There has been a major uptick in the growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America over the last 100 years. In Africa alone, statistics suggest that in about a hundred years, Christianity has grown from 7.5 million Christians to 504 million. That means there are 10,000 converts a day. And so the need for new pastors is massive!
Many churches in the Majority world are busy developing indigenous leaders, but their pastors, whose financial resources and theological education are limited, need materials to study the Word of God and labour in their ministries.
Located near Pretoria, South Africa, the Reformational Study Centre (RSC) has existed since 2008. Within a modest set of offices, equipped with shelves of biblical reference books, Bible commentaries, theological books, and periodicals, a team of staff and volunteers is busy with the gathering and distributing of theological resources via the internet to English-speaking pastors all over Asia and Africa. In addition to this on-site team, there are other staff and volunteers helping out from all parts of the world, and that includes here in Dunnville as well.
Our missionary, Rev. Ryan Kampen,lives in Dunnville but carries on with this full-time work remotely for the RSC.
What follows are the main projects of
the RSC, and a description of Rev. Kampen’s tasks
“Vox Viva” (Latin for “Living Voice”) is the Study Centre’s Bible exposition and application app. It aims to provide the pastors in the young church with the building blocks needed to make their own sermons. The faithful interpretation and application of the Word of God is the living voice of God today. New birth, faith, life in Christ—they all come not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, “through the living and abiding word of God; for ‘All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever’” (1 Peter 1:23–24). Therefore, trained and qualified pastors are busy preparing study notes on the various books of the Bible. With this project, the RSC aims to supply the young churches with easy-to-understand but comprehensive expository and application notes on the Scriptures. The website can be found at www.voxviva.app.
Currently, there are more than 18,000 notes publicly available. Some of the books that include a good number of notes are Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, Ezra, Song of Songs Lamentations, Daniel, Amos, Obadiah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Mark, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation. Lots more to do in the years to come!.
“Lamad” (Hebrew for “to learn” or “to teach”) is the project where the RSC is busy with developing courses for the pastors, office-bearers, and regular church members in the young church. These courses are written in easy-to-understand English. Their primary purpose is to help the users read and study God’s Word. The app for this project can be found at lamad.app.
Courses so far consist of subjects like the Trinity, heaven, who is Jesus Christ? the fruit of the Spirit, marriage, the qualifications of an elder, worry, overcoming sin, comfort for a sinner like me, and contentment.
The courses are currently being run on WhatsApp, which has opened up a massive opportunity for the gospel to spread to all people groups, and for the Study Centre to have immediate, ongoing, and direct contact with those who take the courses—pastors and churchgoers alike! Now the Study Centre can do Bible study directly with them, and encourage them in their personal growth in the riches of God’s Word. What a blessing!
From the start, the Centre received dozens (later hundreds) of requests for material on subjects like pastoral care, ethics, and church government. Before long it became obvious that the need was equally great for material on all kinds of subjects. In time, also these requests could be addressed. This led to the creation of the Christian Library website (christianstudylibrary.org).
The aim of this project is to build a digital library of Reformed material for all subjects under the sun. The RSC has organized it in such a way that the user can find the right material as quickly as possible. There are hundreds of categories that can help the user make his search very specific. And every article that is uploaded has a summary with keywords, to facilitate good searches. Each article is also set at a specific difficulty level: basic, popular, semi-technical and technical.
What kind of material is made available? All kinds! There is material from Reformed and Presbyterian ministers, articles from back issues of church magazines, links to material from websites with Reformed material, and translated material and transcriptions of audio files.
This website has over 20,000 articles and transcribed audio files available at present. One of the benefits of this service is that the user does not have to search through 50 different good websites or get lost in Google search results, but only needs to search on the Christian Library website to find biblically sound material all over the web.
Please check out this resource, and witness the value it holds not only for Christians in the Majority world but for North American Christians as well!
The RSC has also been offering request services, with the main one being The Timothy Project. The name comes from what Paul says to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, “What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.”
The Timothy Project aims to provide a comprehensive library of theological resources, derived from theology handbooks, reference works, and other books as well as articles. Through a growing network of contacts, the Study Centre receives requests for such material. In turn, the Study Centre fills what requests it can from week to week, to help the pastors better understand the Scriptures for their own sake and that of their churches. Copyright laws are such that up to 10% of a book’s contents may be copied and distributed privately.
The requests come from pastors from diverse theological backgrounds, from Roman Catholic and Anglican priests to Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal, and Reformed ministers. They preach the gospel with sincerity and love, but in many cases they do so without specific training or guidance or study material to help them. That is where the Study Centre wants to encourage and assist.
Through the faithful labours of employees and many volunteers alike, over 15,200 English-speaking ministers are benefitting from regular use of The Timothy Project.
With the number of the main projects of the RSC, it becomes apparent that there are many ways to be involved in the work. When it comes to the task of Rev. Kampen, the designation “theological gatekeeper” has been used as a job description. It denotes the responsibility of ensuring that the various materials submitted for publication on the Christian Library, Lamad, and Vox Viva are Reformed. Further, our missionary is also involved in the contributing of study material to Vox Viva
These projects and our missionary’s role just about capture the work the RSC is busy with. Yet in another respect this is not even the half of it. The RSC has a staff of about 20 people, and more than 100 volunteers from all parts of the world. And at the moment it is working with 15,200 ministers in more than 90 developing countries. Both the work and the reach of the RSC, however, are completely in vain without the guidance and blessing of the Lord. So we ask also you to prayerfully support this work. If it is our heavenly Father who opens doors for the spread of the gospel and fills people with the desire to grow in the riches of Christ, then we must be on our knees. There are still many more pastors across the world who really want to study the Word. Since our Lord sees and guides everything, please wrestle in prayer with us. Pray that the Lord would guide the workers to provide the right material and find more of his servants in the young churches. Pray that the ministers would benefit from our labours and grow in faith and the ability to preach the pure gospel.
May the Lord of the church preserve and increase the spiritual wealth of his gospel, according to his exquisite grace and kindness in Christ Jesus!
