The Fourteenth Easter Convention, Kitwe, Zambia

The flight to Lusaka, Zambia, was good; I enjoyed reading William Haslam’s “From Death to Life,” the Cornish preacher who famously came into assurance of salvation as he himself was preaching to his congregation: “The parson’s converted! The parson’s converted!” they cried. But the later years of his life were perplexing and the book finally raised more questions than it answered; the earlier chapters of Haslam in his 20s were the most challenging.

The currency in Zambia has experienced a horrendous inflation. In 1980 the Kwacha and the pound were on a parity, 1 Kwacha to 1 pound. Today it is 9,000 Kwachas to the pound but I upgraded it to 10,000, so 1p is a hundred Kwacha. Then it was easy to gauge the relative price of things. The population of the country is about 10 million but there are officially only 400,000 wage-earners. Many of the rest are in this marvellous category ‘self employed’ and also the interior subsistence farmers none of whom is a taxpayer. Such a tax scheme is a cause of much resentment to the hard-pressed taxpayers. So the tax on the 400,000 is 40%, and this drives many gifted people out of Zambia. You remember that they are also expected to support with their incomes relatives and distant family members in school fees, hospital bills and in old age. I asked one man how this unofficial family support works: “My brother and sister and I agreed to pay all my mother’s bills, power, rental etc. But as the years have gone by they increasingly think that as my wife and I have no children we can better afford to pay those bills than they can, so I am virtually the only one who is supporting her.” He added, “It’s OK.” As the government does not tax self-employed people there is a huge black economy. Tradesmen and craftsmen and businesses both great and small want to be paid in cash. Garages prefer to sell new cars for cash. The Asian community especially does everything in cash, even purchasing houses; they sit and count out cases of money Kwacha by Kwacha to pay for a home. The dollar is the international currency.

Kitwe is Zambia’s second city with a million population; the Ndola airport is 45 minutes away and there pastor Happy Ngoma and one of the deacons Philemon were awaiting me. Incidentally, one particular thing I like about Africans is that few men wear shorts. You think of America where everyone wears them and they expect me to wear them too. Here I am in perfect dress co-ordination with the entire nation, but, alas, shorts are creeping in. Philemon drove me on initially fine roads to Happy’s home where I will be staying for the next week. Occasionally one comes across a typical African sight, all the passengers of a large broken down taxi-bus standing listlessly on the side of the road while a number of men are gathered at the front looking under the bonnet. The inter-city roads are excellent, as are those around centre-city Kitwe, but the suburban roads are a disgrace, a sea of potholes with cars driving on every side of the road to avoid them. These vehicles come zig zagging slowly towards you sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right, while you are doing the same driving towards them dodging these antitank traps. Someone said to me that in the rest of the world if you see a car drifting from one side of the road to the other you judge that the driver is drunk, but here in Zambia if you see a man driving straight ahead on the left crashing over one pothole after another, then you know that he’s the one who must be drunk. There is a pathetic man working on a section of road near Happy’s manse filling in holes with a shovel and standing in the middle of the road putting out his hand for a coin as we lurched by at 8 mph. He is, in fact, an actual drunkard, and most of the Kwachas he gets are spent on beer. Along the roadside are the lonely women with little tables on which are pyramids of tomatoes, or eggs, or sweet potatoes, or a mound of ground nuts. They sit on stools under umbrellas, but I rarely spot anyone stopping to purchase anything from these lonely women.

Everything was splendid in the Kitwe Manse; large bedroom, firm beds, a moving fan; big bathroom; chirping birds (less songbirds here); the water is fine and there are jugs of orange squash and Marie biscuits for elevenses. There is constant boiling water as electricity is cheap in Zambia because of the abundant rivers; the hydroelectric schemes are good and constantly being improved. The Chinese are building a new plant now. I had a long bath and got the dust of travel out of my pores. Everyone gets monthly electricity and water bills, and in Kitwe they are approximately the same amount as a concession to this region. It is a safe country, where everyone seems to have a mobile phone, and how they use them. They go off every ten minutes in the car, at the meal-table, during prayers; no place is sacred to their interruptions. People believe in their right to call other people at any time in any place. As they walk down the street young and old talk away to one another as in Wales, and there are billboards on each street corner advertising the ubiquitous cell phone.

I talked to a pastor about his siblings. They were all raised in nominal Methodism but Christian students spoke to this pastor about the gospel and later the sovereignty of God, setting him off on his journey. He believes that in the last decade his father has been converted; his mother too has made a profession but he wonders how genuine it is. This is what concerns him, two of his brothers have died of AIDS, but at such crises his mother turns to the ubiquitous witch doctors and they have told her that her sons died because a spell was put on them, and she has chosen to believe that.Happy Ngoma came to believe in the limited purpose of the atonement before being persuaded of others of the truths of free grace. It came to him while reading the words of Caiaphas on the purpose of the death of Christ in John 11:50-52: “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. And this spoke he not of himself, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation. And that not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad.” They were the ones for whom Jesus died; that he might accomplish that goal for them.

In the evening there was a neighbourhood Bible Study and I walked for a mile in my flip-flops through a pleasant area with Happy and Elizabeth and their 13 year old daughter Lom, greeting various people on the way. The Bible Study was held in one of the members’ homes, Felix who is a lecturer at the Kitwe University in Forestry Economics. There are thirty staff in that department. The new strains of trees are brought in from Mexico. The copper mines use a lot of pine pit-props like the Welsh mines also did. The things one learns . . . The Bible study consisted of 9 people looking at Ephesians 5, “women submit to your husbands” and most of them contributed, and did so well. After the closing prayer a big bowl of boiled groundnuts (peanuts) was put in the centre of the table.

On Good Friday the Conference of the United Kitwe Chapels began at 3 p.m., or ‘fifteen hundred hours’ as they say. They also might say when you ask them when something had occurred, “Two zero zero three,” instead of “2003” as we would say. Little national quirks. The conference was held in the large Nkana East Chapel erected a few years ago, one of five or so Brethren Assemblies which have become Reformed and these churches work together. In other words, they have called pastors, abandoned the dispensational interpretation of things, but maintain the weekly breaking of bread. There were about 250-300 people in the congregation; ‘Golden Bells’ was the hymnal plus an OHP and we sang such familiar hymns as, Our God our help in ages past, Loved with everlasting love, Who is on the Lord’s side? Crown him with many crowns, etc. I knew them all except for one or two OHP choruses. All the singing everywhere throughout my time in Zambia was unaccompanied. There is plenty of harmonising and some slight variations to the tunes. There were banks of recording equipment down one side at which two diligent men sat taping.

They had asked me to take them through the 22 chapters of the book of Revelation in five sessions. The full text is available on our Aberystwyth church’s website. In the first session, preaching on the first three chapters, I sweated a lot and mopped my brow with the red spotted handkerchief I had inadvertently brought to the meeting (Pastor John Ploughman was in the pulpit); it was a good thing that my wife wasn’t there, but by the next day they had installed a tall fan and trained it on my back and it made a welcomed improvement. No sweat; I didn’t have to use the crisp white handkerchief I had carefully brought. They probably now think that large red spotted handkerchiefs are used by everyone in Wales. People kept turning up throughout the sermon, even to five minutes from the end when they had to sit in the front seats.

English is spoken beautifully. There is just one man whose heavy accent I’ve had difficulty in understanding, and of course the little children. “What pretty hair you have,” I say, “What’s your name?” A little squeak of an answer comes, and if it is an African name I am stumped. But those are the exceptions. Conversations are profound, and intelligent, and English spoken so finely. For example, one man making announcements on Saturday told the congregation there were leaflets describing a certain work at the door: “Please pick up a report for your personal consideration,” he said. You wouldn’t find such elegance in Aberystwyth. There is the same desperate shortage of preachers here as in Europe. The church Nigel Lacey pastored in Lusaka is hunting for one now. It is an important congregation for Zambia. Kitwe Chapel itself has called someone.

On Friday night I went to the second university of Zambia, the Copper Belt University which is here in Kitwe. It was the beginning of the new term and the CU asked me to speak on, “What is the Gospel?” The meeting, due to start at 18.00, started at 18.35 and about 25 students slowly turned up. One of the men in charge, William, was converted 25 years ago during his first week at Swansea University and baptized by Owen Milton under whose ministry he sat during his postgraduate work in genetics. His own children are at university age.

Saturday was the main day of our conference with the same number of people attending and I spoke on Revelation three times at 9.30 a.m. (chaps. 4-7), 11.30 a.m. (8-12), and 2.30 p.m. (13-18). I suppose it was all a bit of a plod with good flashes. They were wonderfully concerned to meet my needs taking me to Pastor Tryson’s house lunch time, feeding me there and putting me on a bed for 40 minutes. Then the questions that I was asked from 30 pieces of paper at 3.30 were pretty searching stuff, and my limitations were quickly manifest. They wanted the exegesis of various verses, and of course desired more explanation than I had given on the ‘144,000’ and the number of the beast 666. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have spread their superstition on 144,000. How significant that the clear teaching in Revelation on the torment of hell is denied by them, but that they actually make literal the number 144,000, and say it refers to the top JWs who knock more doors than anyone else. They are the ones who will leave the world and will get to heaven, so they teach, but the rest of the JWs will spend their time on the fabulous new earth. Works, all works, wretched works, like building across the bottomless pit a bridge of sand.

Sunday was a special day; at 4 a.m. I was awakened with a deluge of rain hitting the corrugated iron roof and peals of thunder and flashes of lightning for an hour. This has gone on for most of the nights following. I went at 9 a.m. to a Bible study of the adults who are examining Bible translating through English history. They did Wycliffe last week and it was Tyndale and the Geneva Bible this week and next week the Authorised Version. It was very fine. We looked at the latter verses at the end of Revelation 22 concerning the sin of adding to Scripture. “Were notes written on the sides and bottom of pages in Study Bibles actually adding to Scripture?” was the question and the answers were great.

The main service started at 10. There was a great listening. People are dressed smartly, some having driven to the service in splendid people-carriers; they have responsible jobs. They carry well-used Bibles and are serious about the faith. I suppose that, counting the many children, there were about 150 present, and I guess I was the oldest. I ate with a business couple who travel the world with their work and then at 3 the final fifth session on Revelation took place in the Nkana East Chapel which was again full. So the studies in Revelation ended well as they had begun, with that bit of a struggle in the middle three sessions on the Saturday. To close there were another dozen great questions on slips of paper, but they were more manageable than Saturday’s, less questions about the exegesis of individual verses in the book of Revelation. I enjoyed thinking on my feet and answering them, and I believe the congregation was with me.

The Lord’s Day ended with a meal for the elders and committee members of the Conference and their wives in the home of a businessman and his wife who had lived for a few years in Colchester. There were forty of us, and outside caterers came in, and we sat out on white garden furniture in a large garden under the stars eating around scattered tables until 11 p.m. enjoying the fellowship and the happiness of the occasion. The Southern Cross was pointed out to me and also the star that is nearest to planet earth. I spoke to a headmaster and he was grim about the situation in the government schools in the country. They have just had a long six week teachers’ strike which began on the first day of term, and they have lost all that period of teaching. Another strike is threatened next week. I asked him in a scale of one to ten in job satisfaction where he would put his own work. “Four,” he bleakly told me. Interesting conversations, and there were no insects to distract us; no trace of mosquitoes in particular, though each day I diligently take my expensive tablets.

One delightful surprise was meeting again Alfred Nyirenda. He studied in Spurgeon’s College 25 years ago under Bruce Milne and Douglas Brown, that conservative time in its era. He returned here to Zambia and was a fine preacher in Lusaka and here in Kitwe where he led many of the leaders of this Conference into an appreciation of God’s free grace. I met him in South Africa fifteen years ago and we are soul mates. He had many questions about the UK, Westminster Chapel, Heath and its former pastor Vernon Higham, the Leicester Conference etc., and I gave him what news I had. He is ten years younger than me and is now the head of a new orphanage which is rapidly building up to be the home of 196 children in 30 bungalows with a mother and aunt in each home. There are half that number present there now but it will soon be full. All the women in the individual houses are single and over 40 years of age; there are two in each house, a mother and an aunt. On Monday I was taken to visit this large village with its school, medical centre and all purpose hall. It has all been erected in the last 2 years, the bungalows of fine brick and they look grand spread across a gentle slope on a very large site. Children came running up to hold my hand and skipped along at my side while Alfred held my other hand as we walked in African friendship. Every home has a couple of vegetable gardens. Some of the kids were abandoned babies, a few pounds in weight with little chance of survival, while others are the orphans of those who have died with AIDS. Some of the children may be HIV positive but no discrimination is made against them. Money initially came from Austria to set up the village, and it all runs at a budget of 200,000 pounds a year, which seems to me incredibly small for sixty staff and a few hundred children.

One feature noticeable in many Christian homes is that TV is on in the corner non-stop. Even when I visited them the TV was rarely switched off; the children wander about, look at it for a while and walk around and then are back sitting and watching for long periods. We’re talking to one another, and then our eyes drift over to the ubiquitous box. There are two channels if one does not have an expensive satellite dish which few can afford, though the porn channel is not expensive. Yuk. The first channel is the government channel, and that does have BBC news international each day at noon for half an hour. Then there are a lot of soaps, and regular football. The alternative is the other channel which opened two years ago and it is sort of free. It is the Trinity Broadcasting Corporation and the 700 Club. There are some good things on this channel. Some of the interviews with Christians going through trials are heart warming and biblical. But in the peak viewing periods you get health and wealth teaching, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Hagin, Oral and Richard Roberts, the women preachers, Reinhard Bonnke, with their histrionic fake healings, and constant appeals for money (I said ‘sort of free’). Here into their living rooms come the American preachers with their incredible wardrobes. God save us! This channel is being switched on and left to run all day in a million religious homes, only switched off at bedtime. It has enough truths to justify untaught Christians watching occasionally, and enough glimpses of glamorous churches – vast auditoriums, big choirs and singers, folksy intimate promises of life- transforming cassettes and video messages (‘for only $20 – in a pack’), wealth and health everywhere, certainly more than enough to build up a restless spirit of dissatisfaction with the real congregations we all attend. Zambia is a nation with some excellent preachers but they are rarely on the box. What this wonderful country which is so interested in the gospel is getting is Hagin and Hinn. Gullible Zambians watch all this fleshliness and think that this is true Christianity. Intelligent working Zambians, on the other hand, disdain such Christianity as laughable. One bright spot is that the sermons of Nigel Lacey have all been videoed and they are shown on TV once a week at 5.30 and there is a man with a remarkable testimony of conversion through stumbling across this programme who was in the Lusaka Baptist congregation with me on the final Sunday night.

On Tuesday night I began my second assignment, the three two hour sessions on preaching given at the Kitwe Chapel, the mother church of these 5 or 6 Reformed Brethren Assemblies, at their regular School of Theology meetings. About forty people turned up at 6 p.m. for the first evening with eight or nine wives in attendance. I lectured for an hour and then answered questions in my waffly way about the call to the ministry, lay preaching, and can one defy the call of God, etc. At times I used a meat cleaver when a scalpel was needed.

Afterwards I was taken to the home of a lawyer called Kennedy for supper along with the elders, deacons and their wives of one of the smaller assemblies to be a part of this group. About twenty of them break bread on Sundays and then an hour later 120 people come to their morning service. They are serious about getting a pastor. Two of the officers work deep underground in the copper mines, one is an electrician, another a lawyer (Kennedy himself), another the headmaster I had spent time with on Sunday night and clearly the respected leader of this group. Their wives were teachers etc. They asked me questions but I was happier quizzing them, like the students on a Sunday night in the Manse. I asked them what books they had found most helpful. It was not too promising a response, pretty wide ranging stuff, but Kennedy said, “The Forgotten Spurgeon.” Then I asked them what were their favourite hymns and Happy’s wife Elizabeth, blew me out of the saddle when she quoted John Newton’s “I asked the Lord that I might grow in faith and love and every grace,” etc. She could repeat it all. She had learned it from the fine Metropolitan Tabernacle hymnal, Psalms and Hymns, though it is also in Christian Hymns.

Ten more attended the second night of lecturing and during the day Kennedy came and took me around Kitwe, for example, slowly driving along the side of the vast collection of sheds and lean-to’s that comprise the market, a central feature of every town on the continent of Africa. We travelled down one side of it, a hundred yards long, but it is also a hundred yards wide with row after row of tradesmen within that square. Everything is for sale there, electronic goods, clothes (“Italian Fashion” one lean-to was called), tools and hardware, bicycles, and food including the best bread in the city. Everyone shops there from the highest to the lowest, but some of the tradesmen are rough and many women don’t go there alone. The clothes not sold in European charity shops have been sent in containers to Africa and other countries for the last twenty years. Here in Zambia they call it ‘sala-ula’ in a derogatory reference to them being ‘turned over and discarded.’ This trade was wiping out the local textile industry and so the government had two courses of action, banning it entirely (as they have tried to do in Zimbabwe) or taxing it steeply (which Zambia has done). This market has had many sala-ula stalls. People saunter along flicking over the tumble of clothes. They get bought, picked apart, redesigned and resold by keen seamstresses. That was the tradition for twenty years, but now even this sala-ula has been overtaken by Chinese imports. New garments made in China are cheaper than charity shop rejects shipped to Africa in transporter containers from Europe. So the sala-ula stalls are getting less and less and Chinese clothes stalls are everywhere.Kennedy also took me to a new church building near one of the shafts of a copper mine. It was interesting to see the familiar pithead winding gear and cooling towers in such an exotic location. The church has walls, roof, doors and iron window frames and so the people are able to worship there long before completion. They have been supported by the other congregations in getting started but the completion is their responsibility, so now there is a lull before glass, electricity and plumbing is installed. Some of the youth workers, if that is not professionalising a broad concern in some of the young men, were playing football with the local boys. I got broad grins of welcome. There are three or four such new churches being set up in the Kitwe area and immediately people from the neighbourhood come along and listen. No declining congregations here.

Elizabeth gave me a demonstration of making Zambia’s staple diet, ‘nchima’. The maize was traditionally pounded and ground up with a pole smashing the ears of corn. That is still done in the rural districts but the women in the neighbourhood of every small town take their corn to a mill – a machine that separate the orange maize husks from the white heart and then grinds that corn in a minute. They take both home on their heads or on a bicycle or in a car if they can afford one (the chickens eat the husks). An orthopaedic doctor told me what knee problems African women have in middle age from carrying burdens on their heads. In the cities Zambians buy sacks of ground corn, and depending on the family, one will last a month. The sack the family here buys costs 1.40 pounds. Town people have a much more varied diet, and Elizabeth is typical of the younger cook. We even ate pizza and on another occasion hot dogs. She showed me how nchima is made mixing the ground corn into an inch of cold water, then she added double or treble that mount of boiling water. The maize expanded and the mix turned into a porridge. She let that simmer and bubble and spit away for 10 minutes, and then she added another cup of ground maize and mixed that – like mixing cement – until it was ready. “Come to the table!” One eats it with meat and vegetables. I eat it with a knife and fork of course, covering it with gravy, but the African says that a fork ruins the taste of nchima; “You have to eat it with your fingers.” One nursing teacher with a big smile on her face was telling me that she was reading a paper on mental problems or clinical depression and that one giveaway of this condition was eating food with your fingers. She collapsed in peals of laughter.

I was taken around a township on the edge of Kitwe this afternoon, “not for the poor people”, Kennedy was at pains to point out. They did not look poor though their houses were not quite as well built as the houses in our part of the city. The children coming home from school in their uniforms were immaculate. The township has 80,000 people and these brethren are planting a church here; it is the church with the copper miners and the headmaster and the 25 members. The site of their new church is a large untidy field and they have put up the iron girders which looked like a modern sculpture. The next church I was taken to was the very reverse, a log cabin kind of structure with no windows, again in a large field. They are confirming ownership and planning permission before going the same way as the other church.

I gave my last lecture at 6.10 for an hour on Thursday and then answered question for 45 minutes, and now that we have got to know one another there was a lot of relaxed good spirits throughout this time. I took their photo and then went for supper to an elder’s home. What fine godly people they all are. What an example they are to us.