7 August

Dear Friends,

A few years ago, I underwent quite the conversion while sitting under a mango tree with a missionary in Mozambique. He would cringe at me describing him as a missionary. In fact, he used to say, in Afrikaans, “’n sendeling is gelyk aan ’n ellendeling” (badly translated as: “a missionary is the same as a misery-nary”). He wasn’t wrong. Missionaries in Africa are known for terrible acts of colonialism and segregation. In fact, the president of Rwanda famously dissuaded missionary activity after the genocide, even recently referring to some of those churches as “a den of bandits”. Desmond Tutu also famously said: “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.”

Be that as it may, there I was, sitting with this missionary under the mango tree. He was one of the good ones. Their organisation, run by Mozambicans, provided microloans to small businesses in the area, built community-led clinics, and set up many schools. We began speaking about the growing poverty crisis in his country and how hopeless they felt in their efforts to make any difference. Pointing at the mango trees around him, he confidently said: “I don’t understand it. There’s enough in the world for everyone to have something to eat. The problem is that we have a scarcity mentality. We forget to share. If only we shared what we have, no one would go hungry.” And then he said the thing that has stuck with me all these years: “What I want out of life is to live simply so that others may simply live.” He called this way of living a faithful following of Jesus and called himself a proponent of the “gospel of enough”.

I would only later find out that these words belonged to Mahatma Gandhi and, somehow, that spoiled it a bit for me. It sounded much better under the mango trees when I converted to this gospel. 

On Sunday, we will be reading the core biblical foundation of the gospel of enough: Matthew 14:13-21, where Jesus distributes the loaves and the fishes. But, for now, perhaps we can reflect on what it means for us, individually and as a community, to live according to the gospel of enough. How can I live simply so that others may simply live?

Rev. Marius Louw