Outprinting the Prosperity Gospel in Southern 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 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.”

This is a pattern that 10ofThose CEO Anthony Gosling sees over and over: “So you think of David Adams in Colombia, Daniel Henderson up in Canada, Massimo in Malaysia, Stéphane in France, or Alex in Austria—and I can name many more. Over the last seven or eight years, something started to happen.”

Around the world, gospel-centered book publishers are popping up. When these publishers gathered in 2024, there were 77 of them. This year, there were 160.

“It was thrilling to see,” Gosling said. “There is a sense of a real movement within Christian publishing, and these guys are there for the right reason. They’re not there to make money but to see the content go as far and as wide as possible, and they’re finding ways to do it. And not because of it, but almost riding the wave of it, is the work God’s doing around the world. It is incredible.”

Five Lives of Tommie van der Walt

“I’ve probably lived five lives over,” said van der Walt, who is South African. He’s not exaggerating—from obedient child to rebellious teenager to a brief stint on an English cricket team. Afterward, with time left on his visa to England, he picked up a job as a security guard at Wimbledon, which led to a bodyguarding gig.

This fourth life—as the bodyguard of celebrities—is probably the most surreal. Based in the high-end Le Meridien Grosvenor House London, van der Walt looked after vacationing A-list celebrities, from Russell Crowe to the Spice Girls to Princes William and Harry.

It didn’t make him want to be an A-list celebrity.

“It’s very lonely, very depressing,” he said. “Hence the drugs and drinking and buying and traveling. Most of them are divorced and seeking pleasure in all kinds of places.”

When his visa timed out, he headed back to South Africa, where he worked odd jobs and reconnected with old friends. After pizza one night, four of them jumped into two cars. It was raining, and as van der Walt and a friend came around a bend in the road, he saw their friend’s car, upside down after smashing through a concrete wall. They were the first on the scene.

“I didn’t have anything to do with the accident, but I felt super guilty about it,” he said. Guilty enough to visit his buddies often in the hospital.

“One guy, who broke his neck, asked me to read the Bible to him—he was a Christian,” van der Walt said. “I would read, and he would minister to me. Then I would get mad, throw the Bible on the floor, and go to the other friend’s room.”

But the nurses had shared the gospel with that friend, and he was also now a Christian. “He would confront me with my sin, and I would get angry and leave the hospital,” van der Walt said. The next day, he’d do the whole thing again.

After about a week, “the Lord just grabbed [his] heart.” He said, “I went home to my mom, asked questions, and she basically led me to the Lord.”

Van der Walt was as energetic about following God as he’d been about running from him. He’d grown up in a mainline Protestant church, and most of the Christianity around him was rife with prosperity theology. But he got ahold of Greg Gilbert’s What Is the Gospel? and R. C. Sproul’s Everyone’s a Theologian. He started watching videos from Ligonier, landed in a gospel-centered church, and found friends who were theologically grounded.

“The Lord just put the right people across my path,” he said.

After earning a senior diploma in architecture and project management and working on construction projects all over South Africa, van der Walt married a pastor’s daughter. He joined her church and eventually came on staff as a mission intern.

Everything about his fifth life was antithetical to the other four—van der Walt was no longer chasing success. Neither was he jeopardizing his life with women, drugs, and occasional games of Russian roulette. And instead of working with the world’s richest and most famous people, he was finding his calling among its poorest and most forgotten.

India and Imprint

In 2016, van der Walt’s church sent him to India to plant a church.

“I always say ministry in India is 70 percent survival and 30 percent ministry,” he said, laughing. “We really enjoyed it, but it was rough.”

Van der Walt, who didn’t have a seminary degree or previous lead-pastor experience, was training local guys to become church leaders.

“We were kind of teaching each other,” he said. “If they had a question, I would go read and come back—fake it till you make it.” Soon, he was passing out his books to local church leaders, asking them to read a section and discuss it with him.

After two years of this, the Indian government, increasingly hostile to Christian missions, kicked the van der Walt family out of the country. Back in South Africa, van der Walt tried his hand at church planting and then revitalization. Neither worked out.

“I prayed about it, and then I went to my elders with an idea,” he said. He told them how few resources their region had—it was harder and more expensive for him to get gospel-centered books at home than it had been in India. He told them how important books were, how they’d helped him in his own faith life but also in training others.

And he told them that importing wasn’t the answer. To ship 120 books from the United States costs around $520. Unless you have Osteen’s financial resources, it’s cost prohibitive.

Van der Walt wanted to print his own books, then pair them with in-person training, for underresourced pastors in South Africa.

Sipho Mfusi

Sipho Mfusi grew up in the African Zionist church—the largest sect of professing Christians in South Africa.

“Where the Bible contradicts culture, the Bible is always put aside,” Mfusi said. For example, polygamy is allowed, ancestors need to be appeased, and good works are necessary for earning salvation.

This worked for Mfusi until, in 2002, his young wife died from cancer.

“I was taught that when you’re facing some kind of a predicament, God will remember your good works and then deliver you,” he said. “And I felt that I was qualified for that. I prayed and I consulted traditional healers, and still my wife died. So I was very angry with God.”

Mfusi was working in the airline industry, which moved him to Sydney, Australia. When he married his second wife, she kept asking him if they could go to church. Finally, he agreed. They picked a church close to their apartment—Randwick Presbyterian Church.

“The minister there was preaching from Exodus 20,” Mfusi said. “He said, ‘There is no human being who is able to honor God and love God in a way that God demands—except the Lord Jesus Christ. If you turn from your sins and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, God imputes that righteousness of Christ to you, as though you have loved God wholeheartedly with all of your heart.’”

Mfusi had never heard that before—that if he were to drop dead, he would definitely go to heaven because of Christ’s merits. He went back the next week, and the next. After 18 months, he and his wife came to Christ.

Suddenly, Mfusi was interested in reading—and not just the Bible itself, but books to help him understand the Bible. He learned so much that when his work transferred him to the United States, he was worried about his church options.

He said to the man who was discipling him, “Hey, brother, when I look on TV, I see Creflo Dollar, T. D. Jakes, and Kenneth Copeland. I see all of these prosperity gospel preachers. I don’t want to end up in their churches when I get to the United States. What can you do to help me?”

Mfusi’s mentor pointed him to Mark Dever, who pointed him to Mike McKinley’s Sterling Park Baptist Church. After a three-year stint in Virginia, Mfusi resigned from his job, earned a theological degree from George Whitefield College, and moved back to his hometown to do ministry.

That’s when he met van der Walt.

Unusual Alliance

In important ways, Mfusi and van der Walt couldn’t be more different.

“I’m a native Zulu,” Mfusi said. That means that in 1970, his family was forcibly confined to a tract of land on the eastern coast and stripped of their South African citizenship. Mfusi was 5 years old.

The perpetrators were the Afrikaners—van der Walt’s tribe. He wasn’t yet born during the forced move. But he can remember when apartheid was finally struck down. He was 11 years old.

“When you’re meeting someone [like that], there’s this baggage you have to work through to gain trust,” Mfusi said. “With Tommie, it didn’t work like that. We clicked immediately, because Tommie has a heart not just for taking the gospel to the suburbs, but to places that are predominately black and underresourced. It was really easy to gel and become very good friends with him.”

It was also easy to catch his vision for Imprint. During his first four years of ministry, Mfusi worked in the Zionist church where he grew up. He preached expositionally, started Bible studies, and began to translate Dever’s What Is a Healthy Church? into Zulu.

After a while, church leaders began to wonder why he was talking about Jesus so much, why he wasn’t interested in praying to the ancestors, and why he was so firm about marriage staying between one man and one woman.

“Slowly, their attitude towards us started to change,” Mfusi said. “They said, ‘It’s a shame this guy spent so much time with white people in the United States and in Australia and at the school. They’ve corrupted him.”

In April 2018, the leaders kicked out Mfusi. Undeterred, he planted a new church. About 50 of the Zionist church members came with him.

Mfusi knew he wanted to disciple his new congregation well. And he knew he was going to need books to do it.

Zulu

Since 2018, van der Walt, Mfusi, and the other directors at Imprint have published 63 books in South Africa. Through conferences and networks of churches, hundreds of thousands of copies are making their way out to pastors, many of whom don’t live anywhere near a bookstore.

Imprint is also diving into translation.

“If you go to any major Christian bookstore here in South Africa, you will only find Bibles or hymn books in Zulu,” Mfusi said. All the prosperity books are in English.

At Imprint, eight books are now available in Zulu, including John Piper’s Good News of Great Joy, Dever and Jamie Dunlop’s Compelling Community, McKinley’s Am I Really a Christian?, and Mbewe’s God’s Design for the Church.

“I handed a guy at one of our conferences Conrad Mbewe’s God’s Design for the Church,” van der Walt said. “And he said, ‘This is the first Zulu book that I’ve ever owned.’ He’s never, ever owned a book that was written in his vernacular.”

At a different conference, van der Walt handed out Bibles. “The whole group just burst out singing in Zulu,” he said. “It was basically, ‘The Lion of Judah has shown up, and he brought his Word.’”

Van der Walt is thrilled with the progress in supplying affordable, theologically sound books in English, Zulu, and Afrikaans.

“And last year, we published our first local author book, which we’re quite excited about,” he said.

But he also knows there’s an even bigger barrier to good theology in Africa.

Literacy

Africa is the least educated and most illiterate continent in the world. In fact, 25 of the 30 least literate countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Every Sunday, when I’m standing up to preach, I’m reading from the Bible,” Mfusi said. “I’ve made sure every member of our church has a copy of God’s Word. I tell them what page number it’s on. I ask them to open their Bibles. I say, ‘Let’s read together.’”

After church, he’s reading through What Is a Healthy Church? with his congregation.

“I have made sure every member of our church has a copy of that book,” he said. “Because it’s not a reading culture, I don’t tell them, ‘Go read the whole chapter.’ I say, ‘Go read a paragraph.’”

Often, they don’t. So Mfusi has them read together.

“I’ll say, ‘You read the first sentence,’ ‘You read the second sentence,’ and so forth,” he said. “Because I want them to get acclimatized to reading.”

It’s slow going.

“We are now on chapter 10, and we started reading this book back in 2015,” he said, laughing. “What can I do? I would’ve liked to move on to another book, but God has called me to pastor these people, and I’ve got to pitch to the level where they are and begin to grow with them.”

The work might be sluggish, but it’s not fruitless. When several men in the church—potential church planters—were found to be unrepentant in sexual sin, his congregation knew what to do.

“There was unity in the church, because one of the chapters in Mark Dever’s book is [about] church discipline,” he said. “There were unanimous decisions on all three of them when we had to excommunicate them.”

That was a victory, because many Zionist pastorates are passed down from father to son, or given to someone who donates a lot of money, without regard to the biblical standards for church leadership (1 Tim. 3:1-12; Titus 1).

There’s sweeter fruit too. Mfusi’s congregation recently moved into a bigger building—one that’s closer to where most of them live. He’s using his own books to stock a library there, and he’d love for local pastors to borrow them. That would be remarkable—32 of the 38 churches in his area are Zionist.

It’s a long shot, but Mfusi is living proof it can be done.

“God was orchestrating everything from the beginning,” he said. “All glory to him.”

Growing Movement

The work van der Walt is doing with Imprint—publishing books and training pastors—is being repeated all over the world.

“For example, 9Marks is focused on ecclesiology, and I’ve seen their healthy churches series translated into all sorts of languages,” Gosling said. “They’ve got training material that goes alongside it.”

From Poland to Ethiopia, those books and training are being embedded into the ecclesiology of the local church, he said.

“Then you’ve got Ken Mbugua in Kenya doing his Simeon Trust program—it’s the same thing,” he said. “These books and programs begin to inform local pastors and give them resources. That has an impact. And you begin to see that in the way that they’re running their churches, the way they’re preaching, the way they’re honoring the Word of God, the way they’re discipling their people. And so the church grows.”