It's a great joy to be with you this morning. We've had your pastor with us, as he said a moment or two ago, in our own church, in our pulpit, and I was looking forward to finally follow his trail and find out where he keeps coming from. I'll say one or two words of thanks concerning that when our service at 10.45, you said, begins and it will be my opportunity to preach then. Sometimes one feels a little uneasy about speaking about himself in a context of worship. But it's amazing that the Lord does his work through cracked pots of clay like ourselves. And the Apostle Paul is a good example. So I thought I could begin with just reading a section of Galatians chapter 1. where the Apostle Paul, speaking about himself, beginning with verse 13, says, For you have heard of my former manner of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the Church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions. But when God who had set me apart even from my mother's womb, and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me, so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles. I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood. Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me. But I went away to Arabia, and returned once more to Damascus. Then three years later I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him 15 days. And on and on his testimony goes right into the second chapter. showing us something of where the Lord's servant has come from and how it is that he is in a position where he can write this epistle to challenge the New Testament believers concerning their liberty in the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, my testimony is not as glamorous as that of the Apostle Paul, but it still speaks concerning the grace of God to a wayward sinner. And it also speaks about some of the convictions that presently make up my ministry especially as I am in the heart of Africa, rather than that which takes place as I go globetrotting. Let me begin with my family where I am, and then I will make my way backwards. I'm married to Felistas, as has already been said. And the Lord has blessed us with six children. three of whom have been adopted through the African extended family system, and then three that the Lord has given us through birth. They range from about 35 down to 17 in age, with the oldest, a girl, being married now to children, that is, we now have two grandchildren. So there are three boys and three girls, wonderful children we have, five of whom have professed faith and are now members of Kabwata Baptist Church. The last one is the one we're still praying for to come to that position. His closest friends got converted earlier this year. There used to be three of them who were conspiring together in mischief. Now the other two have been converted. They'll soon be baptized. So we're hoping the Lord is moving in closely to him. But my own background is that of having grown up in a church that is called the United Church in Zambia. It's called United because the mission body that started that denomination had a number of denominations behind it and so they thought of establishing churches that were nondescript doctrinally. largely liberal in its beliefs, lost quite a bit of its earlier gospel emphasis. So it wasn't until the end of my high school days that I first had the gospel preached to me with any meaningful clarity. And it was through a letter from a friend who had also just gotten converted through the witness of other friends. So he wrote to me and shared with me the gospel. I had earlier heard it through a friend in school, but because his lifestyle and mine were the same, I assumed all he's saying was quit your church and join mine. That's the way I interpreted everything that was happening there. But this time it was different, largely because my elder sister had just become converted somewhere around September 1979. It was through a local Baptist church that I later on joined, the Lusaka Baptist Church. And so as I came home after high school in December, I found a completely changed person in the home. My dad had become an alcoholic after the death of my mom, so anything that could be turned into cash was being turned into cash. The situation was miserable in the home, and I couldn't understand how my elder sister could be so joyful. She's trying to make a meal out of next to nothing, and she's busy singing Amazing Grace as she's doing so. So that really got me searching. And when this letter arrived from my friend, it seemed to have now been pointing me to the secret behind my sister's conversion. Well, it took another three months of my trying to be. a Christian and failing miserably, that finally in March, April 1979, I went back home. At that time, between high school and college, all of us used to do compulsory military training. So I took the weekend off, got back home with the specific purpose to deal with this matter once and for all. So that's how I went back to that same letter, reread it, fell on my knees, and prayed to the Lord to save me. Now if you're an individual that the Lord has brought to himself through repentance and faith, you will agree with me that when that happens, you don't realize the implications of your conversion. So for me, yes, there was a burden on my heart I needed to deal with. And in a sense, I dealt with it. I remember opening my Bible after that for the first time in the book of Ecclesiastes and read it from chapter 1, chapter 12. I thought perhaps it was just a unique book in the Bible because I couldn't stop reading. But of course, later on, I realized the Lord had opened my eyes. I could now understand his word, and hence the excitement that was there. So then I went through my university studies. But as I went into my first year university, that's how my elder sister now invited me to her church. And consequently, I began to attend Lusaka Baptist Church. A year later, exactly one year after my conversion, I got converted on a Friday. A year later was a Sunday. It was one of those sort of leap year situations. I was baptized at Lusaka Baptist Church as a believer in Christ. The next five years, which would be from 1979 to 1984, were the most formative years of my Christian life. To begin with, the church that I was in, the pastor or had taken over a series of messages. He had just become the pastor then, and the series was going through Romans. So the time I joined, he was in Romans chapter 5. And I think for the next three years or so, he sort of made his way up to chapter, roughly chapter 8. And you go through those chapters inch by inch, Sunday by Sunday, over the years, it's a transforming experience. And anything I learned about preaching, I learned from his example. ministering to me as a young lad, together with a number of others. He was also regularly referring to other writers and commentators on the Book of Romans, and you can well understand that in due season we discovered Martin Lloyd-Jones and his magisterial series on the Book of Romans. And there were a number of us young people excited about sitting under this ministry. And being university students, we wanted to be ahead of the curve in our pastor's preaching. So we began to go to buy the same books he was referring to, to read them one week ahead of him. in the hope that when we now sit to hear him, it will be easier to see why he's wrestling with the text as he was doing. By and by, we discovered that most of those books had George Whitefield's symbol on the cover. And in the simplicity of our thinking in those days, remember we were new Christians, we just assumed that those must be the good books. So we would get our student allowances once every term. In those days, now they've gone into semesters. And rush to the Christian bookstore and just start turning books around. The moment you see that logo, you put the books aside. And once you've got a pile, you think, OK, this may be a little more or less. the kind of money I have in my pocket would put them on the counter and simply say to the person they have got so much so don't go beyond that. Then back in the room, that's when we begin to look at the titles and authors and the contents and so forth. So that's how we then fell in love with the Burn of Truth books. Again, being young, we were studying them, drinking them in. And that's how, by the Lord's grace, we came to the Reformed faith. It wasn't just myself. It was a number of other friends, notably the current pastor of Lusaka Baptist Church, Ronald Kalifungwa, would have been in that team, but a number of others as well. Those were glorious years, looking back now. At that time it was just, this is Christianity and we're making the best of it. Some of the books that meant a lot to me then Lewis Berkoff's Systematic Theology was one of the very first books that I studied side-by-side with Arnold Dalimo's two volumes on George Whitefield. Again, in the simplicity of my mind, I was saying, okay, This book, The Systematic Theology, will give me light. This book, the biography of George Whitefield, will give me heat. That was my thinking. And so I read them together. I've never forgotten the first day opening Bekoff and seeking to read, I think his first chapter was something like The Knowability of God. The title itself blew me away. And then as I made my way through just the first page, I remember closing it and thinking, This is deep stuff. I hope I'll be able to understand this. And I mean, the book was this thick. I'm struggling with the first page. I'm wondering whether I will make it to the end. But again, if you've made your way through it, you realize that a few pages later, you begin to get your bearings in terms of what systematic theology is all about, the way in which it goes stage by stage. And yeah, things became easier to understand and so forth. Another book that meant a lot to me then was the book The Forgotten Spurgeon by Ian Murray. When I got it, my understanding was that Spurgeon had been forgotten. That's what it means. But as I read it, I realized that in fact it's talking about the aspect of Spurgeon's ministry that had been forgotten. and it was his reformed convictions, his Calvinistic understanding of the way of salvation. But what it did for me then, and that's important for the rest of my ministry, was to recognize that doctrine and truth was worth fighting for, which is really the heart of that book. Spurgeon fought for a biblical understanding of salvation and in fact even died for it. So I came away when I closed that book with the feeling that that's what I should do if I'm going to be true to my own conscience. I'd come to believe that the way of salvation was, as you understand, the five solas, and that to shun away from declaring that and defending it was to shun away from my primary calling as someone who was sensing a call to the preaching ministry. which is what I want to quickly move on to. It was another seven years from the 1980 when I assessed God's call to the ministry to 1987 when the Lord finally opened the door for me to become pastor of Kapwata Baptist Church. So there was a seven-year wait. Four to five years were related to my academic studies, so I was busy studying as a mining engineer. The one thing I recall, though, was a friend of mine coming into my room in my fifth year, looking at my bookshelf, smiling and saying, Conrad, what are you studying at this university? So my answer was mining, of course. He says, no, no. Looking at your bookshelf, one would think you're doing a major in theology and a minor in mining. And when I looked there, I guess the guy was right. Most of the books were related to the Christian faith. I went to work in the mines for about three years. That's where I met the lady who is my wife. We were in the same Baptist church there. That became the testing ground for my convictions developed over the five years in Lusaka. because I found a Baptist church that the elderly people were just following, it was a Southern Baptist church, so they were just following the traditions of their fathers, to borrow the words of Paul here, whereas the young people were completely swept away by the charismatic movement. They were sworn disciples. of individuals like Kenneth Huggins and the Copelands of this world and so on. Those were the books they were reading. They were being imported into Zambia and given out freely. They were just reciting these guys as though they were the epitomes of truth. So I got into that, I was merely asked to be the leader of the youth group and all I did was to take the youth group through the Sermon on the Mount. So one weekend we would do an inductive Bible study on one of those sections. And then the following weekend, I would preach on the same section in a way that would show the young people that here is a sermon that is true to the text. Basically, that's what I did. And then before long, my pastor resigned, largely, and I'm not glorying in this, but largely due to my ministry in the youth group. Because what happened is that the young people who came to the reformed faith began to challenge the elderly people in the church to come and listen to the same ones in the youth meetings. And before long, began to have a few bald heads in the youth meetings. And then at a certain point, I noticed the pastor himself showed up in the youth meetings. And consequently, the leadership began put pressure on him to work on his sermons. Out of frustration, he went into a spiritual boycott. Everything got nasty. He resigned. He tried to come back. The leaders refused. And you know, Southern Baptist, I'm sure, And Baptists generally, you know, they can be quite messy when dealing with that. Finally, anyway, they didn't accept him back. And then the leaders said to me, as long as you're not working on the Lord's Day, the pulpit is yours. If you are working, we give you the permission to find someone to preach for you. So that's the way the few final years of my private life came to an end. Kabwata Baptist Church, that I had been a part, I was part of a team from the Lusaka Baptist Church that used to go out to plant this church from 1981 until a year before I left for the Core Belt. Now, five years in the church planting process, there were wind, The church became independent. It was now looking for a pastor, and the leadership was pointed in my direction. So come 1987, I was invited to preach. For a month, I was on leave. So I did that in June. End of July, they sent a call. End of August, I resigned my job. Beginning of September 1987, I moved there to Pastel. Still a bachelor. Green between my ears. At the age of 25, when I look at those who have been five years old today, I ask myself, what on earth were these people thinking about when they called me? But the Lord was gracious, and so I've been there roughly 26 years now. The church had a membership of about 35 or 40. We have known a tenfold growth, so now roughly 450. We didn't have any facilities. The Lord has been gracious over the last 20 some years to have given us land in a very accessible part of our city. It's in an area where young professionals would first settle down because there are a lot of high-rise apartments, fairly cheap, it's closer to the city center and so forth. And then as they go up the professional ladder, then they start moving to better residential areas. So because of that, My wife and I would be among some of the oldest folks in the church. Our children are probably the next generation in terms of the parents are in that church and then the children are also now in that church. So it's sort of the first time this is beginning to happen in our own church. So it's a very young congregation. Part of it is because of the area we are in, I've already explained, but part of it is because we are an English-speaking church and my parents, although they knew English, they would prefer to socialize and consequently even have their religious lives in the vernacular language. So that also explains some of those social dynamics. So if I could move on to Kabwete Baptist Church quickly, and then I want to allow for the last 15 minutes for a Q&A, because I always realize in a context like this, people have questions, and I'm not touching them. I'm sort of going in the wrong direction, at least wrong in terms of what they think. So it's always good to scratch where it's itching. Kabwete Baptist Church. is a reformed Baptist church like yourselves. It did not start off that way. It was initially a church that just adopted a conservative evangelical position, Calvinistic in direction, though not completely. A number of us became pastors at about the same time. I've mentioned Ronald, California, my close friend, who at that time was still on what we call the Cooper Belt. Another friend of mine, Cholwe Mwetwa, also became pastor at about the same time, also on what we called the Copper Belt. The three of us were close friends. We had come to reform convictions. We had taken on these new churches which, as I said, were conservative evangelical but largely ignorant of the rich reformed heritage that we have. We were convinced that we needed to move these churches into a position of being reformed Baptist. The first five years were messy. I almost lost my pastorate in the fifth year, but the Lord was very gracious. The vote that was made on me, I survived it. largely, those that wanted me out then used the sort of al-Qaeda approach of suicide bombers. Spiritually speaking, discipline was enacted and finally, after about seven years, there was stability, progress, warmth in the church, and 20 years later, we've never looked back. I was a young man, so if I was to go through that process again, I would be more patient. Remember, it was between the age of 25 and 30, and at that time patience is not your greatest virtue. So I'm not totally happy about some of what we did then. But the Lord was gracious, and the church stabilized. We put together our initial eldership team. And since then, we've had a plurality of elders. We adopted the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, somewhere between 1991 and 92. So that gave us a sense of stability as we started going forward. We also adopted a multifaceted ministry approach where we encouraged all our members to be involved in one form of outreach ministry or another. That was part of the the strife that was there in the church because at the time I was taking over the pastorate, the thinking of most members was that the pastor, we pay him, he does the work, the rest of us can afford to be asleep in the back seat. If the church numbers are going down, we blame him. If they are on an upward slope, We praise him, he's doing a good job and maybe even increase his salary. I argued for a body concept, the first Corinthians 12 onwards that we all have gifts that God has given us, we ought to be a body, we ought to be functioning together and in order for us to fulfill the great commission in the world. Fast forward so many years, Kawada Baptist Church functions almost like a beehive at the moment. Members are involved in all kinds of outreach ministries. I can spend the next one to two hours telling you about that. It's a full package in itself. It's one of the things that brings warmth to my own heart that I can be here and be checking on Facebook and emails and so on and just hearing about what's still continuing to happen as outreach efforts are taking place there. Then somewhere in the mid-1990s, a church in some 300 kilometers south of Lusaka was about to close down. I had been invited there a few times to preach. To cut the long story short, they therefore came to us to ask if we could provide oversight with a view to turn the tide so that the church could begin making progress. That was our first, our maiden effort at missions work. Again, it was difficult to convince the church because at that time we were down to two elders. Myself and another elder were still meeting in a rented community hall. The church was barely managing to meet my own financial needs. So to start trying to get a church out there going, the members felt it was not the right time. But the two elders were convinced that there will never come a right time. And consequently, the members finally said, well, look, you are our elders, you lead, we will follow. As I said, that was the beginning. We have since planted anything between 20 to 25 churches across Zambia and in neighboring countries. And now we're sort of looking further north. And it's just been wonderful to see Reformed Baptist churches spreading across the country. Professor Chansky yesterday drew my attention to an interview done by Mark Deva. He was interviewing a young Kenyan. So we listened to it after that with my wife. And it was good to hear an outsider who had been in Zambia for about four years giving his perspective. And one of the things he said was that Zambia is like an oasis. of the reformed faith in Africa. He says, in other countries in Africa, the charismatic movement is having a field day, just basically sweeping away anything and everything. And then he said, but in Zambia, the reformed faith is a dominant group of God's people, with church plants happening all over the country so that there is a formidable force that's keeping the charismatic movement in check. As I said, listening to someone who came from outside, came into Zambia to study for his theological education and now gone back again to Kenya, it was an encouragement to my own faith. And that's a summary of what is happening there. We currently have approximately 40 Reformed Baptist churches in Zambia, almost all of them having started within the last 25 years, 10 of whom are in the capital city of Lusaka itself. And there is a mission atmosphere that has become a new spirit among us and even tomorrow our conference, which is our national conference, is starting and it's under the theme Running Forward and Remaining Faithful. And the running forward has to do with missions. that let's keep this going, let's get the reformed faith, the true gospel out across Africa. And then remaining faithful will really be six messages on the doctrines of grace so that again we remind ourselves of what the true gospel is all about. We've already had 1,200 registrations, and we're looking forward to the usual guys who just arrive without having registered. So the Lord willing, we should have about 1,500 people. And they're coming from right across the region. While I've been here and looking on Facebook, it's just been amazing. People have traveled for five days in order to get there from different countries of the region. A few people can't come because of the Ebola situation in West Africa. They were ready to travel until all this happened and there's been a ban on travel from West Africa. So, you know, too bad for them. But it's just good to see Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Africa, Swaziland, Kenya, Uganda just streaming into Zambia for this coming week. Three more minutes there so let me just say one or two extra bits and then I would like to open it up for questions. We have had part-time pastoral training programs going, simply because we have known that we don't have the means to put up a full-time theological educational institution. So that's been quite a challenge for us. and continues to be, but two things that I need to say that have recently happened which are helping us to sort of get a sense of where we are and where we ought to be going is that at least two of our churches, Lusaka Baptist Church and Kawata Baptist Church, have begun internship programs. The Kabwata one is for a whole year, if possible, but some individuals come in for three months, others come in for six months. We are able to take on a maximum of six individuals. Right now we have four of them with us, although we began the year with six, the other two had shorter periods. And we began to see the positive effect of having these young men, almost all of them I've interviewed that have already finished their Bible college training, but now they're coming into a congregation that they can see carrying out the principles that they learned in college. And it's just been good to see as they then move on, most of them go into church planting work, it's just good to see how A lot of things are in place in their minds so there are less problems as they are sitting there leading the new works on to maturity. So that's something that's taking place and we're grateful. Most of the interns are from within Zambia but we're also having individuals from outside, South Africa, Botswana. We've had at least one from Germany, another one from Canada. We have one who's applying from the U.S. right now, another one from Cyprus, and so on. So that's sort of taking on a more international dimension. Then next to that has also been the establishment of a university that we are calling the African Christian University. It's also a joint project, this time for all the Reform Baptist Churches, but four of our churches in Lusaka are providing the initial team that's getting this off the ground. We began the initial work of discussion and so on in the year 2008. We ought to have opened the doors this coming month. It's a liberal arts university, so it will have as many of the various disciplines from a biblical worldview. But because Africa being what it is, the Zambian government says it's not yet ready to issue the license for us to begin operating, so we've pushed our opening day to January. Now, we hope to have it as a university and seminary. And our hope is that finally, the seminary side, which will be for training pastors, will enable us now to have a full-time theological seminary where pastors can come over from different parts of Zambia, different parts of Africa, and be trained in pastoral ministry. So that's where we more or less are now. A very, very nice small story that makes you say, wow, I wish. Well, let me assure you, we also have our heartaches. All right, congregations being what they are, we still have individuals. In the midst of all this are the Ananiases and the Sapphires and, ah. They give us nightmares, sleepless nights. But thankfully to the Lord, in the midst of those discouragements, when we take a few steps backwards and we see the bigger picture, we are encouraged. OK. I've stolen an extra two minutes from your Q&A. We'll give you five minutes total so we can transition from Sunday school to the worship. So five minutes of questions. OK. All right. yes yes uh... in in zambia there's no persecution of christians from political leaders The persecution that individuals who convert to Evangelical Christianity suffer from is either from the family, middle family, who are still religious and feel that this person's move out of the family church is a betrayal. or in the workplace where a Christian is sought and liked. And obviously, others who also claim to be Christians are now saying, look, you are being holier than thou. And consequently, their malice is poured on the individual. That's generally the way it happens. Otherwise, in the Zambian constitution, believe it or not, in the preamble it actually says Zambia is a Christian nation. So that makes it a little more difficult for anyone in political circles to attempt anything else. the American version of Reformed Christianity and the British version of Reformed Christianity, and then convert that into the Zambian cultural version of Reformed Christianity. Is that ever a tug-of-war, a struggle that you wrestle with? Perhaps the best way to answer it is that the only way we didn't really struggle is because we were not copying, we were not sort of seeing outside our own country and saying, okay, they are doing that, let's do the same here. Of course, there were a number of younger people in our churches who would want to do that, but those of us who were in leadership kept saying over and over again that, look, we have the scriptures as much as our friends have, So let's follow what the Bible says and anywhere where there are what I would call cultural nuances, let's accept that that is what our friends are doing, but let's remain who we are here. So I think that has helped. so that whatever has been happening outside Africa we have known about in terms of reading through magazines and journals and so on over the years, especially before the internet became the in thing. But yeah, we haven't really said let's do what others do. We have maintained international speakers for our conference primarily because we felt that cross-pollination was important, especially in our earlier years when the argument being used against the Reform Baptist Movement was that these were young, untrained pastors who are going to mislead you. If you go that way, your churches will die, and so on. And we felt that if we could get older pastors with many years of ministry under their belts to come and minister among us, that there will be an opportunity for our own members during periods of break to ask these pastors questions. And we did discover that there was a greater sense of relief when they spoke to these pastors who shared with them what was really the truth out there, rather than the scarecrow that was constantly being put before their eyes. But otherwise, we have remained in control of our Zambian situation. Yeah. Good. Any other questions? I'll use that opportunity to drink some water. Yes, brother. The greatest challenge is to... Yeah, well, I would say that first of all, when our generation was there some 25 years ago, there was no internet. So we were reading books and grew in our Christian faith through that avenue. Our young people are reading books but not as much as we did. and they are surviving a lot more on downloading Sermons. Now, thankfully, most of the Sermons they download are the right kind. And consequently, when you're hearing who their favorite preachers are, it's preachers around the world, and it's good guys. So in that sense, you're grateful that they're using the internet appropriately. But clearly, again, with the internet now being available even on smartphones, and young people have their smartphones, you're realizing that social media has swallowed them by and large. and there is a sense of loss relative to the times in which we were. Having said that, though, I don't know about other churches, but In our church, we laugh as elders that the reason why we seem to be running is because if we don't keep running, our young people run over us. In other words, there's a lot of energy for ministry and missions among them, for evangelism and so forth. So there's a very healthy atmosphere with all the challenges that go with young people. and I find that just being their friend, being available to them, picking out one or two areas of concern and dealing with them but at the same time as you sort of nibble you also blow there so that they feel that you're still the sort of elder brother figure among them. As we maintain those relations with them as their elders, I think the overall picture is still positive. And so in that sense, if the current trajectory continues, I would say that I'm looking forward to a better day. That's the way that I'll put it. We've just begun, for instance, a ministry in our church that we're calling Students in Missions. And when our students are on break, we put them in a bus or buses and take them to a number of these mission stations to spend a week or two or three. And they are falling over each other to get out there. So we are praying that as they get exposed, They may then, upon finishing their studies and pairing up in marriage, begin saying, well, look, we found this so fulfilling, perhaps the Lord might be leading us and calling us into this area. So we're definitely praying along those lines.