In the first official editorial meeting with Dr. John Jusu, someone boldly asked, “What makes you the right person to be the editor for the Africa Study Bible?”
Leaning in, John responded candidly, without any hesitation: “Because I am Africa.”
He went on: “My home country [Sierra Leone] has suffered from civil war for ten years. I have been a refugee. I grew up in a rural village, where my family was very poor, but I have now moved to a large city. I live in a country that is not my own. I have adopted dozens of war orphans and help to care for them along with my wife. My father is a polygamist. I straddle the two cultures of my Western education, (which was begun by missionaries in my village), and my cultural heritage. I have lived every inch of the African experience. I am Africa.”
Oasis President, Dr. Matthew Elliott, recalls “it was at that moment that I knew beyond any doubt that God had chosen John to be supervising editor of the Africa Study Bible.” But how did a poor child from a tiny war-torn country in West Africa end up earning a PhD in Education at Trinity International University, and become one of the foremost African voices in theological education and curricular design?
Last week, in between the flurry of meetings, I was able to steal a few minutes to sit down with John and ask him questions about the process of editing the Africa Study Bible (the details of his responses to the complexities of editing a pan-African study Bible will follow in Part 2 of this blog post). At the end of our conversation, I finally asked him the question, “Why are you so passionate about this project? How did you begin this journey that has brought you here?”
He looked at me with a raised eyebrow, and said incredulously, “Do you really want to hear this story?”
When I responded with a smiling “Yes. It's important!” he leaned back and smiled back. “Okay. Then I will allow myself to take my time.”
“Once you have denied people knowledge, when you deny them information, then you deny them power, you deny them wealth creation. Knowledge is power. I believe that people are being misled [in Africa] because they are not able to come directly to the fountain and drink. The water is instead being polluted as it is passed through the hands of many before they can access it.
“I was raised in a God-conscious family, in a village that had a strong missionary presence and a missionary school. When I reached Primary Five, my father told me that he could no longer afford to pay my school fees. That changed me. Up until that point, I had been maybe a C-student, but when I knew that if I was able to place in the top five students in my class, I could get a scholarship to go to high school. I burned the candle at both ends, and I was one of those five students, and was funded to go to high school.
But I now wanted to go to the university. I wanted to go to medical school. I knew that if I graduated at the very top of my class, I could get a scholarship to go to the university in the United States. I worked very, very hard, and I succeeded. I graduated at the top of my class.
But, because my dad was poor, and my family did not have much influence in the church, I was not given the scholarship to go to university in the U.S.. When I was denied the scholarship, I was furious. When you deny people education, you have disenfranchised them. I was so angry at these missionaries, and I rebelled against the church. I began studying destructive ideologies and made my anger with these missionaries very public. This rebellion lasted for five years. I managed to scrape together money and attend some college. While I was there, I tried to start a popular revolt against the government with my student friends. Every one of that group was expelled from school except for me.
Then the head of the Christian Union Fellowship came to my room and said, “We know you were the ringleader, and if they were going to expel anyone from the school, it should have been you. Your family is poor, you are their only hope, and if you do anything again, you will be expelled, and you will lose your opportunity to have an education. That will be the end of you.
The following Sunday, I went to church for the first time in five years. I began to take my life seriously. I realized that I could not ascribe to God my suffering at the hands of human actions.
After I finished at the University of Sierra Leone, I wanted to go to medical school. But the means were not there. So, I went back to the same high school where I had flouted the missionaries’ authority. I wanted to teach there. But they would have none of me.”
Jusu continued, describing the process of reconciliation and forgiveness that took place between him and the missionaries who ran this school. He was eventually given a teaching post. With the financial help of these same missionaries who had once denied him a scholarship to college, he began to pursue his dream of medical school.
“While I was waiting to go to study medicine, I was made not only a teacher of the school, but also the chaplain. I had no training, but I was made chaplain to walk alongside and help troubled kids. Now, as chaplain, I started to garner some theological training to help with my work, and this is the beginning of my interest in theological training.
The missionaries had granted me a scholarship for me to study medicine in Liberia. But I had barely begun my studies in Liberia when civil war broke out there, and I went back immediately to Sierra Leone. I had already resigned my job at the high school, and the only place that they could send me was the theological school. I went to the theological school in order to wait for things to settle in Liberia so that I could go back to study medicine, and it is that waiting that brought me to Africa International University.
This is how I became interested in theological education. I started to look at the curriculum critically. And I thought to myself, what I am seeing out there is not the same as what is in the curriculum. There was a distance between what I expected from my pastor and what I was learning in the curriculum. There was something that was really wrong with this thing we called theological education and the training of pastors for the African context."
He earned two masters’ degrees from what was then Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST), now Africa International University (AIU). Then, John was finally able to pursue his dream of education in the United States. As a recipient of funding from the Christian International Scholarship Foundation, John traveled to Deerfield, IL, where he obtained his PhD in Educational Studies from Trinity International University. He returned to AIU, where he is now the Dean of the School of Professional Studies.
“When I was studying in the United States, what I wanted to know was, how have you processed your questions? I don’t want to take your answers. I want to learn to create tools and frameworks that will allow Africans to process their own questions using their own symbols, to reach the answers.”
John describes his academic expertise as “understanding the epistemological frameworks of Africans striving to go into pastoral and teaching ministries of the church in Africa, and how that understanding will influence the production of learning materials and the pedagogy of such learners.”
The road is still one of revolution. But instead of a revolt against the political system, John has chosen to dedicate his life to revolutionizing the education and shaping of Africans in the church. He is dedicated to training leaders and providing tools that can lead African Christian brothers and sisters directly to the fountain of Scripture to drink truth.
This work is central to the mission of the Africa Study Bible, which seeks to make Scripture relevant to the everyday lives of African Christians. John’s expertise in understanding and shaping how Africans learn is essential in his role as the Supervising Editor, as he guides the material into a holistic learning tool for everyone in the African church, on all strata of society.
To this day, Jusu explains, he is still “very edgy whenever [he] sees injustice.” He hates to see people denied education and knowledge. This passion of empowering dispossessed communities continues, but it has been shaped and focused by a divine hand.
“When I tell my friends from college that I am working for the church, they say, ‘Forget about it,’ because they cannot believe it. But look what the Lord has done. He has changed me, and he has redeemed these passions for his people.”
“I’m still waiting to go to medical school,” he laughs.