Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch the Video
Did you know that classical Christian education is gaining great momentum in sub-Saharan Africa? Today we chat with Karen Elliott, the Executive Director of the Rafiki Foundation, a group that has been instrumental in building a classical Christian curriculum for these people.
Discover how the Rafiki Foundation is caring for orphans, growing classical Christian schools, and even working to supply biblically sound materials to the churches of this region.
Want to get involved? The Rafiki Foundation is seeking long and short-term missionaries to assist with their villages. To learn more about these opportunities or to donate to their cause, visit https://rafikifoundation.org/
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.
Marlin Detweiler:
Welcome again to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We are so excited to have Karen Elliott with us today. Karen is the Executive Director of the Rafiki Foundation. Karen, welcome.
Karen Elliott:
Thank you. Marlin, it's great to be here!
Marlin Detweiler:
As we get started, let's hear a little bit about you personally, your family, your background, and maybe those things that led you to the place that you are today with Rafiki.
Karen Elliott:
Well, I'd love to do that, Marlin. First of all, I like to tell people that heaven is my home, but my second home is Nigeria, and then third home is Texas. And, I do live in Florida now, so I guess I have a fourth in Florida as well.
Marlin Detweiler:
Keeping four homes is pretty expensive, Karen.
Karen Elliott:
Well, it is, but you know, God pays for them, what can I say? And, you know, you can't do an RV across the ocean, unfortunately. So I've been, I'm from Texas originally, but I did serve on the mission field with the Rafiki Foundation for about ten years in the 1990s primarily, and then came back from the field to serve at the Rafiki home office.
At the time, we were in Texas. But then, God, showed us it was time to move. And so God provided for us land in Florida. So Rafiki Foundation is in central Florida and we are on 57 acres just north of Orlando. I like to tell people that the Rafiki Foundation is a much more adventurous ride than anything Disney World can imagine. And I understand right now you are right here in Central Florida.
Marlin Detweiler:
I happen to be near you. Yeah, I’m in a hotel room in Winter Park, which is a suburb of Orlando, which is kind of an interesting area. It wasn't planned.
Karen Elliott:
Yeah. Next time you come back this way, come up and see us.
Marlin Detweiler:
We would love to do that.
Karen Elliott:
In my job in the 80s I was in the banking industry, and then I sensed a call to overseas missions. And I went overseas for two reasons. One, the the lack of spiritual, let's call it, or biblical resources in much of the world, and also the material needs in much of the world. In America, we have access and time to get Scripture, to get well taught, if you look for it. And we have the resources to afford it, in many parts of the world, that is not the case. So that is what God used to motivate me to leave a career. And I am single, never married. But I have 3,600 kids in Africa. 900 of which are orphans and have grown up in Rafiki villages.
And so, it's a calling. And so I'm thankful for where God has led me and what we get to do in the Rafiki Foundation. So, that's kind of my life. And I have brothers, I have siblings, I have nieces, have great nieces, great nephews, family to which I'm really close. And then I had the family of God.
Marlin Detweiler:
Did I remember correctly that you had your education at Southern Methodist?
Karen Elliott:
I went to SMU. I was highly confused. I ended up, started out as a music major, ended up, with a minor in music, and major in finance and a little bit of accounting sprinkled in. Then I went back to school and got a masters in education from, University of Texas.
And then I'm working on a doctorate degree with Faulkner University. So I’m ten courses in, I've only got six more courses left. And two of those include the dissertation time. So I will be their oldest graduate. That's all I got to say. I think I was their senior citizens ministry by letting me come into the program, but I really have benefited from it. You know, if the Rafiki Foundation is going to encourage others to establish classical Christian education in the continent of Africa, I really wanted to understand and read the great books because I did not receive that kind of education. I wish I had. A little bit was sprinkled in, but like many people from my generation, we didn't have that as robustly as is happening today.
So I have had the privilege of reading some Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, works that I've maybe touched on 40 years ago, but now getting a chance to read and write about. So that's that's a little bit about about me.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, that really helps fill out some foundation for this interview. Tell us what the purpose of Rafiki is. And what's quite honestly, from my vantage point, as far as I know, Rafiki is what Karen Elliott does with it. I didn't know about Rafiki before your involvement and have little context for understanding without the tremendous work that I know you've been involved with.
So help us understand, Rafiki, in terms of what it's done and where it's going.
Karen Elliott:
Well, the Rafiki Foundation has been serving in Africa almost 40 years now.
Marlin Detweiler:
Wow.
Karen Elliott:
And we were founded by Rosemary Jensen. Rosemary ran Bible Study Fellowship for 20 years. And at the same time she founded Rafiki. And initially, everyone who was sent out to serve with Rafiki went out to teach the Bible and help people raise their standard of living.
Marlin Detweiler:
Has it always been focused on Africa and Northern Africa in particular?
Karen Elliott:
Well, actually sub-Saharan Africa, primarily. We were in other continents, or countries. We were in India, we had work in Latin America, and of course, and so we were in those continents and countries for a while. But Rafiki, in the early 2000s, decided to concentrate its work in Africa. Because some of the poorest countries of the world are in Africa.
And so we've always wanted to minister to those in need. So what happened and what really caused us to pivot into education from our perspective, and by the way, our founder and president emeritus is doing well. She's 94 going on 95 this month. Oh, I just saw her yesterday. Rosemary is as coherent as you and I are.
And so I value her friendship and her mentorship. So, anyway, I'd love to talk more about Rosemary, but I do want to get on to talking about Rafiki, which is her heart and mine. Rafiki is a Swahili word that means friend. So we are friend to Africans. So in the early 2000s, we were encouraged to start taking in orphans, so that caused us to pivot, to develop, land, to get land, build buildings and start taking in children.
And when we started doing that, the question, like every family is, “How are we going to educate our children?”
Marlin Detweiler:
Sure.
Karen Elliott:
So we can't send them to government schools in Africa. One they have low academics, they're overcrowded, they don't have enough materials, and they're not Christian. And we can't really just use American curriculum. Although we did for a while. And so God led Rafiki to not only take in orphans and start building facilities, getting land and building facilities, eventually, landing in ten countries in Africa and taking in these children.
But we started developing our own curriculum and our own Bible study, because we wanted good content and we wanted our curriculum to be classical Christian, culturally attentive to the continent of Africa. I would say our curriculum today is not African. It is international. Every subject is taught from a biblical worldview, every subject, every unit for every grade level.
So art and music, science and math and, language arts. And then you've got, you know, history, logic, rhetoric. We work with a lot of classical educators throughout America to basically put themselves on paper. And so God caused us to write a school curriculum for schools for us to use, and then for African schools to use. We also, though, needed a Bible study.
And so Rosemary, with her connections, was able to get 18 theologians who believe in the reformational truths, to write lesson notes and questions on every book of the Bible.
Marlin Detweiler:
Wow.
Karen Elliott:
So in our schools, we now have a Bible study for every age level, for every book of the Bible, for every day of the week. And so in Rafiki schools in Africa, and this is the model we are hoping to also promote and help establish in Africa, is our school starts with Bible studies, the first class of the day, preschoolers to high schoolers, to the adults, to the custodian.
Everybody is literally on the same page of scripture. We also have catechism and hymns included with the Bible study. And so we've got like what we believe is a sound theological Bible study, and we have this classical Christian curriculum that is attentive to Africa. What I mean by that is when we have word problems in math, for example, we use two mangoes plus two mangoes, not blueberries plus blueberries.
You see what I'm saying?
Marlin Detweiler:
I do, and wherever this is, cultural context is what it was intended to be. That's written for Americans. We need to understand that.
Karen Elliott:
That's right. And so kids go to the, you know, Jim and Sarah go to the market, not necessarily to the grocery store. So there's some of that. However, there's a strong Western civilization strand in our literature, in our art curriculum, in our music curriculum, and in the history curriculum. So it’s all taught from a Christian worldview, but also our science and math and we, if there are mathematicians and scientists, we need to feature that are from African descent, we include those. We have been intentional about that.
But also people always wonder, well, you know, how does this work in Africa? Well, in the African school systems, they do have curricula. And so their social studies, their language, we teach. And there are a couple of other texts that we are required to use because at the end of a student’s program at Rafiki schools in Africa, they have to sit for government exams.
And government exams in Africa are subject based. And so they have to sit for a social studies exam, a math exam, a chemistry. So our classical Christian curriculum is more international in scope, but we incorporate what is necessary for the students to pass those national exams and appreciate their culture. So our art curriculum, you've got yes, Renoir and Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Yes, you've got Egypt. Yes. The ancient, you know, the pyramids and the artwork from there. And Grecian urns, of course, but also you've got African Benin bronzes dropped in, and you have batik and weavings and other artwork and art images throughout Africa. So that's how we've tried to do that. But we do introduce the students to the Western, you might call it Western civilization.
I love this. I got a story last week from our school in Nigeria, which, by the way, for any of your audience who are able to see my background, that's the Rafiki village in Nigeria with children's home and classical Christian School, pre-K to 12 and then the teacher training college. So I just got an email last week, a note that, from one of our heads of school that there was a secondary student just reading Plato's Republic at lunch.
Don't you love it?
Marlin Detweiler:
That I do.
Karen Elliott:
Not to mention. Then I get stories, like from the vice-chancellor of a university in Africa who says, “Man, those Rafiki kids know more Bible in theology than our pastors.”
So I love what God is doing here. So we had children. We started taking in orphans. We had to create schools. We had to create our own curriculum, and then we had to create our own Bible study.
And then we had to create our own teacher training college material.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Well, I would underscore something before we get too far away from it, that you made clear, but I want to underscore it in a way that our listeners grow to appreciate even more. And that is how complicated it is to provide an educational overlay. Overlay is even the wrong term, to provide cultural context for what it means to apply a classical Christian education to a culture that's very different than an American culture.
It is the adaptation. And I know missionaries have been doing this for decades. If not centuries, but to do it for evangelism purposes and for life skills and that sort of thing. But to do it in education, I personally appreciate the complexity of that, and I'm incredibly impressed with how you all have approached that and applied it.
And I really want us to understand how important that is to do well. And you guys really have.
Karen Elliott:
Thank you for that. I appreciate that, Marlin. We really, and this is God's grace to us. You know, we pray and we we trust the Lord for wisdom, but we also, I have some great people in our staff and on the mission field, and we have partners in Africa, the church and universities, which are run by Africans to help us in this enterprise.
Because we don't want to do, you know, there was classical Christian education in West Africa in the 19th century, and it was successful. It cultivated the African intellectual elite of the 20th century that fomented and advocated for equality and independence. And so it was successful Latin and Greek. But what happened was, is they totally and not everyone.
But there was a sense of there is nothing good in Africa. And we've taken the approach that we want to include whatever is true, good and beautiful, that we find and we appreciate that. And so I think and we've tried to be sensitive to that without leaving out what is considered the great books, the great ideas, the great the you know, the great wonders, you know, people that everyone should know something about.
And so thank you for that. It's developing. We really had to work hard to make sure that Plato's Republic was accessible. And so you can't find it in a bookstore. So what do we do in our curriculum is we take huge swaths of the public domain version and drop it into the teacher text and the student text in our materials, because teachers can't just go online.
It's expensive. They don't have the money, they can't afford the book. So we want something that's biblical, affordable, classical, international, and missional. So we're in ten countries in Africa. We have a Rafiki village that is pre-K to grade 12 with a classical Christian school for the orphans there and poor children in the community who all come on scholarship provided by people who give to Rafiki throughout the world.
Marlin Detweiler:
That was a question I was going to ask. There are ten schools, ten villages.
Karen Elliott:
Correct. So each village has a school, an orphanage and does teacher training. Six of those ten villages has a teachers college that will hopefully in the next year, be accredited as a degree granting institution in classical Christian education.
Marlin Detweiler:
That’s incredible!
Karen Elliott:
We have a woman with her doctorate in education who did her dissertation in teachers colleges in Africa, doctor Carol Krantz, and she's worked with others to really put together. It is really college level courses on Christian liberal arts, with a pedagogy that is classical. And it's a real teachers college in terms of child development, how to make your classroom materials, how to teach effectively.
And they get a practicum in our school. And so we're working on getting that fully accredited. So what God's given us, Marlin, is an education system, a whole system that perhaps he might allow us to see flood the African continent through churches and private schools throughout ten countries in Africa. And so, we've got the teacher training, we've got the curriculum, we've got the Bible study, we have the model schools.
And this is all of the Lord. Marlin, I always want to point to that. And we have the partnerships with African denominations. So we partner with 25 African denominations. They represent 20,000 schools and about 60 to 70 million churchgoers. We've been friends with them since we set foot on the continent. And so that's one avenue.
But we're also working with some other partners that have schools, private schools, so that in the next 30 years there may be 1,000-2,000 schools teaching the Bible every day to children, teaching them classically, every subject biblically, raising up, discipling the next generation of the world. This is what we are seeing.
Marlin Detweiler:
One of your growth strategies that I'm hearing. I want to make sure it's stated that, is now that you've established this group of ten. Is it fair to say you're likely to establish more, but you're also likely to help other organizations with whom you now are growing in affiliation to do what you've done on their own, in partnership with you or, because they've been mentored by you?
Karen Elliott:
Exactly. That's right!
Marlin Detweiler:
I have this saying about being strategic about what we do. And it sounds to me like you, the people you work with, I assume your board as well, are incredibly strategic and to the benefit of the continent and the kingdom in ways that don't happen as much as I wish they did.
Karen Elliott:
You know, I think that's a really good point. I will say our founder, Rosemary Jensen, had always been careful not to get distracted off mission. There are so many needs in the continent of Africa. People are always like, “Well, why don't you start a hospital? Why don't you start this? Why don't you do that?”
And God has really led us in this direction. Like I said, once we started taking in orphans, we had to educate them. And the only curriculum available pretty much in Africa that's affordable is a secular, progressive curriculum. Even the church schools only have that, and they don't have other sound theological materials to use in their schools.
And so as we just did the next right thing and then tried not to get distracted by so many needs on the continent and we believe really that of course, next to the family and the church that a classical Christian school is a fruitful discipleship environment. And our mission right for Christians is to make disciples of all nations, teaching them everything I have commanded you.
Jesus says.
So we're a mission agency in that sense. We're helping to make disciples. But our vehicle, our strategy for that, is running our own ten schools really well. And I would love your audience to consider helping us with that. And I'm not talking about money necessarily. I'm talking about missionaries. But also to help others go and do likewise.
And so we have individuals, proprietors who run their own school. They come to us.
Marlin Detweiler:
Do you want Western teachers?
Karen Elliott:
Yep, we'll take them.
Marlin Detweiler:
So you’re training indigenous folk and you're hoping for Western teachers as well?
Karen Elliott:
We would love to have educators from America come and serve Rafiki villages. They can come short term or long term, and be a part of the mission that we're doing and help to establish the best education and best Bible study forthe least of these and the future generation of the world, every other toddler to teenager who will be born in the continent of Africa in the next 20 years.
The church is growing. The problem of the church in Africa is lack of sound theology. What if God allowed us to have a million children daily studying the Bible and learning to think logically? We all know what classical Christian education does. So how about offering this to Africans, who are standing firm on biblical morality, but they are being deceived by so many ideologies?
We will lose the next generation of the world if we don't enhance, if we don't approach this. This is one strategy God has given that could do that. So American educators, your network of people are already primed. You know the classical Christian education. Maybe you're sensing a call to mission. We offer a unique opportunity for men and women to serve, to oversee a school, to run a teachers' college, to run an orphanage, to run a whole village, to manage a facility, to teach art and music, to help others learn how to teach the Bible.
There's a myriad of ways people can serve in the Rafiki Foundation, so we would love to have them.
Marlin Detweiler:
When we met a few weeks ago, it was obvious to me that there was a possibility of a win-win situation for our online school constituents, parents, and students to come on a mission trip. When you said that was something that you welcomed, I was thrilled. And so, as you know, we're working on making that happen.
And I hope that this will be inspiring to others to reach out to you and to the organization to see how those that are attracted to this work by God's leading might be part of what you're doing, and be blessed in the process. We have to always realize that we're not the people with all the answers coming to give to someone else.
We're getting from it too. It's a give and take and boy, do I want to realize that. The blessings that God has for us are in serving. And it's not because we have all the answers and they have all the questions.
Karen Elliott:
Well, Marlin, I can't tell you how much it encouraged me when you came up to visit with us at the conference, we definitely will welcome high school students and chaperones to go and serve for a two-week short-term mission at a Rafiki village. Our schools are in session in the summer, so there are opportunities to help at our schools and with the children's home and the teachers college.
And we have sent out thousands of short term missionaries. So I think we can help make it easy for your constituency to go and serve overseas. And it gives you a chance to see what God's doing in Africa. My prayer always, when people go and serve is that they will come to know the Lord better, because really, that's eternal life, right?
And so that going out short term and seeing another part of the world where classical Christian education is flourishing, we've done three classical Christian conferences in Africa, two in Kenya and one in Uganda. And we've had some great speakers from America go and speak, and we're seeing a very strong interest in this. So more people from the US coming to help and see will only encourage and strengthen our work in Africa.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's really cool. One of the things that we have seen in our online school is how incredible this is. The thing that I have been most blessed with that I didn't see coming when we started doing online education. And that was the tremendous blessing that it is to be in a mix, in an international mix of students in a classroom learning setting, and things like mission trips are other elements of doing the same thing. It's remarkable.
Karen, in the last couple of minutes, I'm curious if you can kind of paint your vision, for what it looks like for Rafiki five years from now and ten years from now. We certainly understand that we make plans, but God gives the growth. But I know you and your organization well enough to know that those are important ways to operate, to know where you're trying to go and plan to go. So tell us a little bit about what you see happening in the next few years.
Karen Elliott:
Well, our prayer, Marlin, for our ten Rafiki villages is that we will have ten model classical Christian schools, that we would also have ten teacher training colleges fully accredited.
Marlin Detweiler:
All right.
Karen Elliott:
And then we are asking God for at least a thousand schools in the next ten years using our curriculum and Bible study. So we would be training heads of school, teachers, for those schools. We also, as I've mentioned, we work with the church in Africa, and we have Sunday school materials and Bible study materials, and we'd love to see 50,000 churches in Africa using our Sunday school materials because they don't have much to use.
But that's the church side of things. For education, I'm just seeing this network of schools growing. Then we have also partnered with African Christian universities, throughout Africa. And so we hope to then help them launch our teacher training college content on their campuses and have their model school. In fact, when I was in Malawi, just recently meeting with our church partner university, they were like the university, the deputy vice-chancellor said, we want the whole country of Malawi to go classical.
You need to make your teachers college bigger and your school bigger on your campus. I said, “No, you need to run this material on your own college site in another part of the country, and you need to have your own demonstration school that's classical and Christian. We will help you get there.”
Marlin Detweiler:
We will train as well. Yeah.
Karen Elliott:
Yeah. So that's Rafiki 2.0 then. Rafiki 3.0 is pretty much online, we are looking at that. We want to get the model well established. So you can really see it three-dimensionally. But I think eventually there will be a way for us to also offer some of this digitally in a hybrid environment. So that's Rafiki one, two and 3.0.
Marlin Detweiler:
That is what a great vision. You are to be commended for forward thinking, which so much so often is missed, and it really allows for continuity and for effectiveness and success in ways that I wish happened more. Thank you so much, Karen, for all you're doing. Thanks for telling us your story. Folks, if you're interested – give us your website as a starting point for people that want to get into more.
Karen Elliott:
You can sponsor a child, you can go on a mission trip. We'd love for you all to be a part in that way.
Marlin Detweiler:
And you can move there and teach or be an administrator, too.
Karen Elliott:
Just like Anna Liebing. I think you all interviewed her a several months back, and we could use about, you know, 30 more just like her.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's great.
Karen Elliott:
Thanks, Marlin.
Marlin Detweiler:
Karen, thank you so much for joining us, folks. Thanks again for joining us for another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Hope to see you next time.
