Rev Hendrik du Plessis November 2020
News from D’kar – December 2020
The Bushiri fever
For the past two years, the Bushiri fever has been sweeping through Botswana like a whirlwind. Many of our church members became from faithful followers others just ordinary admirers of the self-appointed prophet. Vehicles had his photos on and were an everyday sight. If there was a Bushiri meeting somewhere in South Africa, some of our members raised money among themselves to attend these meetings. In no time P3000 would be collected and soon they will be driving down to South Africa with an old battered car and you wonder if they will ever make it.
The motivation behind it all was that prosperity was proclaimed. At one point, the Botswana government had to intervene because people were willing to go into deep debt with banks, just to make a contribution in terms of money to the Bushiris. So money flowed out of the country and the people were left behind struggling to pay off their debts, and nothing came of the prosperity promised to them. Churches were even established here, in Gantsi and also here in D’kar where they met regularly. In D’kar, they usually gathered at a certain building on Friday evenings and loudly let themselves be heard through loudspeakers until late at night. The music was so deafening that I often wondered how their eardrums held it.
If you dare preach or talk about it, some members will boycott our church for weeks. For a long time it was a theme in our preaching whether they liked it or not, and slowly but surely some of our members began to turn. The Lord has a wonderful way of giving direction to His church. Sometimes, like the prodigal son, you have to take care of pigs before you get to your senses. When the prodigal son sat there among the pigs and stared at the pods with hungry eyes, he realized that it was much better when he was still under his father’s roof.
Through the intervension of the Lord another “miracle” happened – Covid 19. An drastic end was made of large gatherings. Serious questions were asked about the so-called prophet. Was he not the one who prophesied of a good and prosperous year? Did not they all chanted “receive” during the rallies? With him, they dreamed of money flowing in, workplace promotions, partners and marriages. In fact, this is what the youth dreamed about and everything that goes wrong is attributed to the work of the devil. After the rallies, many of his followers come back with honey they need to use. They bought the honey expensively during the rallies, hoping that it would do what the prophet promised, and then out of the blue Covid-19 appeared, so fast that the “best prophet” in Africa could not have predicted or foreseen it. Since then we have not heard anything again about a rally here in D’kar or Gantsi.
On the other hand, by the grace of the Lord, the numbers in our church have increased drastically. We had to turn away people because the numbers allowed by the government was exceeded, much to the dismay of those who had to turn away. Government officials have visited our church several times to see if we comply with the necessary rules and regulations. Before you enter the church, your fever is taken. Your hands are washed. Your name is written in a register book, together with your cellphone number and physical address. In the church there are markers that we have placed exactly where you may sit so that the necessary distance is maintained. With the last visit of the government, some of the soldiers with AK-47s arrived at the service. At the back of the church with an AK-47 in hand, a soldier in uniform stood and watched the proceedings. After a while, he held up his thumbs as a sign that they were at satisfied and then left the church building.
With the scandal surrounding the Bushiris and how they left South Africa, we hope it was the final nail in the coffin. Yet it opened our youth’s eyes in many ways. It exposed our young people to themselves. Loopholes could be seen in their Christian garb. Where we thought everything was well, everything was not. The following that the Bushiris had. led one to realize that many people long for a kind of “prosperity” that the Lord does not always promise or guarantee, especially among our youth. Themes in the Bible began to become relevant to address the distorted prosperity religion. Just think of the lives of Joseph, Job, and Paul. There are so many themes in the Bible that bear no stamp of earthly prosperity, and the ordinary believer can identify with people in the Bible for whom it was not always as prosperous as one would like. One thing that the ideology of prosperity religion does very well is to bring a false conscience home. When “adversity” strikes you, it means only one thing, the Lord has forsaken you, and when you give money to your so-called prophet, he can intercede for you and change your life drastically for the better.
To conclude, we still want to ask your intercession, that the Word of the Lord will truly reach our youth, but also for our older generation who have remained faithful through all this time and have not hesitated to speak and admonish. Quite often some of our church council members stood up in the church and condemned it, sometimes so harshly that I wondered what church attendance was going to be like next Sunday. During funerals when anyone was given the opportunity to speak, some of our members and church council members did not hesitate to even mention the name Bushiri. For many of them, it was a great struggle when their children were involved. May the Lord give us the wisdom to truly reach our young people with the Gospel.
Your brother in Christ,
rev Hendrik du Plessis Reformed Church Dekar (Botswana)