girl woman now, but then the life of these children who will raise them.

Speaker 3:

So it's a complex social, cultural, religious impact. I think I'm thankful to say, in the experience that I have had, there's been a lot of good effort by both church community and government. But some of these are long held cultural beliefs and when it's in that identity about who you are that can take only the transforming power of the gospel to break somebody's. My identity doesn't need to come from my cultural group. My identity can first come from who I am in Christ, not to forsake my people or my culture. There's richness and there's goodness and there's joy in Tanzanian culture and tribal culture, but, as in any culture, there are things that we would want the gospel to transform, and practices of circumcision for girls and, in fact, helping a society and a culture. Think through what makes me a woman, what makes me a child of God, a female child of God, is something that the gospel can answer.

Speaker 1:

We're going to ask you both a question about that in a moment, but before we get to that, let's bring Tim Swan in. Because, tim, when we went looking at the various safe houses and things protecting young girls, that very one we went to in Serengeti, after talking to you, muita, we got there and there was a well out the back that had been paid for by Anglican Aid or by a church at Hurstville in Australia through Anglican Aid, and I just thought, wow, here is this house where young teenage girls are taken, and the water for it has been paid for by an Australian suburban church. And you're doing quite a lot through Anglican Aid to help in these areas, can you?

Speaker 1:

just give us that.

Speaker 4:

Well, I think also you see again the fruit of sort of Australian CMS and missionary involvement flowing out in that. So in some of these places there have been missionaries, they've been connected to churches and the churches are saying, okay, there are great needs just to access safe water, for example, how can we support the building of a well? And so Anglican Aid is providing the mechanism for a church or Christians here to be able to support building something like that. Or in the case of Mara Diocese there we've been supporting the building of a girls' school there and a primary school to help deal with some of these issues, as well as a sewing centre where some of these young girls learn to sew and have a future there.

Speaker 1:

My wife was super impressed by the sewing centre, in fact, and she said when we came to do our tax-deductible giving at the end of the year, she said that's the one I want to, because girls are going there to learn to sew, but actually being given a future, that isn't the future you were describing a moment ago.

Speaker 4:

Being given a future, but also they're being taught in a Christian environment and actually living there in a Christian environment, with Christian teachers who are helping shape them and also, I guess, as Judith says, helping answer some of these questions. What does it mean to be a child of God? What does it mean to be a Christian woman? Where is that going to lead? What are my opportunities for the future?

Speaker 1:

Well, let's go back to that question then, mowita, how are you? I mean because it seems as though part of the problem is tribal culture, and I'm imagining that there's some syncretism between a tribal culture and somebody who's come to Christ. But how do you speak Jesus into this space? And then we'll ask you the same question, judith.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, for example, in relation to FGM, when we go around our churches doing confirmation, we also go around our churches doing confirmation. We also go back to Genesis and tell people God made you good and whole and you don't have to do anything else apart from trust God, believe in God and then have this sense of being a whole person in God, rather than have to go to people who are doing mutilation to make you feel like you're a real person. So we go and tell them that. But obviously you know there's something very subtle about Africa, which is and of course, I guess, other parts of the world that you have religion, an African traditional religion or religions, if you like, because every bit will have a different part of a different kind of that expression of that religion. So you make that transition to Christianity and so how much do you keep and how much do you take forward? In much of Africa that I've seen, and particularly in my own area, the worldview is a plus for us because people accept this supernatural worldview, almost take it for granted, and that is a good starting point for people to know, instead of the lesser being and ancestors and the gods, there is one God, god of Jesus Christ. What will happen there?

Speaker 2:

There are people who feel oppressed by sin, if you like, in the traditional community, traditional world, and diviners and witch doctors thrive because people fear misfortune, people want to be liberated, people want to be liberated, people want to feel safe. And then we say to them now this safety is in Christ Jesus, this safety is no longer in you being fearful or afraid, but your security is in Jesus Christ. So people can make that transition because they can see the difference between trusting in Jesus and being a slave of witch doctors, diviners and so forth. In fact, these days, of course you remember I also spoke about prosperity gospel, which is in my view I know some people might be upset if I said this that prosperity goes for preachers, particularly in Africa.

Speaker 2:

Maybe other parts of the world is different, but it's like being a witch doctor on Sunday. So you sanitize this traditional beliefs and manipulation of people, playing with their fears and their needs, disease and so forth, but you do it on Sunday. People are looking for security, which we say to them in the traditional world or traditional religion or cultural setting, you don't get that because, again, it is about faith. But then, with prosperity gospel, if somebody went to church, they would be told OK, you give money, so your child will be well and security comes from prayer, but you give money first, which is the same thing which the rich doctor would tell anybody. Give money so that the medicine you are given will be effective is the same kind of mentality, and so the operation or the operational world of the witch doctors is almost the same thing as what Prosperity Gospel Preacher is doing on Sunday. It's a sanitised kind of witch doctor practice, if you like.

Speaker 1:

Let's go back to Judith. Judith, the gospel you want to preach to young women in Africa.

Speaker 3:

It is good news, and I think why I invested under God a large part of my adult life and why I'm continuing to be with Anglican Aid now is because it is the power of God's word that will transform somebody. But God's word, as rich as it is in a non-literate society, people who are first-generation Christians, having come out of their traditional religions, the Bible is alien to them. And so one of the ways we know that we will strengthen the church and, as Anglican says, we want to strengthen churches and transform communities. And that's why we're investing in the training of church leaders, because, as Bishop Mwita said, young Christians are vulnerable, and young Christians are vulnerable particularly to pastors who may have a good intent but do not know the word of God. And so what we want to invest in to protect that young girl in her community is training up the leaders of God's church to be confident in God's word, to be grounded in God's word and how to teach it in a culturally relevant way into their communities. So the more we can get trained men and women and you know I want to beat my drum here a little bit one of the ways that we will continue to transform the girl child, the young woman in Tanzania is through the training of women, and that is what we would like to continue to do.

Speaker 3:

Well, but we want to make our pastors rich in their own understanding of God's word, in their own personal walk with the Lord and so being confident in God's word and able to discern actually that is not what God's word is saying, because if you only get one message that that is what Christianity is with good intent, you may follow that, and so the training that we're doing through Generous Givers to Anglican Aid and the extended mission community that's still part of Tanzania, is to ground people in God's word. Allow him and his word, his spirit, to transform every person one by one, but one by one. In Tanzania is actually a community, and transform a community. You can transform generations of people into the future who will need not grow up in fear.

Speaker 1:

If I come to a slightly different topic, Mowita, one of the tensions you have as a church leader in Tanzania is whether or not to take money from the West, which has theological strings attached, from liberal churches in the West that are saying you've got to teach and believe things contrary to the word of God. And that's a live debate amongst church leadership in Tanzania at the moment. Can you just give us a little insight into that?

Speaker 2:

Well, one of the reasons why we cherish our partnership with Anglican Aid and the Diocese of Sydney and all the evangelical conservatives in the world is that we tend to see money in a different way. I mean, some people say, take money from anybody and use it, particularly in the context of Africa, which is suffering from poverty, even though God has endowed Africa with a lot of resources minerals, minerals, you know, animals and everything but still that doesn't translate into the economy of the countries and then creating income, creating wealth, getting people out of poverty. So we have a context in which poverty reigns and the people that come to our churches are very poor. I mean, a lot of them are poor, particularly in rural areas. They're giving. People do their best. They can collect money In a diocese like Tarime, where I started with 1,000 people, now 7,000 in the last decade or so, but the giving is still small. So if a bishop wants to do any development project, community project that transforms, like we're working with Anken Aid, Build a school.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, build a school which you're trying to do at the moment?

Speaker 2:

Yes, we're trying to do it Get girls, give them opportunity for education. Bishop wants a big car. Bishop wants I don't know running course for the diocese. Bishop wants I don't know running course for the diocese. And there is this joke that evangelical Christians have Jesus and we have Jesus in our hearts, but our pockets are not as thick as the liberals. So you choose between having Jesus and having the gospel and your pocket being full of money.

Speaker 2:

The bad news is the people who tend to have big, quick money are the people who tend to downplay the authority of scripture, evangelism, theological education. But they have money for other things. Why should someone give you $500,000 very quickly for a building, for a guest house, for I don't know a community project, if you like? But you ask them for $5,000 for theological education, for training evangelists, and they tell you you don't have the money. So that's kind of the difference, because this is almost like a project of destroying the church. The church will be things we can see, but not faith in God. So for us, some of us have stood our ground, not just for the last 10 years, for over 20 years. We're simply saying God has enough faithful people around the world who can work with Uncle Ed and us around the world from Australia, other parts, and we can still do the same things, but just wait and pray.

Speaker 1:

Tim Moita's really laid out the strategy. It's funding theological education and funding education to help people read and write so that then they can learn Jesus better. And what are the different projects that you're actually trying to do that through?

Speaker 4:

Well, I think one of these projects came because of conversations with Bishop Muita as chairman of GAFCON Tanzania, in that we said how can we help? What's the support that we can give from Australia? And the need was theological education, and so we said, okay, well, let's work in partnership to develop theological education in various Bible colleges in Tanzania.

Speaker 4:

But of course, we're not just doing that in Tanzania. We're doing it in the poorest nations in the world, where there is real difficulty for pastors or churches to be able to afford to have their pastors trained, and so it's a huge impact that we can have with not a lot, not even great amounts of money, to be able to see people trained and then go out for a lifetime of ministry in their own cultural context, and Judith is certainly helping with getting these programs up and going in Tanzania in particular, burundi, other places.

Speaker 1:

Right, we want to say thank you all for coming in and we will put some links to some of those programs on the show notes below this. My guests on the Pastor's Heart Mowita Akiri. He's the diocesan bishop for Tarime in Tanzania, and also Tim Swan, ceo of Anglican Aid. And Judith Carth, who has served as a missionary with the Church Missionary Society in Tanzania for 20-odd years but now is working in projects at Anglican Aid. My name's Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.

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