Outprinting the Prosperity Gospel in Southern Africa

Posted on July 3, 2025 
Filed under Africa

“Seven years ago, Tommie van der Walt went to his elders with an idea.

‘I wanted to train pastors,’ he said. He especially wanted to train pastors in impoverished and underresourced areas. And he wanted to do it, in large part, by using books.

It sounds like the beginning of a great plan. Van der Walt lives in Africa, which is overrun with syncretism and the prosperity gospel. The need to train pastors is obvious.

But relying on books wasn’t as intuitive. First, getting books to Africa is prohibitively expensive. The shipping takes months. And if you do manage to get books there, Africa’s oral tradition and lower literacy ratesmean they’re likely to sit unread.

Not only that, but somebody else had beaten him to it.

‘Guys like Joel Osteen pay for imports or for printing,’ van der Walt said. It’s a financial strategy: ‘They pay for their resources to be dirt cheap, because they know if you read their books or see them on TV, you’ll give them money.’

It’s working—over the last 10 years, the prevalence of the prosperity gospel has been ‘getting worse,’ says pastor and TGC Africa Council member Conrad Mbewe. ‘One reason is that there is very little antidote for it.’…”

– A fascinating story of God’s grace at work – from Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra at The Gospel Coalition.

Photo: Gospel Coalition.