Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, TGC.
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 rates mean 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.”
In 2018, van der Walt began work on one. Over the last seven years, the Imprint ministry has printed about 60 gospel-centered books, including their first from a local author. They’re distributed to a network that has grown to 800 pastors in 17 countries.
Along the way, 10 pastors have been through pastoral internships, and another 150 through the Simeon Trust workshops that Imprint offers in conjunction with Brackenhurst Baptist Church in Johannesburg, South Africa.
“I’ve seen people grasp the truth, and I’ve seen the transformation in their leadership,” van der Walt said. “Pastors that are not saved get saved. Others that are abusive do not abuse their sheep anymore, but they love them. Pastors are increasing in their knowledge of the Word and practicing good hermeneutics, so their preaching increases and yields fruit. Poor churches are starting to grow in their giving because they understand that they need to look after their pastors. And churches are growing.”