Dear Friends,
On July 6, I flew to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, where I met the group from
Creekside that flew in later the same day. None of their checked baggage
arrived and they were exhausted from two days of continuous travel from Los
Angeles (they received all their luggage a few days later). So we moved them
over to our lodge for the night to catch up on sleep. Next day we headed out
on a long road trip into the remotest part of Zimbabwe, the Binga District
in the Zambezi River valley. Amazingly, we found Isaac Ndendela patiently
waiting beside the road for our arrival on the basis of a letter I sent him.
Isaac is a church leader with churches we worked with from 1981 to 2002,
which are known as Zimbabwe Christian Fellowship. In fact I first met him in
1981 when he was a farm worker near Bulawayo during our first year of
language study. Isaac speaks Tonga and his home is in the hot Zambezi
valley. After he became a Christian about the time we arrived in Zimbabwe,
he had a strong calling to quit his job and return home to preach. He has
been there ever since planting and nurturing churches in his home region,
despite the fact that he dropped out of formal schooling in the first grade.
Representatives from his four churches gathered to meet with us, but Isaac
had a definite agenda in mind for our visit. He announced this right away:
“We welcome you to come and teach us, but we also want to teach you. We will
begin with our own service where we will do all the teaching, then we will
give you a turn.” So that night one of the young men Isaac is grooming for
leadership preached an excellent message.
In all, three of Isaac’s disciples preached while we were there, while I
preached one message from Psalm 23 as the American contribution. This was
the first time I had seen such a scheme implemented by Zimbabweans when
Americans visit. It demonstrates a new level of confidence in what they are
doing locally.
I asked Steve Phillips, who is Creekside pastor, about the quality of the
messages we heard, and he agreed they were remarkably biblical. Texts used
included Numbers 11, Genesis 1, and Matthew 24. All the sermons showed
serious exegesis of the text. The results were not something you might hear
in sermons in the USA, but certainly applied to the African context. It
appears that the preachers received excellent training from another of
Isaac’s protégés, Francis Mudimba, who had developed into a real trainer
before his untimely death earlier this year. His brother said he had
contracted a form of malaria that made him not eat for a prolonged period
till he died. This is a huge loss not only for Isaac’s churches but also for
all churches in the Zimbabwe Christian Fellowship. Please pray that God will
provide someone of Francis’ caliber to take his place.
While the Creekside group was doing a program for the children of Isaac’s
churches, Isaac called me over to meet with his church leaders. Fifteen men
assembled under a tree to meet me. These are the fruit of Isaac’s twenty
years of work for God in his home area, and it is clear Isaac is thinking
and praying about the future of this work. Unselfishly, he explained that
these men always have him around to talk to, but now that I was here he
wanted to let them say to me anything that was on their mind. This is what
they proceeded to do for over an hour. They reported on what their churches
are doing or planning to do and had some requests. Rather than a shopping
list of things that only white men can provide, the men primarily asked for
help with leadership training, reflecting the loss of their main trainer
recently.
Their remote location means that they receive few visitors from other
churches and so also receive few opportunities for interaction about
leadership. One possible solution is to run an annual short-term Bible
school just for them in their Tonga language, but God will have to open the
door for that, so please pray about that too.
We all came away from the visit to Isaac’s home feeling we had witnessed
something very unusual, something that only God could have fashioned in the
wilderness. Larry Broughton, one of the Creekside team, even felt the need
to record some of Isaac’s story on video, with me interviewing him and
translating, so that Creekside can eavesdrop on this unique servant of God.
Indeed, no one else on our trip could really match up to what the first
grade dropout had accomplished for God.
Our next village stop was with Jameson Mahlangu, a retired coal miner, who
also lives in a remote area to the east of the coal mining town of Hwange. I
have only known Jameson for about eight years, as his church was part of
another association of churches planted by another set of missionaries. When
those missionaries left, the main church leader asked to join Zimbabwe
Christian Fellowship, but he sadly died before the final decisions could be
made. After his death, the churches in his association could not agree on
the wisdom of joining ZCF, so in the end only three churches decided to do
so, creating an unfortunate split in their old association. Jameson has
proved to be a dynamic leader and also has developed younger leadership, but
not to the same extent as Isaac.
In both villages, the Creekside group was initiated into eating sadza with
goat meat. Sadza is the thick corn meal porridge that most Africans like to
eat twice a day if possible. Since we formed a group of nine Americans, and
there were numerous Africans who wanted to eat with us, it seemed that a
goat was about the right quantity of meat. Two teenagers of our group got
into cutting up the goat and cooking it on the open fire. As usual, the main
delicacy was the liver, roasted separately and served first. In some ways we
ate better in the villages than we did elsewhere.
The reason for that was that regular stores had empty shelves. While we were
in Zimbabwe, the government was busy trying to stem the highest inflation
rate in the world. Their method was to force shopkeepers to lower prices to
what they had been charging two weeks earlier, but since prices had doubled
in two weeks, this meant in effect a half-price sale. We saw two stores in
Bulawayo with riot police outside holding the crowds at bay while
shopkeepers inside lowered prices on all items. Then the mobs would enter
the store and empty the shelves. One store manager who asked our group to
take photos of the empty shelves called the action “looting,” but it was
government sponsored. Suppliers were no longer willing to restock the
shelves as this would necessitate operating at a loss, and store owners were
threatened with seizure of their businesses if they closed, so many stores
duly opened each day without anything substantial to sell to the public.
Even we “tourists” with foreign currency could not buy all we wanted, and
our meals were unusually simple:
cereal for breakfast, peanut butter sandwich for lunch, and something like
macaroni and white sauce for dinner. Seldom did we get enough meat or
vegetables or fruit. Fortunately, on this trip we had not scheduled much
time in town, and spent almost every day in rural areas. In these areas, it
was possible to buy live chickens and oranges on occasion.
Our final week was spent in the beautiful Matopos Hills south of Bulawayo.
This was the venue for a Bible school for Zimbabwe Christian Fellowship
church leaders. Despite the difficulties in obtaining both food and fuel,
about 60 leaders came to the meeting. I had expected about 20, so this was a
pleasant surprise. The chairman of the association of churches, Philip
Nyandoro, runs a successful business engraving and selling tombstones, so he
used his flat-bed truck to transport leaders out to Matopos. The school had
an equal number of American and Zimbabwean teachers.
George Bragg, on his fourth trip to Zimbabwe, was at ease communicating with
the local leaders, as he explained how Moses’ leadership developed through
hard times that were sometimes more severe than those in Zimbabwe today.
Steve Phillips, on his first visit to Africa, was understandably more
concerned about connecting with the Zimbabweans. But his illustration about
pastoring out of overflow from time spent with God was easily understood. He
used a pitcher full of water, a cup, a saucer, and a plate to show how the
living water of God’s Spirit runs out of our cup into the saucer and then
into the plate. The connection across language and cultural barriers was
made after all.
In order to use the gifts of the rest of the Creekside group, activities
were planned with the local church children in the afternoons when they came
home from school, and Sharon Wigal had a long session with all leaders
interested in teaching Sunday School. In addition Swarnet Ncube, the local
pastor, arranged for the team to visit the local primary school. Here they
had access to all 250 children and teachers to present the gospel and some
dramatic scenes from the Bible and to witness personally to the headmaster.
All of this in a public school in a Marxist state!
The final morning of the Bible school was a direct interaction between the
Zimbabwean leaders and the Creekside group. As in Isaac’s churches, now the
leaders from various districts were invited to share what was on their heart
with the visitors. Again, it could easily have been a shopping list of
things that Americans can provide, but it wasn’t. Instead, the primary need
surfaced as leadership training. This Bible school obviously meets a need
for rural leaders who seldom get to spend a whole week just to learn from
the Bible in their own language. Please pray that God will permit the Bible
school to continue to function for these often neglected leaders.
Our last day in Zimbabwe was spent in the Nkulumane suburb of Bulawayo,
where I worked the last years of our missionary days to establish a now
thriving church. On the way to Nkulumane, George and I were dropped off for
a meeting with the ZCF national leadership committee in West Somerton. This
was in order to introduce us to the present committee and to summarize the
discussions of the previous day in the Matopos. When that was done, we tried
in vain to start Philip Nyandoro’s pickup truck. So we transferred to
another pickup which then ran out of gas after going less than a mile. As a
result we were over an hour late arriving at the event scheduled for
Nkulumane, but the rest of the Creekside team had gone ahead without us.
Immediately, I was whisked away by Pastor Emmanuel Mwale to meet some of his
leaders in order to discuss how things are going with Nkulumane Church. In
both West Somerton and Nkulumane there was neither water nor electricity. In
order to get water, people were lined up with their buckets at wells drilled
by World Vision every few blocks. This is life in Zimbabwe, and it is far
worse than when we lived here just five years ago. Zimbabwe needs urgent
prayers!
Robert Reese
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