Who Needs a Missionary?

How the Gospel Works All by Itself

Reese

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630871819
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In Who Needs a Missionary? Robert Reese reviews his own missionary experiences in Zimbabwe and finds that the best results came from an indigenous leader who had the least contact with missionaries. Reese conducted interviews with this leader to let him speak for himself about his journey with God in ministry; these interviews form the heart of the book. Mostly without missionary guidance, this Zimbabwean Christian of humble origins journeyed from his conversion to Christ to arrive at a transformation of his home community. Reese draws lessons from the life of this remarkable leader, who has enjoyed so few earthly advantages, yet has been rich in faith and fruitfulness. God has determined that the gospel will work all by itself whenever and wherever it is planted in human hearts.

1

Conversion

We first met Isaac Ndendela near the village of Esigodini in Zimbabwe. “Village” is used in the English sense of a small town, not in the African sense of a cluster of huts. Esigodini has a rustic Anglican chapel that could have been plucked from an English village. Right next to it is a cricket pitch with the white backboards that are there to enhance the batter’s ability to see the dark red ball coming. Originally, Esigodini was named Essexvale, and was set up as a small business center for white farmers in a broad valley with several dams that supply nearby Bulawayo with water and also allow for some irrigated farming.

By 1981, when we arrived in Zimbabwe, life in Esigodini was beginning to change. As a nation, Zimbabwe had only been created one year earlier after a long guerrilla war. The newly elected government headed by Robert Mugabe began by changing the names of towns in a symbolic gesture to move away from the colonial past. Essexvale became Esigodini, a word meaning “in the valley” in the local Ndebele language. Beyond that, shops began to cater more to the African population, since they were in the clear majority and now seemed to be in charge of the country. Slowly but surely, Esigodini was being transformed into an African town.

My wife, Mari-Etta, and I rented a house in Esigodini from the Electricity Supply Commission (ESC) right on the main highway from Bulawayo to Johannesburg. As 1981 was a year of transition in Zimbabwe, white people were leaving in droves from fear of an imminent Communist revolution, since Mugabe was and is a self-proclaimed Marxist. This created a brain drain from parastatals like the ESC and opened the way for a missionary couple to have one of their houses for a year.

Our goal was to study the language and culture of the Ndebele people before diving into fulltime church planting. Ironically, an Ndebele woman we had met in the United States had recommended Esigodini as an ideal place to learn the language and she was right. Many Ndebele lived in Esigodini, where they worked for white people or shopkeepers, and just over the range of hills to the south were the communal lands where traditional Ndebele villages abounded.

Our colleagues in mission, Allen and Janelle Avery, had arrived before us and established an English-speaking church in their house. In 1981, this congregation was predominantly composed of white people who were making an effort to adjust to the changes in the country. In fact, the dramatic turn of events leading to independence for the country caused many white people to open up to the gospel for the first time. Losing the sense of privilege caused many to think about God and their own spiritual condition.

One of those who turned to Christ in a deep and abiding way was Sandy Wolhuter. She and her husband Geoff ran a chicken farm near Esigodini. They had one child at that time, as we did. Their Jeremy and our Ellen were almost identical in age, under a year old when we first met. As both our families continued to have children, they always seemed to match in age. Since Sandy worshipped with us on Sundays and our children brought us together, we began to visit the Wolhuters regularly as they lived close by.

Going to the Wolhuters’ place from our house in the valley, we would drive towards Bulawayo on the main highway, reaching a steep ascent known locally as “Danger.” Zimbabwe always seemed to have vehicles on the road that belonged in a museum, so the biggest danger seemed to be that the drive up the hills would be the death of the vehicle. My main memory of “Danger” is seeing vehicle engines boiling over on the uphill stretch. No doubt there was also the danger of speeding (or “overspeeding,” as the Zimbabweans phrased it) on the winding downhill drive.

Just beyond the summit, we would turn to go down again into a steep valley where the Wolhuters had their farm. Their Dutch-styled farmhouse, which never seemed quite finished, nestled in the bottom of what the locals called “esihotsheni,” meaning “in the gulch.” In winter, the chill from the surrounding hills would funnel down like a cold blanket where the afternoon sun couldn’t reach. That is where we met Isaac, who worked as foreman for the chicken farm.

Isaac is a Tonga man from the hot and steamy Zambezi River valley in northern Zimbabwe along the border with Zambia. In fact, the Tonga people live on both sides of that great river that forms the border, since the national boundaries were drawn by Europeans who had little or no idea about the groups of people they were dividing up into new “nations.”

Most of the year, the Tongas need no blankets, because as the Africans say, “The heat is the poor person’s blanket.” Indeed, the Tongas tend to be poor and somewhat despised by other groups in Zimbabwe. Their region was only opened up with roads during the building of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River in the late 1950s. Even into the twenty-first century some Tongas still live in much the same way as their ancestors. Compared to urbanized Africans, Tongas are often thought of as country bumpkins.

Having been born in Zimbabwe of American missionary parents, I occasionally traveled through Tonga territory as a boy and I remember stopping now and then at a fly gate. This was an attempt to halt the spread of the tsetse fly, the carrier of sleeping sickness. The fly’s sting is like that of a horse fly, but more painful, a fact I know from personal experience. Mainly, however, the sting means death for most domesticated animals. This meant that the Tongas had no cattle, which abounded elsewhere in Zimbabwe. At the fly gate, the vehicle drove into an enclosed and darkened shed so that any flies riding on it would move toward the windows and be trapped. At the same time, the attendants would spray insecticide underneath the vehicle to kill any remaining flies.

By the twenty-first century, the fly gates had become a thing of the past, as the tsetse fly was sufficiently eradicated. Tongas were also becoming more engaged with the outside world. The modern world means the market economy. Families now need cash to pay school fees for their children, and to buy things like soap, matches, cooking oil, tea, and sugar. These new necessities drove Tonga men to find jobs far from home. Even though Isaac did not yet have his own family, he joined the migration out of the remote Zambezi River valley and went to the Bulawayo area, the center of Ndebele culture, over three hundred miles south of his home.

Isaac quite enjoyed the bright lights of Zimbabwe’s second largest city. At that time, just prior to Zimbabwe gaining independence in 1980, Bulawayo was a city of about half a million people. Independence meant greater opportunities for Africans, so they were flocking to the urban areas where globalization had begun to concentrate jobs. For people familiar with international urbanization, Bulawayo still seems provincial and laconic, a bit of a colonial throwback in the modern era. But for Isaac it was quite a refreshing change from his earlier days in the bush. He was interested in more than jobs, however, as were many young men first arriving in the big city.

Soon Isaac was living with a new girlfriend in a room he rented in the sprawling western suburbs of Bulawayo. That side of town was part of Zimbabwe’s colonial legacy of enforced racial segregation in housing. The western suburbs were quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks, as the railway line from Botswana to Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city, split the city in two. To the east of the railway line were the spacious yards of the eastern suburbs, reserved for white people in colonial times. To the west were the tiny “match-box” houses originally built as cheap rental homes for urban laborers of the lower classes. In the middle were located Bulawayo’s factories and heavy industries, dominated by the railways. The prevailing southeast wind tended to blow industrial pollution toward the western areas. Even when the eastern suburbs were thrown open to residents of all races, the western suburbs remained uniformly high density low-cost African housing. To these western areas the vast majority of new urban dwellers came to find cheap housing, causing these areas to expand rapidly in the postcolonial period. Along with the expansion came all the familiar urban vices.

Isaac enjoyed his vices in his new location. He had the common Tonga habit of smoking marijuana, or imbanje as it is called in Zimbabwe. Imbanje smoking is so entrenched among Tongas that the government decided not to combat it. Thus they made Tonga territory the only part of Zimbabwe where imbanje is legalized. Other groups also smoked the weed, but they ran the risk of being arrested for it. Of course, even Tongas were not allowed to export this crop nor to smoke it when away from their home area, but many still did. Isaac was one of them. He was used to indulging in a number of harmful habits.

One day while Isaac was out in the small yard of his home in the suburb of Pelandaba, he spotted a paper lying in the garden. When he picked it up he realized it was a Christian tract in a series entitled “Voice of Prophecy.” However, it was written in the Shona language, the tongue of the majority group in Zimbabwe, and he couldn’t read it. Intrigued nonetheless, he filled out the response sheet and mailed it in, effectively enrolling himself in a correspondence course that he could not understand.

Isaac was a first-grade dropout in school. After Isaac spent a single term in first grade, his father pulled him out to do something more useful: herd goats. As a result, Isaac grew up illiterate, although he had learned the alphabet during that brief sojourn in school. When he became an adult, he realized the necessity of teaching himself to read his own Tonga language. Now he was determined to learn to read and speak Shona in order to study the Voice of Prophecy lessons.

The lessons began to arrive with all Shona words and no pictures. The teacher identified himself as J. J. Muganda, saying at the outset that Isaac had chosen to enroll in a good school. He urged that every student should pray at precisely 8:00 am daily in order to join in this exercise with all other students. As a result, daily morning prayer would become an entrenched habit for Isaac, but for now he was only beginning to try to pray. However, the issue that opened his mind up was the third thing that J. J. Muganda emphasized. He asked, “Do you own a Bible? If not, borrow one and read it.” Muganda also emphasized the danger of breaking God’s laws in the Bible.

The tract that Isaac found was hardly the kind of literature that would normally convince anyone to become a Christian, because it was extremely negative. It was direct and hard-hitting, condemning every sin that Isaac was in the habit of doing, in no uncertain terms. Sexual immorality, drunkenness, drug addictions, theft, lying, cheating, and so on would all consign a person to certain torment in hell on Judgment Day.

Isaac mulled over these words in the first lesson, but carried on with his life as before. One day, as he was spending time with his girlfriend in his tiny room, he glanced down to see the tract lying there. He had been carrying it around with him and now it was on the bed where he was about to have sex with his mistress. He suddenly thought again about what he was doing and the warnings from the tract. “Do you believe in God’s laws?” the tract asked. Here he was, about to commit fornication and with some plugs of imbanje in his pocket. J. J. Muganda seemed to know all about his sinful life. Suddenly, he took fright and in that moment decided to repent of all his sins and make a fresh start in life.

He understood that Christianity called for a change of behavior. He told his girlfriend that they could no longer engage in sexual relations because he was now a Christian. He didn’t chase her away, but told her not to expect him to act towards her as he had been doing. He told her she was welcome to sleep in their bed as before but he would no longer feel free to touch her as he had been doing. He was really determined to make a clean break with the past.

Since he knew very little about Christianity, he decided to invest in a Bible, as Muganda had been urging him. At the Matopo Book Ce...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Conversion
• Chapter 2: Training
• Chapter 3: Church Planting
• Chapter 4: Making a Living
• Chapter 5: Obstacles and Suffering
• Chapter 6: Training Leaders
• Chapter 7: Transforming the Community
• Chapter 8: Rebuilding the Walls
• Epilogue
• Bibliography