Facing the Future
With Confidence
Presented Tuesday, July 5, 2005

Pardon Mwansa
President

From two came three!" The Southern Africa-Indian Ocean Division (SID) was born on January 1, 2003, from the Eastern Africa Division and the Indian Ocean Division, the two divisions that administered most of Africa up to December 2002.

This new entity has three official languages--English, French, and Portuguese--instead of just one. It is comprised of 23 countries and territories that stretch from the southern regions of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to the northern borders of Angola, Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique. It is administered from Harare, Zimbabwe, and has a population of 135,000,000. It is organized into eight unions, three of which now have conference status. It enjoys the lead within the Adventist world family for its population to member ratio. Notice the following statement from the General Conference Statistical Report (October 8-14, 2004, page 1):

"Seven of our 13 world divisions now have a population to member ratio less than the 468 worldwide average. Indeed, two have less than 100: Southern Africa-Indian Ocean with 80 and South Pacific with 88."

Among SID's unions, Angola and Mozambique have unique challenges as a result of their recent civil wars. Acknowledging this situation, the General Conference president, Jan Paulsen, visited both unions assuring them of his support. Since then the SID administration and department directors have made every effort to train and develop the local leadership in both countries.

How has the church grown?
In the first two years of its growth (2003/2004) SID increased in membership from 1,624,282 to 1,840,540, a net increase of 13.3 percent, or 216,258 members.

During the Year of World Evangelism 2004 the net growth was 126,772 members--an increase of 7.4 percent over the previous year.

In Zambia there is now one member for every 22 people in the general population. In Zimbabwe it's one in 24. It is expected that both these unions will break the 500,000 membership mark during 2005, while the division's membership is expected to pass the 2 million mark in the same period.

How Is such growth possible?
Apart from the invaluable involvement of our pastors, there are numerous other factors that promote membership growth. The most important is lay involvement. Many of SID's laypersons are committed evangelists who conduct their own campaigns.

Catherine Banda of Malawi Union is an example. She has no formal training in public evangelism other than a brief seminar in preaching conducted by her local pastor. Undeterred by this, she began to hold small public meetings. Four were baptized after her first attempt, 30 after the second, and 28 after the third. Recognizing her zeal, the South Malawi Field formally assigned Catherine to conduct a campaign in Bulaka, a town with a small Adventist population where recent evangelistic programs by experienced pastors had been aborted because of the community's hostility toward our message.

Upon arrival at Bulaka, Catherine found opposition to her ministry from an unexpected source--the church itself. The local elders were not impressed that a woman had been sent to preach, and they told her that "this is not a place for amateurs!"

Catherine prayed through the night, pleading with the Lord to soften the hearts of these men. He did, and the next day they reluctantly permitted her to commence her campaign in this Muslim-dominated area. At the end 58 souls were ready for baptism, including the village chief, who chided the local church leaders with these words at his baptism: "You Adventist men, how come you had this great truth for years and you never told me?"

Another reason for growth is boldness and innovation. An example of this is the willingness of the church to seek unconventional ways of reaching those who would normally not darken the door of an Adventist church. For example, in the city of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, the Makokoba Adventist Church recently targeted the Big Bhawa beer garden, one of the oldest beer halls in the country and a popular venue for live musical entertainment. They brought their top choirs and singing groups to entertain the crowds with the best in gospel music and a selection of prayers.

Another example of this innovative and bold approach to evangelism is the recent airing of Hope Channel on Africa's biggest satellite subscription network for 10 months free of charge. This meant that a potential audience of 2 million viewers in sub-Saharan Africa was exposed to our message.

Locally originated satellite evangelism has also played a significant role in evangelization, the most recent of which was the Voice of Prophecy campaign uplinked from Lusaka, Zambia, resulting in more than 20,000 baptisms.

In February this year the youth of the unions launched the Elijah Project, which plans 650 evangelistic campaigns by June 2005.

The Sow 1 Billion program has distributed 92,250,000 tracts in 10 languages.

Staying focused is not easy
Keeping a large and rapidly growing organization focused on key objectives is necessary but not easy. Recognizing this, the SID administration has established the Eight Focus Issues--eight core issues to concentrate on growth, spiritual nurture, unity, self-support, leadership training, ministry to minorities, the fight against HIV/AIDS, and Christian Education.

Each of these issues has a specific set of desired outcomes and action plans to support it. These have been printed in the three official languages of the division and circulated widely. Seminars promoting them have been held for the workers across the division.

The Eight Focus Issues
1. Growth
We have already referred to the SID's membership growth of 126,772 (7.4 percent) for 2004. This membership increase resulted in the establishment of 176 new churches and 315 companies during the same period. If we take the two-year period of 2003/2004 the growth figures for churches and companies are shown in table 1:

2. Spiritual nurture
Spiritual nurture doesn't happen naturally; people don't automatically "grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 3:18, NIV). The church needs to be intentional about this core issue, so SID has set aside this year as a Year of Revival and Spiritual Nurture.

Plans have been laid to foster a climate of revival and spiritual nurture throughout the division. This includes the distribution of special nurture literature, conducting thousands of revival meetings, and the special region-wide SID Business and Professional Persons' Camp Meeting held in Johannesburg, South Africa, during February under the theme Nurturing Excellence. The latter event was attended by more than 600 laypeople and church employees. It showed that our members are active witnesses at every level of civil society and government.
This emphasis on revival and nurture is also intended to proactively address one of the division administration's other deep concerns: membership retention. This past year we were blessed with a net increase of 126,772 members, but that was after we sadly removed the names of 21,052 members who no longer attended.

While we have a deep concern for those who have not yet heard the Advent message, we remember these people who slip unnoticed through the back doors of our churches. During 2003 they were equal to 20.5 percent of those who joined our church (Membership Retention Analysis--1999-2003, GC). Losing one member for every five or six we gain is too high a price to pay.

3. Unity
Comprised of people from Africa, the islands around its coasts, and Europe, our division is a rainbow of human diversity that needs careful Spirit-led management. We want each of our members, irrespective of his or her age, gender, language, cultural identity, nationality or race, to feel an integral part of church life. To achieve this we have encouraged all our organizations and committees to reflect a spirit of fairness, impartiality, and inclusiveness in all their election, appointment, and recruitment processes.

Among the specific challenges involving unity is the situation in South Africa, where ongoing negotiations are under way with a view to merging the racially aligned Transvaal and Trans-Orange conferences, and the Southern Hope and Cape conferences for greater efficiency and unity within God's church. Significant progress has been made to this end, and we give God the glory for this.

4. Self-support
Numerical and spiritual growth are not the only characteristics of a mature church. Another important quality is self-support, a core value to which the SID administration subscribes. SID has had one of its largest unions, Zambia, recently obtain conference status. It is expected that two more, the Indian Ocean Union and the recently formed Botswana Union, will soon be ready for conference status.

During the same period we also witnessed the formation of the North Mozambique Field, and the granting
of conference status to the South Botswana Field and the South Zambia Field.

5. Leadership training
In SID we cannot afford to ignore the implications of a sustained growth rate of 7.4 percent, for if we continue to grow at this rate, we will need to make significant provisions for the 789,525 members who will swell our ranks by the next General Conference session.

We will need to train motivated and skilled leaders to manage this vast future membership. If we base our calculations on one pastor serving 1,000 new members, we will need to train and graduate 790 pastors during this quinquennium.

If we assume that these new members will be grouped in congregations averaging 250, then there will be 3,158 new church boards to form and train. If these congregations are going to be grouped into fields or conferences of 78,952 members each, we will need to find and train administrators and support staff for 10 such organizational entities.

6. Ministry to minorities
In SID there is a growing conviction that in order to fulfill the mandate to proclaim the gospel to all (Rev. 14:6), we need to intentionally foster ministry to the racial, cultural, and linguistic minorities among us. At every level we are encouraging the establishment of minority ministries committees to be "tasked with the development of plans to cater for effective ministry to, and for, minority groups."*

In our largest union, Zimbabwe, the administration has appointed persons at union and conference levels for minority ministries, and we hope that similar action will soon be taken in other unions.

The division also encourages special ministries to groups with unique needs or circumstances such as women, children, refugees, professionals, prisoners, migrant laborers, etc.

7. The fight against HIV/AIDS
It is a chilling reality that of the 10 countries most affected by HIV/AIDS, nine of them are in SID's territory. The figures that follow, drawn from the Population Reference Bureau (2003), give an idea of the challenge:
Swaziland 38.8 percent Namibia 21.3 percent
Botswana 37.3 percent Zambia 16.5 percent
Lesotho 28.9 percent Malawi 14.2 percent
Zimbabwe 24.6 percent Mozambique 12.2 percent
South Africa 21.5 percent

Percentages may deceive us here, because they mask the actual number of people who have this disease, and just one example may make the picture clearer. With a 21.5 percent infection rate and a population of about 45 million, it means that as many as 9.5 million South Africans may already be infected.

To personalize this even further, in Zimbabwe they plan to baptize 80,000 new members this year. If they do, about 19,680 of them (24.6 percent) could be HIV positive. This is a human crisis of staggering proportions that we cannot delegate to the health-care professionals in our 82 clinics and 11 hospitals--it is a challenge for all our members.

In response to this challenge, orphanages have been opened. The division and its unions are working with a major international donor organization in a Training of Trainers Programme (TOTs) to produce a team of skilled trainers to educate large numbers of selected members as caring support persons in their communities.

In addition to this, there are teams of employees, such as the HIV/AIDS unit at Maluti Adventist Hospital in Lesotho, who do internationally recognized work in the development of effective community-based systems for the care of AIDS orphans and people living with AIDS.

8. Christian education
The provision of quality Christian education poses a daunting challenge to SID and the present enrollment picture is shown in table 2:

During the next five years we will have to increase the capacity of our schools and colleges significantly to keep pace with the estimated membership growth.

Conclusion
Our history as the Southern Africa-Indian Ocean Division has been brief, but you have seen evidence of the Holy Spirit at work. Most of our plans, such as the Eight Focus Issues, are just beginning to bear fruit. But if the Holy Spirit has done so much already, we have the confidence that He will do even more by Atlanta 2010, if Jesus tarries that long.

In closing, I wish to express my special thanks to our heavenly Father, who so graciously supplies our every need.

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*Eight Focus Issues: Desired Outcomes and Action Plans, a Southern Africa-Indian Ocean publication, 2004, p. 15.