The Reformed Baptist Church at the Victoria Falls

At the Livingstone airport in Zambia pastor Michael Bwembya met me and took me to his home, and on the next day we set off for the Victoria Falls 20 minutes away. We were hampered by a power cut which lasted 12 hours, the water supply was cut off too for 18 hours. On the way to the Falls we visited the David Livingstone museum, but we were refused entry because of the lack of electricity. So I missed seeing his walking stick, a giant flintlock rifle, instruments for optical surgery, a tin box he stood his candles in, a spearhead (thrown at him), his watch case and his sketches of the falls. I wanted to buy T-shirts with special names and pictures of animals on the front for the grandchildren but the power to operate the machines was not available. I tried to buy some things in a curio shop with my credit card but the absence of power meant that credit cards were not accepted. It was all a nuisance. David Livingstone was the first white man to discover the falls – “the smoke that thunders” is the African name – “Mosi-oa-Tunya” – and he named them after his queen. He made this discovery 150 years ago this year on a expedition accompanied by 200 men in 100 canoes, and so there is a special effort being made to promote the falls for the tourists, but it is a five hour drive from Lusaka.

We drove along a country road for a few miles from Livingstone passing a few guarded entrances to the drives to three large modern hotels. Then we arrived in a large yard surrounded with African curios, and a busker in a head-dress, bare-chested who was playing a primitive xylophone behind a box for money. There was room for a few dozen cars, and this was the entrance to the Victoria Falls. We went through the entrance, a narrow door and signed our names in the visitors’ book (one looks for ‘Wales’ or ‘Welsh’ just in case someone else from Aberystywth happened to be there). There were not many people at the Victoria Falls, a few hundred, and then we walked along a narrow concrete path through jungle of a dense growth until, around a corner, one gets one’s first glimpse of the Zambesi river plunging over this precipice. It is awesome, and one stands and gazes for an age, but this is just the beginning. The path winds on along the cliff top on the opposite edge of the Falls at a lower elevation so one is looking up at them. There are plenty of viewing places to stand and see the Falls from different angles. The Victoria Falls are one mile in length, and no one has ever been able to see them all because they give off such a spray that one’s vision is limited. No one can see the bottom; it is all the thickest spray; one cannot see the sky above because of this same cloud of spray, and one can just see a few hundred yards of the waterfall at any time before the mist closes in. It is very impressive, primitive and frightening. How mighty are his wonders.

Then as one goes along the path one gets wetter and wetter, and wetter and wetter, and wetter. One gets utterly soaked through. One comes to a pedestrian bridge and as one crosses it one is enveloped in drenching clouds of spray like a hose pipe directed at one. It is not pleasant. The water is cold and constant; it comes down and it comes up. From the north and south and east and west it rains at you and on you and through you relentlessly. It is like standing in a shower fully clothed and switching it on cold and standing there for ten minutes facing the shower and then turning one’s back on it for another ten minutes and getting one’s back soaked, and then repeating the experience, back and fore, soaking oneself. So I clambered across this bridge, and I was shouting involuntarily, “Ooooooooh! Ooooooooh!” all the time, indifferent to any other pedestrians, and glad to get to the other side and under some trees, but they send in the dive bombers, huge individual drops of water, millions of them, ferocious, relentless, “Mmmmmmmm-pow! Mmmmmmm-pow!” Ten a second zap you. Give me the drenching cloud any day, and so back into it one goes, on and on to the end with the last view of these majestic earthy falls rumbling on, utterly oblivious to we ants gazing up at it, lacking words to describe the sight. Livingstone said that these are “scenes so lovely they must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.” Below and to the east from the Falls is the gorge through which the ruffled Zambezi goes on its way gathering itself together. Above there are bungee jumps, the highest in the world at 111m. (“one of the 1,000 things to do before you die”). I’ll do it the day before, and white water rafting (“the adrenalin junkie’s ultimate fix”), and across the gorge the railway bridge linking Zambia to Zimbabwe, that is, old Northern Rhodesia to old Southern Rhodesia. The bridge celebrated its actual centenary the day before I was there, and you look across at it.

I have not finished. Where do you think you go now? You retrace your steps. Yes, through all of that again. Yes you do, knowing what lies ahead of you now, through the jungle’s dive-bombing and across the bridge of wet wetness, and along the path of mighty spray. You thought you could not get any wetter. O yes you can. You discover a new kind of wet, a new dimension of wetness never before experienced. It has strange effects on you as you laugh and cry. There is this majestic sight of the Victoria falls on one side of the path. It calls for sobriety and feelings commensurate with one of God’s great wonders in his creation, and yet there you are, more bedraggled than you have ever been in your entire life. I look at my arms and they are white. I have never seen them look so pale, purged of any healthy tone, leprous. I rub them to make sure they are alive. I can feel my fingers. The rain has run down into my shoes, a sole has started to come off my left shoe, and later I discover the dye has come off the shoes and stained my socks. “What were you doing wearing socks to the Victoria Falls?” you ask. I shall explain later. My handkerchief in my pocket is like a handkerchief taken out of a bath of water. Some bills in my pocket are soaking wet. A piece of paper I keep for making notes has turned into blotting paper. My trousers, with the weight of the water, slip down my legs and I have to use the highest notch on my belt to stop them falling down completely. We stagger back to the bank of the Zambezi river and sit on a stone and I laugh uncontrollably gazing at my whiter than white arms and soaking trousers.

There is a sign ten yards from the edge of the Falls in cold official capitals, “NO SWIMMING. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CROSS. BEWARE OF CROCODILES.” I earnestly obeyed every commandment. People who are world travellers have described the Victoria Falls to me as a great fun experience. They have told me that in the hot African sun you are dry in next to no time. Do not believe them. You are soggy for the rest of the day. Every garment you wear is soggy, and sitting in soggy clothes hour after hour is not a lot of laughs. You long for dry clothes. You might have scorned me for the clothes I wore. I was open to that derision. But I am not the barefoot or sockless sandals man wearing shorts, and neither was my father before me. I was not raised that way, but that is what a trip to the Victoria Falls requires. I am a long trousers man, and will be until my dying day. You can hire capes and hoods. I was dissuaded by these same experts who said that the rain gets through and in. “You sweat and there is inner condensation. Better to brave the elements!” they said. Next time I will hire a cape. There were five women, followers of the Sisters of Charity of Mother Teresa, who arrived with us at the entrance in their white habits with the blue borders. They all put on capes and hoods and looked like hobbits on their way to market, but they were drier than me at the end. Everyone in Livingstone was drier than me. If there had been a prize for wetness I would have won it easily. They would have had to make a new category of super-wet for anyone to challenge my record-breaking wetness. Maybe I have found my new sphere of excellence where I excel all others. Mr. Wet of Wales. Break your hearts inhabitants of Blaenau Ffestiniong rain capital of Wales. I am the champion, a valleys’ boy from the south. I am not giving up this Lonsdale Belt without a mighty effort from some poor damp challenger. I might even die bearing the title, and weep like Alexander that there are no more waterfalls to conquer. That afternoon we returned home and I attempted to peel off my clothes, easier said than done, especially the sports shirt which stuck to my back as if wallpapered to it, but persistence was rewarded and I put on my dry clothes. What a delight.

The Livingstone Reformed Baptist Church is about ten years old and it has had a chequered history, but under Michael it is heading in the right direction. Two of the officers came to see me on Saturday afternoon. They had been out in the streets for three hours giving out invitations to the special service on Sunday morning when ‘Jeff’ Thomas from the UK was to be preaching. What fine men, different, but solid supporters of the church. I asked them what books had helped them most and their responses showed the different attitudes we meet in congregations all over the world. One was not much of a reader and he struggled to find a book he could say had touched him. The other mentioned Forgotten Spurgeon and The Sovereignty of God, and the works of John Owen, “though they are not easy to read.” He is a laboratory technician checking samples of bodily fluid. I was interested in that – how one knows if a man is HIV positive etc. This man chaired the meeting on Sunday morning. The church uses Grace Hymns plus a kind of Sankey supplement which is widespread in these churches throughout Zambia. The early missionaries introduced and translated Sankey’s and this generation has grown up on these Victorian gospel hymns with their chorus structures. Eminently singable, but surely only to flavour a diet of more solid hymns.

The church has purchased a splendid piece of land – all these new churches I have been taken to have to possess vast pieces of land, the smallest being two acres and the largest the size of a football pitch. They are going ahead raising the capital for the next step. They first of all put up a wooden temporary structure without windows or electricity; they build some temporary toilets across the other side of the enclosure, they erect some coverings for Sunday School classes, and then they make their presence felt in the neighbourhood. Then next they build a little house for a watchman and with him installed they can buy a lorry-load of breeze-blocks hiring a builder who will start putting up the basic structure. Or perhaps they will first get the girders and erect the outline of the building. Then they take a deep breath and gather more money and go on to the next phase. It is a long journey, but they have the heart for it all over Zambia.

As in other churches we visitors were asked to stand and were welcomed to the church. Could they stay behind afterwards and the officers will greet them? Then the congregation was asked to welcome them. In Kitwe this welcome was displayed in three loud claps, but in Livingstone in a burst of clapping as in the morning service in Lusaka Baptist Church. I went to the door to shake hands with every person as they were released pew by pew to go to the door. The children sat in the front row and they came up to me first, and after shaking my hand they stood next to me in an ever lengthening line. The members of the congregation came out, shook hands with me, and then, with the children next to me, had to join the growing line shaking hands with everyone else who left the church and joined the line. There were many happy conversations between people as they moved down the line greeting every other person who was in the congregation. I thought it was a brilliant exercise, a contemporary application of ‘Greet one another with a holy kiss’ but I could not see how we could implement it in our own church in our weather and with our architecture and structures.

A couple of visitors were asked back to the Manse, one was a teacher who was Seventh Day Adventist who told me he enjoyed listening to the Bible being preached. I asked him about the SDA food laws. He said what they all say that it is merely for health, but I said that if he started to eat bacon sandwiches and pork chops he would never get anywhere in SDA circles. Is salvation by faith alone in Christ alone or is it by faith in Christ plus keeping these Old Testament food laws? If it is that then Christ has died in vain and we are still in our sins. If I must make a contribution to my redemption then I am a lost man because I can never make it perfectly. Simply to covet a bacon sandwich makes me a sinner if the SDA are right. It is odd how basic an issue is free justification though Christ in all sorts of circumstances – hugely with Rome, and then also with modernism which knows nothing of such a salvation. But here too in Zambia and central African where there are thousands of SDA churches meeting on Friday nights and Saturday mornings and denying eternal punishment as strongly as some English Anglicans.