Mark Gillmore: Hello once again, this is Mark Gilmore here with our Go Mission podcast.

I believe it was just a recording or two ago that I mentioned to you all, get to Africa because God is working there.

And part of what was on my mind as I said that was hearing about what God is doing in Zambia.

And it is my privilege to sit down here today with Brother David Ray, who God has given the privilege to get to Zambia.

Amen.

And I want him to just share his heart, his vision, what he has seen happening there, and stir your heart with that land.

And as we get started, I’m sure there are a number of you sitting there saying, where in the world is Zambia?

So let me start with that question.

Where is Zambia?

Guest: Well, you’ve got the fat upper part of Africa and the thin lower part of Africa.

It kind of has got a big bulge at the top.

If you cut that in half and then take that lower half and point right in the dead center, that’s just about where my house is.

So what’s the history of Zambia?

The history of Zambia is a British protectorate, British colony.

The Portuguese had colonized Angola and Mozambique, and they were going to cut Africa in half and split the British Empire in Africa.

So Cecil Rhodes took a team up and basically colonized what is now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi.

It was then called Northern Rhodesia, Zambia, Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, and New Zealand, which is now called Malawi.

And in doing so, he was able to complete the Cape to Cairo Railroad. and stop the Portuguese from cutting it in half.

Then in 1964, Zambia declared its independence.

It’s kind of the British let them leave because the British was not interested anymore.

And a man by the name of Kenneth Kanda came to power, and he was a dictator in Zambia from 1964 until about 1989, 1990, when Frederick Chaluba was elected.

Frederick Chaluba was the first Democratic elected president of Zambia.

Kenneth Kanda said that we’re going to be one nation, one language, and one people, and declared that English would be the national language of Zambia.

There’s 47 tribal languages, seven of which are considered major tribal languages, but English is the language of the nation.

Mark Gillmore: That is so awesome to hear.

I’ve traveled, and when you get to a nation that has English as a base language,

Guest: There’s nothing stopping you.

You love it.

I say you can get off the plane and witness.

Yes.

And when we had a team come and they got off the plane, one of them had their bag lost.

We stood out in front of the airport waiting for them, and we gathered all the security guards together and did a little Bible study.

Absolutely.

It is thrilling.

Mark Gillmore: So you can literally get off the plane.

Yes.

And preach Christ.

Guest: Yes.

Mark Gillmore: Wow.

So how did God connect you to Zambia?

Guest: I got a burden for Africa later in my ministry.

I was a pastor in the United States. ironically when I was a young Christian, young married, I was challenged by a pastor, an evangelist to surrender my life and say, you know what, God, whatever you want, that’s what I’ll do.

And in the back of my mind, I was pretty well convinced if I did that, God would send me to Africa.

Not because I felt called to Africa.

It was just the worst place I could think that God would possibly send me.

And so in the process of time, I went to Bible college and I went out and pastored a church for about eight years and God began to move my heart closer and closer to I looked at Uganda.

I prayed about that.

And then I had a man over at my house that was involved in helping national pastors.

And he saw my affinity to those national pastors.

And he just looked at me and he said, Brother Ray.

I said, yeah.

He said, when are you going to get on the foreign field where God would have you to be, where God’s obviously called you?

And I just broke down, started crying.

And he said that he knew a man in Zambia who’s off the field now.

His name was Bobby Bonner.

And he’s always looking for guys and he can’t get enough laborers there.

So I called Bobby and he said, well, what do you want to know about Africa?

And I said, well, tell me about it.

Are they open to the gospel?

And he said, well, we had two men ride on a bicycle 600 kilometers one way to get a Bible.

And he told me a story about driving down a road and seeing an old man under a tree.

And he told the driver to stop.

And he said, I need to go talk to that man.

And he said, no, there’s more people ahead.

He said, no, no, no, that man.

I want to talk to that one.

He went over to that man and began to preach Christ to him.

And two hours later, the man knelt down and accepted Christ.

And he stood up and the old man told him, he said, I’ve been coming to this tree for 18 years, asking God to tell me who he was before I died.

And it wasn’t just Bobby’s experience.

I’ve had stories like that.

I could take a two-hour podcast and tell you about stories about old men getting saved.

People saying, I’ve been waiting 13 years to learn how to know God before I die.

And time and time and time again, it’s a normal thing.

It’s not abnormal.

It’s a nation that is hungering and desiring to know God.

And there’s not enough people to tell them.

Mark Gillmore: So you’ve been there now for how many years?

For seven years.

Seven years.

And as you’ve experienced these seven years in a land that reflects exactly what you were just telling us of, what do you see God doing in Zambia?

Guest: In a micro sense, in the sense of our church, which is, I believe, a picture of the way the nation is moving, the younger generation is breaking from the idea of following the traditions of the elders.

The entire nation of Zambia has been due as what has been done.

It is like a respect to your father or your grandfather to do everything the way that they did it, whether that be farming, living, or anything.

And it has really locked the nation into despair and poverty.

And the younger generation now is seeing through technology what the rest of the world has.

And they’re saying, we don’t want that.

And they’re open to something new.

And we have got to reach them right now.

It is a generational, in my opinion, it is a generational opportunity to capture an entire nation for Christ.

They’ll embrace, we’re starting to see atheists come in.

We’re starting to see Zambians become agnostics and atheists, which is unheard of.

But it is this idea of they know what has been done does not work, but they have not been given biblical Christianity, which will work.

Mark Gillmore: Yes.

I feel like even looking across the breadth of the world, but even especially in Africa, as these modern influences come in through technology, it actually, you know, we can look at those voices and sometimes see the problems with it.

But it actually also breaks down some of the old strongholds.

It does.

That once we’re controlling.

It’s a double-edged sword.

Right.

Guest: It brings openness to something new, but it also brings a direction of ungodliness and wickedness and rejection of Christ.

Mark Gillmore: So in Africa, it’s like this technology is a little newer than, let’s say, where we are here on the American side.

There is a window of time.

Guest: There is a window of time.

Mark Gillmore: That we have right now.

Guest: Absolutely.

And it’s time to jump on that.

It is time to jump on it.

There’s no question.

Mark Gillmore: You’re a young person and you’re looking out on the world, beginning to gain a vision like what we’re talking about.

What would you say to a young person?

How can they prepare?

Guest: Get on a plane.

Get on a plane.

Fly over.

Stay at my house.

Find a missionary wherever and see it.

You don’t know what you need to be trained to do until you see what is needed to be done.

You will find no better training than being on the field.

And you say, well, how am I going to fund it?

There’s a thousand ways you can fund it.

Mark Gillmore: don’t worry about that god worries about that make a commitment to go i do agree and especially when we’re talking about a land where you’re going to have a common language yes so you can show up and minister you’re not in this you know this huge barrier right language you’re right there to

Guest: communicate and and the reality is is i’ve preached i mean i preached through romans one through seven and galatians probably three to four times in the last seven years we go back to the same things and relay the same foundation, the same foundation.

We’ve lost the need to lay the foundation of the gospel in American churches.

There’s an underlying assumption that everybody understands it and they don’t.

And we’re losing the gospel because it’s not commonly being proclaimed.

The idea that you can preach it over and over.

Our young men understand the gospel and they are preachers extraordinaire because we constantly, constantly preach it.

We preach it to see people get saved and we preach it to teach people how to tell people how to be saved.

And because of that, you have a very narrow window of understanding of what you need to be effective.

I’m sure that one day we’ll get down to the horsemen of Zechariah or the intricacies of the book of Revelation, but right now we’ve got a whole bunch of people dying and going to hell and we need to get the gospel to them, and we need to start churches where the gospel can be propagated, which makes it very simple.

Mark Gillmore: You know, I think of that quote David Livingston said, or maybe it was Robert Moffitt.

Guest: Moffitt, it was Moffitt.

I think I know the quote.

Mark Gillmore: Who talked about looking out across the plains of Africans seeing fires from 1,000 villages.

Yeah.

And how have you experienced that?

Guest: Well, we see the smoke of 1,000 villages packed into one city of 3.3 million people because they all still burn charcoal.

Yeah, right.

Okay?

And that’s the city of… 3.3 million people.

Lusaka.

Lusaka.

It’s growing by 200,000 people a year.

Zambia is growing by 600,000 people a year.

There’s 1.14 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa.

And in the next, are you ready for this?

In the next 28 years, that population is going to double.

We don’t have time to prepare for eight years.

We don’t have time.

Eight years is too late.

And the other thing that we see, not only a mass of people, but there is a mass of death.

It is common for 20-year-old people to die, 30-year-old people to die, 16-year-olds to die, and they’re dying from maybe totally preventable diseases.

We had a lady that almost died with infection in her stomach.

She could have been treated with oral antibiotics, had it been caught soon enough.

She had to have an emergency surgery and had 1.8 liters of fluid removed from her abdomen.

Had we not intervened, she would have died.

And people die like that all the time.

So death is so prevalent.

Death is easy.

And so the people are open because they know you’ve got to prepare for what’s next.

And it is heartbreaking.

Mark Gillmore: I know for me, I can kind of remember back in past years, Africa being this, just kind of this missionary destination.

Right.

But since 2009, I’ve had the privilege of being in Africa over 20 times.

And to me, Africa feels like home.

It feels normal.

And I love that.

Guest: that it’s become normal yeah well it’s like hawaii only without the beaches and lots of garbage

Mark Gillmore: but but but going back to even the story that you gave about your past where you said if i surrender my life oh yeah he’s probably going to call me to go to africa i had the most crazy ideas of what africa was so there’s a young person who’s listening and saying god if i surrender my life to you might send me to Africa right can you convince okay him so like I’m convinced why would it be that going to Africa might be the best thing okay so okay so here’s the truth of it okay so I looked

Guest: at Uganda and I’m like looking at this map of malaria that’s got all these black and gray checkered dots showing the prevalence of malaria yes so God says no to Uganda so I pull up the same map of Zambia when I started praying about that the map of Zambia is solid black and I’m like well that can’t be right and so i look up the statistics and it’s like if it’s over like 10 cases per whatever then you get a black square because most of the countries are less than that and zambia is like cases of like a hundred so it’s just solid black and malaria is endemic and i’m thinking what in the world are you doing god you’re calling me this place where my kids are going to die from malaria i brought five children over one stayed back in america so far in seven years of Africa with on average probably five of us in the family living there we have had malaria zero times wow now why do we have malaria zero times we don’t go out at night mainly not because of malaria but because the people on the roads drive crazy yeah we live in not in a high population area we put screens on our windows we spray for bugs in our house and we just don’t get malaria I’ve only got salmonella one time and it wasn’t that bad and that’s my fault because I was eating in dodgy places because i got too excited about living there the weather is beautiful in lusaka the highs are in the 90s for a few months of the year the rest of the time it’s beautiful rains there and i’ve got a little orchard that i planted in my backyard i’ve got every type of citrus apples bananas peaches apricots pomegranates mangoes figs it’s like guys come to my house they’re like this is like the garden of eden just go to africa for the fresh fruit the fresh fruit It’s unbelievable.

And the quality of life is really good.

If you come with some money, the quality of life is good.

We don’t live in a mud hut.

You couldn’t live in a mud hut.

If you did, people would think you were insane because they know you have money.

And they don’t live in a mud hut.

They live in a concrete block house.

We live in a Western-style house.

I built it myself.

It’s comfortable.

It’s two acres.

It’s very nice.

My daughter, who’s 11, she wants to go home to Africa.

She doesn’t want to stay here.

She wants to go back there.

It’s really a nice place.

The people are different.

They’re low-key.

They are not in a hurry.

And the biggest reason is this.

You can literally stop anywhere and talk to Christ, talk to somebody about Christ.

I got to know a guy that owns a hardware store, the largest hardware store chain in Zambia.

He said, I really want to hear more about this gospel.

So he invited me to his private lodge in the Zambesi River.

We took two speed boats up the river.

He’s got people there that run the whole thing.

We stayed in a chalet that rents for $300 a night.

He just put us up there for free, fed us, took care of us.

We stayed there for a couple of days on a private game lodge.

And this is preaching the gospel in Africa.

We can preach from the state house to the street, from the slum to the highest levels of government.

Mark Gillmore: Speaking of government, that reminds me just of this open door that you have for Bible distribution.

Could you just describe that a little bit?

Guest: Years ago, I went and I met with a brigadier general.

He’s now retired.

And he told us, he said, I asked him, I said, what can I do to help you?

And he said, wow, I’ve never been asked that.

And he sat back and he thought and he said, I can put you on a military base and put a thousand soldiers under a tent and let you preach the gospel to them.

We want our military soldiers to get saved.

And that was before I started deputation.

I reconnected with him this last year.

We’re at a point in our ministry where I could do that physically.

I feel it’s okay, responsible enough to be away from the church at long periods of times because we’ve trained nationals to run everything.

He put me in contact with his counterpart.

I met the new Brigadier General, and he asked me if we could bring Bibles to every military officer, every military personnel in the Zambian Army, Air Force, Zambian National Service, Office of the President, Immigration Officers, and all branches of the police force.

So we’re right now putting together, and I think we’ve got it done, roughly 90,000 Bibles that are going to be shipped to Zambia.

And we’re going to get in a truck and drive all over the country and take Bibles into military police posts and military installations and preach Christ to all these people.

And if a young person wanted to come over and get practice to present the gospel, what an opportunity.

Yes.

You’ll see Zambia, the real Africa.

Mark Gillmore: When you think of Bibles being distributed across the breadth and length of the country.

Yep.

Guest: Church planting all the way and disciples and distributing tracts and little villages all the way there, all the way back.

That’s the foundation for completing the Great Commission.

It is.

It is.

And then going back and discipling the pockets of believers that grow out of that and starting New Testament churches.

Absolutely.

What do you have in your life that would be more exciting than doing that?

Just to give you an idea, the last time we took a trip to Mongo, we passed elephants crossing the road right in front of us like deer.

But they were bigger.

That’s fantastic.

God’s blessing us.

It’s exciting to live there.

It’s a wonderful place to live. and it’s probably the best place to minister to in the world if you speak the English language.

I don’t know if there’s anybody that listens to this podcast that speaks English.

Mark Gillmore: Well, young people, it’s my privilege to remove the veil of fear that is coming over God’s people and say this is a time to be on mission.

And as Brother Ray has said, go.

Just get to Africa.

Let it change your life.

So as I always remind us, remember, the only way to stay at peace in a world of turmoil and uncertainty is to stay on mission with Jesus in his Go Mission.

Amen.