Mack Update - April 2009 - South Africa

Because many of you have indicated that you pray for us as we seek to reach people for Christ and build up Christians in Christ I want to send you a brief report of one of our recent ministry opportunities. On Tuesday of this week Carol and I returned from a two-week period of ministry in Zambia. We flew into Lusaka on Wednesday and were met at the airport by our dear friend Pastor Ronald Kalifungwa of the Lusaka Baptist Church. Ronald, one of our former students at Grace School of Ministry, along with several other pastors from another area of Zambia, had invited us to come to their country to conduct marriage seminars and preach in a couple churches.

Our ministry in Zambia actually began on Thursday evening when we had the privilege of preaching at the Lusaka Baptist mid week service and then on Friday evening we started to teach a marriage conference that went all day Saturday and finished in Lusaka on Sunday evening. The meetings had been well promoted and were all well attended by Lusaka Baptist Church members and also by many people and pastors from other churches in the area. We soon discovered that God has used the ministries and pastors of Lusaka Baptist Church to raise up numerous solid churches and pastors in other parts of the city and in more distant regions of Zambia.

From Lusaka we took an hour-l ong flight to Livingston where Elder Joseph who joins with Pastor Michael in overseeing the ministry of the Trinity Baptist Church met us. We soon met Pastor Michael who became our guide for a tour of the spectacular Victoria Falls (deeper and wider than Niagara Falls) and a local game park. On Wednesday evening we conducted a mini marriage conference at the church, which was attended by church members and people from another church in Livingston. Though Trinity Baptist is about an hour’s flight away from Lusaka we soon learned that it was one of the many churches that have a vital connection with the Lusaka churches and draw some of their support from the mission minded people there...Since they can’t borrow money, they build as they have the money for materials and labor. Right now they are at a stand still as they wait for money to pay for the rest of the project.

Having completed our ministry at Trinity Baptist we flew back to Lusaka where we spenta night with our hosts Meshack and Esther Daka and then on Friday we boarded a plane and flew to the copper belt area of Zambia to do a marriage conference for the churches in that region. The conference, sponsored by the Reformed Baptist churches and pastors, was held at a YMCA hotel in Kitwe. As was true of the Lusaka conference, this seminar was well promoted and prayed for and attended by the Christians in the copperbelt section of the country. I was told that there were pastors and people from more than fifteen churches that attended the meetings. On Sunday we were scheduled to speak in the morning and evening at Fairview Reformed Baptist Church, a church that was located about an hour’s drive from Kitwe where the main conference was held.

Well, that’s a brief review of our Zambia journey – wish you could have been with us – you would have enjoyed seeing the country (especially Victoria Falls), meeting the people and the adventure of swerving all over the road to miss the pot holes. We were told that we shouldn’t travel with someone who drove straight because if we did we’d end up in a huge pot hole and go nowhere. We enjoyed swerving and got our Zambian PHD = Pot Hole Dodger degree. Incidentally, we think we also escaped getting malaria in that the malaria mosquitoes pretty much left us alone! Thanks for praying.

Our Zambia trip was a busy and tremendously productive time. I close this epistle by giving you a few more highlights of our time in Zambia coupled with our limited and very subjective assessment of the state of the church in that country.

1. One of the primary highlights was the singing of the people in the services. We don’t know if we’ve ever heard people sing as well as these people did. Carol said that hearing the people sing would have made the whole trip worthwhile for us even if nothing else worthwhile had happened. When these people sing they sing from the depths of their bodies and souls. It was great – thrilling and uplifting – a foretaste of heaven!
2. Another highlight was the fact that while we were in Zambia, as Carol said, we did not feel very white. By that she meant that the people treated us as though we were one of them, which, of course we were. What she meant was that though we saw few white people the whole time we were there everyone treated us and accepted us as friends and more than that as kin. And to be kin in Zambia really means something. We were impressed with the devotion to family we saw in this country, at least among Christians. And, for us, there just didn’t seem to be the color or racial barriers that exist elsewhere.
3. A third factor that encouraged us while in Zambia was the fact that our GSM students were evidently doing a wonderful work in their churches. We got feedback from some of the people that the counseling and preaching of their pastors seemed to be more practical and relevant in recent days. One lady made a special point of coming to see us so that she could thank us for=2 0help she and her husband were getting from the counsel of their pastor. At least seven pastors or elders told me that they knew that they needed help in being better counselors and that they were going to make application for Grace School of Ministry. One of the pastors told me that the change he saw in the ministry of one of our students was what prompted him to want to enroll in the same course.
4. We were impressed by the theological and biblical soundness and competency of the pastors and elders. They are readers and students who have read and studied many of the right books as well as the right book (the Bible). In my limited judgment and exposure, God has blessed Zambia with some of the best preachers and preaching in all of Africa and beyond. SDG. Please pray that the Lord would cause them to continue to be humble and faithful to Him and His Word and thus be a light, not only to Zambia, but also to the rest of Africa and to the world.
5. The fact that some of the churches have bookstores that are stocked with solid, meaty, quality literature indicates that the people buy and read quality literature. When we put out samples of some of our books, the people were crowding around the table to look at them and then many of them would ask about the procedure for acquiring them. When we visited some of the homes, we noticed that the bookshelves contained books by writers that produced biblically sound material.
6. In my judgment, my preaching (delivery, not content) was somewhat deficient (all my fault), but the people were extremely attentive and responsive. God is gracious and, in spite of my deficiencies, we received much positive feedback about how the people were helped, convicted, encouraged and challenged. We had Q & A sessions at both major conferences where people asked more questions about applying the material than we could possible have time to answer in the amount of time we had. In addition to these public Q and A times, many people asked me good questions in private conversations indicating that they are a thinking people. By and large, many (perhaps most) of the Zambians have had a quality education in their schools and universities and also in their churches. In my opinion, there are more Biblically and theologically sound churches in certain areas of this country than are found in many other areas of the world that are similar in size. And they are planting other churches. Ther e are the usual cults and unbalanced and unbiblical groups operating in Zambia and leading people astray, but God has done and is doing something powerful and incredibly Christ honoring in Zambia. My prayer is that it would continue and increase and that our Lord would be pleased to do the same thing in South Africa and beyond.
7. Many of the Zambian Christians are concerned about growing in grace and the knowledge of our Lord and His Word. They want to be thoroughly biblical and also very practical and relevant in their ministries and they know that for that to occur they must study to show themselves approved unto God, workmen who do not need to be ashamed because they are properly handling the Word of Truth (2 Timothy 2:15). Because of this concern, as I previously mentioned, some of them have already taken our two year modular course in biblical studies at Grace School of Ministry and others have assured me they will be applying for admission in the near future. (To complete this course they must travel to South Africa eight times in two years and do much reading and studying that can immediately benefit their ministries at home. The cost of the sixteen courses over the course of two years is about $300.The cost of books a nd transportation to and from Pretoria is more than the actual cost of the courses. We try to raise some scholarship money to assist them with the total cost of the program. Please pray for us and, if you can, help us in this endeavor. Sorry for the commercial, but since I was discussing Grace School of Ministry, I thought it was appropriate to provide this information.) And now back to the main point I was making about the concern that Zambian Christians have for increasing their ministerial knowledge and effectiveness. This concern has caused a group of men in the copperbelt region to meet regularly in Ndola to sharpen one another in ministerial knowledge and skill. And to further the implementation of this concern, Bruce Button, who has been involved in pastoral training in South Africa will be moving to Lusaka to head up a pastoral training school training school called Sovereign Grace Theological School.

And now as I really close, Carol and want to express our gratitude to you for reading this epistle and also for praying for us, for Grace School of Ministry and for the pastors and churches of South Africa, Zambia and other parts of Africa.