Needed: 30,000 Books for Groundbreaking African Theological Library

Philip Hunt came to Christ in Maine but learned his theology in Africa.

“The first book a missionary handed me when I got to Kenya was J. I. Packer’s little book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God,” said Hunt, who flew to Mombasa when he was 25 to do mission work. “It really startled me. Those concepts answered questions I had, and that book became a doorway for me to continue to study and read.”

Hunt kept reading as he worked in a church in Kenya and then as he moved to Zambia to plant Faith Baptist Church of Riverside (and later Kitwe Church).

“During those years of church planting and pastoring, it became really evident to me that if we were going to see healthy, reproducing churches, then we needed a place where we could intentionally prepare leaders,” he said.

In 2006, the Central Africa Baptist University (CABU) opened with 12 students. (Ken Mbugua was one of them.) Over the next 18 years, the school grew to about 200 students learning expository preaching, missions and church planting, counseling, sign language, and chaplaincy. CABU faculty began training teachers and launched an MA in Christian studies, and they’re planning to add an MDiv. They added 15 remote training classes—where a teacher spends a week with a group of pastors closer to their homes—and have taught more than 2,000 pastors that way.

“I can’t think of anywhere around the world where I have been more encouraged by the gospel work than in Kitwe, Zambia, around the Central Africa Baptist University,” 9Marks founder Mark Dever, who doesn’t often use superlatives, told a group of pastors a few weeks ago.

CABU has nearly 920 graduates serving in 14 countries, property with classrooms and a student center, and government accreditation.

But what it doesn’t have is a library. Yet.

Christianity in Africa

Zambia is full of pastors, but many of them preach the prosperity gospel.

“Almost all you hear is this message about how God in Christ wants us to be physically healthy and materially prosperous,” said pastor and TGC Africa Council member Conrad Mbewe. “You hardly ever hear sermons about sin and repentance. So salvation has now become deliverance from sickness and poverty.”

Over the last 10 years, the prevalence of the prosperity gospel has been “getting worse,” Mbewe said. “One reason is that there is very little antidote for it. There is little for people to hear concerning the truth, so the noise is what is capturing their attention. And by far, the greatest noise is from the prosperity gospel preachers.”

Prosperity theology has become almost the definitive position of Christianity in Africa, especially south of the Sahara, he said.

That’s a problem for Africa’s Christians, and increasingly, it’s a problem for Christianity’s witness worldwide. By 2050, Africa will have both the highest percentage of Christians and the youngest Christians in the world. “The future of world Christianity,” wrote historian Philip Jenkins, “is African.”

That means Africa’s theological education right now is critical.

Part of that is good websites, which can disperse information quickly and cheaply, said Mbewe. But research shows your reading comprehension is six to eight times better if you’re flipping the pages of a physical book.

Plus, books can be accessed without an internet connection, never have broken links, and let you make notes in the margins, Mbewe said.

In Zambia, “the reading of print media is still exceptionally low,” reported a study from the University of Zambia in 2021.

“At least among conservative Bible-believing ministers, that must change—and is changing,” Hunt said. “You cannot educate men without them becoming readers. . . . We need to recognize that Christianity did not begin when we came to faith, but there is a whole history that stretches out.”

He can’t think of a better place to encourage an appetite for reading than at CABU.

“You literally can mandate it,” he said. “And then you’re discipling students, showing them the value of it. Part of your coursework is helping them think critically, to interact with the literature, to encourage writing.”

“Libraries are handmaids to lectures,” Mbewe said. “As a lecturer, you can point in a particular direction and then send your students to do their reading. When you bring them back into a common room, where you give them space to interact intellectually, their minds are being sharpened a bit. They are becoming real thinkers and researchers.”

But that’s hard to do without books. And Zambia—along with other sub-Saharan countries—doesn’t have a lot of those. In 2018, Zambia had just 45 libraries, or one for every 400,000 people. For comparison, the United States had a library for every 3,000 people that year.

“If you went into a public library here in Zambia, you would just shake your head,” Hunt said. “It’s just this little place with ancient, broken books. It’s sad.”

If CABU wanted a library, they were going to have to build their own.

If You Build It

In March, CABU opened a publishing house. They’ve already printed 8 titles, including Mark Dever’s How to Build a Healthy Church, Conrad Mbewe’s God’s Design for the Church, and Greg Gilbert’s What Is the Gospel?

But 8 books isn’t enough. So in March, CABU broke ground on a theological library. The 9,200-square-foot building, which should be finished in August, will have enough shelf space for 50,000 volumes.

“We anticipate that thousands of students will be able to do research with healthy resources they otherwise wouldn’t have had access to,” Hunt said. “If we could pull this off, it would be unique in our area of Zambia, to have a library of this breadth.”

“If it were available,” Mbewe said, “there’s no doubt that it would be real solid gold.”

The only problem is, Hunt doesn’t have 50,000 books. He only has 16,000.

They Will Come

A few weeks ago, Craig Stoll at Christianbook International Outreach got wind of CABU’s project.

“Hey, I’ve got a 20-foot container we could ship to you from America for free,” he told Hunt. “It will fit 30,000 books. All you have to do is fill it up. You want it? If not, I can find somebody else.”

Hunt’s heart jumped. “No, no, no, no, no, no—don’t give it to anybody else,” he said. “Give me a couple of weeks. I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but this is the opportunity.”

He was already on his way to Washington, DC, for a 9Marks intensive when he started making a list of titles and publishers like Banner of Truth, P&R, and Crossway.

But 30,000 is a lot of books.

The Ask

Hunt thought about the American pastors in the Reformed Resurgence, some with gospel-centered commentaries, biographies, church history books, or systematic theologies they no longer needed. Maybe they’d be interested in helping to shape Africa’s theology?

If that’s you, here’s your chance.

“We don’t want pastors to just grab everything on their shelves and throw them in boxes, thinking, Let me get rid of them. I’ll send them to Africa,” Hunt said. “That’s not what we’re looking to do. We want to be intentional about what goes into that space. We really want to fill it with good books, from Augustine’s City of God to The gods of Africa by Leonard Nyirongo to John Owen’s Mortification of Sin.”

You can send those gently used books to Massachusetts to join the shipping container or you can donate financially online. See the Reaching Africa website for details and?a list of helpful book topics—such as preaching, education, Christian living, and pastoral care and counseling.

When the container ships in August, it should arrive in time for the books to be sorted and shelved before CABU’s leadership conference at the end of November.

“The invention of the printing press was arguably one of the key features that fueled the Protestant Reformation,” Hunt said. “I think it’s safe to say we need an African reformation. And we cannot devalue the role that access to quality books plays in the shaping of the theology and thinking, and in the direction, of a nation and a continent.”

He thinks CABU’s library could be part of that—if he can get it.

“God is at work,” Hunt said. “If God can provide such a wonderful gift as this shipping container, he can provide the books.”

Visit https://www.cabcusa.com/for-library-project to donate today.

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra is senior writer and faith-and-work editor for The Gospel Coalition. She is also the coauthor of Gospelbound: Living with Resolute Hope in an Anxious Age and editor of Social Sanity in an Insta World. Before that, she wrote for Christianity Today, homeschooled her children, freelanced for a local daily paper, and taught at Trinity Christian College. She earned a BA in English and communication from Dordt University and an MSJ from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She lives with her husband and two sons in Kansas City, Missouri, where they belong to New City Church. You can reach her at [email protected].