Page 122 - God's Church through the Ages - Student Textbook

Study Section 21: The Gospel goes to Africa

21.1 Connect

So far, a lot of church history has taken place in Northern Africa, the European continent, and in
North America. That’s because of missionary efforts to spread the Gospel to those people first.
FINALLY, God laid on the hearts of these believers to travel to Africa as missionaries and share the
Gospel with the millions of people who were lost there. One of the greatest missionaries of all time
was David Livingston. If you go to Livingston in the south of Zambia, you can see a bronze sculpture
of him next to Victoria Falls, the falls he discovered as he traveled north from S. Africa to share the
Gospel northward. He was an amazing man of faith as well as an explorer. He sought to abolish the slave trade,
but his primary goal was to share Christ with the people of Africa. Let’s learn about this great man…..

21.2 Objectives

1. The student should be able to give a biographical sketch of the life of David Livingston and share
how his life played a significant role in bringing the Gospel to Africa.

2. In contrast to David Livingston, the student should also be able to biographically explain the life of
Karl Marx and the results of his errant teachings that have impacted millions of lives, even to this day.

21.3 David Livingston, 1813-73 –– 104

"[I am] serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men or
taking an observation, [even if some] will consider it not
sufficiently or even at all missionary."

With four theatrical words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"—words
journalist Henry Morton Stanley rehearsed in advance—David Livingstone
became immortal. Stanley stayed with Livingstone for five months and then
went off to England to write his bestseller, How I Found Livingstone. Livingstone,
in the meantime, got lost again—in a swamp literally up to his neck. Within a
year and a half, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer.

The whole civilized world wept. They gave him a 21-gun salute and a hero's funeral among the saints in
Westminster Abbey. "Brought by faithful hands over land and sea," his tombstone reads, "David Livingstone:
missionary, traveler, philanthropist. For 30 years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the
native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, and to abolish the slave trade."

Highway man
At age 25, after a childhood spent working 14 hours a day in a cotton mill, followed by learning in class and on
his own, Livingstone was captivated by an appeal for medical missionaries to China. As he trained, however, the
door to China was slammed shut by the Opium War. Within six months, he met Robert Moffat, a veteran
missionary of southern Africa, who enchanted him with tales of his remote station, glowing in the morning sun
with "the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had been before."

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