Stephen Lungu, from South Africa, tells his story
I had no premonition at all. I didn’t even know it existed: the final missing piece of the jigsaw of my life.
It was 1992 – the 30th anniversary of my conversion. Thirty years since I had gone into that Dorothea Mission tent meeting, intending to kill. Instead I had met Jesus Christ – and become the most unlikely and surprised convert in all of Africa.
What a dramatic difference meeting Jesus had made to my life! Remembering this with gratitude, I threw myself into the big African Enterprise mission to Durban that year, Harambee 1992. Our extended AE team preached up and down Durban, seizing every opportunity to talk with people in schools, prisons, hospitals – anywhere. How I yearned to reach out and touch the lives of angry, hurting young men such as I had been. I was there to bring new hope. Little did I know what that mission held in store for me personally.
Stand-in preacher
Each Sunday during the mission, the Durban churches invited the AE evangelists to preach at their regular services. On this particular Sunday I was up at the AE centre in Pietermaritzbur when a message came through. The preacher scheduled to take the evening service at a little mixed-race Methodist church in Durban was ill. Please could I drive down and stand in for him?
So I drove down, found the little church in an insignificant neighbourhood and was greeted by the pastor. I was glad to be there, but quite honestly, after days of meetings, it was just one more service.
How could I possibly have guessed that this ‘stand-in’ must have come from God? I was simply, incredibly, in the right place at the right time. Had I not been there that night, a very precious 30-year-old secret would have been lost to me.
The service began. After the hymns, prayer and notices, I stepped up to the pulpit and got underway. I told of my childhood, my miserable teens sleeping under the bridge, and about joining the gang. My story was hardly typical. I had the complete attention of everyone in that church. Fifteen or 20 minutes in, I finally reached the fateful night at the Dorothea tent meeting.
Two old ladies
By now I was well into my stride. So when two very old ladies suddenly whispered urgently to each other, I was surprised, but ignored them. But they kept whispering, and one looked at her Bible and then showed the other. This was unusual. Old ladies did not usually start comparing Bibles when I was talking about how my gang had been about to petrol bomb a Christian meeting. But I kept talking.
Then to my amazement, those two old ladies stood up! They disturbed several people as they shuffled out to the aisle. Perhaps they were not feeling well? It was up to me to hold the congregation against this distraction. I thundered on.
Then the two women began to wave and call to me. ‘Young man! Young man!’ one cried urgently.
I paused a second in astonishment. She fixed me firmly with her eye. ‘Come here! Come here!’ she cried.
By now, of course, the entire church was distracted. I felt a stab of frustration. I had undertaken a four-hour round trip to come to preach. And these two old dears had suddenly taken it into their heads to interrupt the most crucial part of my testimony. I took a deep breath and tried to remember where I was in my story. ‘My gang members were all there in the tent,’ I stammered. ‘But I did not care – I wanted Jesus…’
‘Young man! Young man! Come here!’ I continued firmly. ‘We need to talk to you!’ they said. The little old ladies advanced on me, frail and shaky, but utterly determined.
‘We must tell you something’
After 30 years of preaching throughout Africa, I thought there were few situations with which I could not deal. I’d been stoned, I’d had cars try and run me down. But this was the first time two old Methodist ladies in their best frocks had ambushed me. ‘I will talk with you later…’ ‘No, now. We must tell you something’, fluttered one old lady, swaying dangerously. ‘Come here!’ said her friend, waving her Bible. My heart sank. I knew I was beaten. I stepped off the platform and went down to them.
They reached out and gripped my hands. They stared at me as if they could not believe I was there. ‘You, you!’, one old lady trilled, ‘God gave us you! You were the answer to our prayer!’ I smiled weakly. ‘Yes, dear sister… what are you talking about?’
She tapped her foot impatiently and looked at me as if I were a stupid little boy. ‘You have just said,’ she said, ‘that you went to a tent meeting of the Dorothea Mission in Highfield, Harare in May 1962. That you were the leader of the gang.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And if you’ll sit down again, I will tell you what happened next…’
‘We know what happened next!’ said the other one, giggling with joy. Her friend thrust her Bible into my hands. ‘Look at this. It is my Bible. Look what it says there.’ She pointed to a page at the back. The soft leather of the Bible was limp with use and age. There was some hand-writing, faded and hard to read. It began with a date: May 14, 1962. Beside that date was written a simple prayer: ‘Lord Jesus, will you save one gang leader tonight.’ May 14, 1962 had been the night of my conversion.
Praying housewives
I felt the past reach out and grab me. The shock was violent. These two old ladies, whom I’d never met before, had prayed for me and my conversion on that night 30 years ago. ‘But – I never saw you that night’, I stammered. ‘I don’t remember you.’
‘Well of course not’, one old lady replied. ‘We weren’t there. We were housewives in Durban. But we knew about the tent meetings in Highfield Township, and so we were praying. We asked God for a gang leader.’
‘But until tonight’, her friend continued, ‘we never knew how God had answered that prayer. We heard about the riot, but had no idea that anyone had become a Christian. But from what you’ve said tonight, we have just realised that you were the answer to our prayers.’
I could scarcely take it in: these two ladies had been praying in their white middle-class Durban kitchens back in May 1962 while I was entering the Dorothea Mission meeting in Harare, intent on petrol bombing and mayhem. In answer to their quite specific prayers that night, the Holy Spirit had moved in my life, opening my eyes to the reality of Jesus’s love.
Everyone in tears
Now the congregation had two crying old ladies and a crying preacher – standing there in the aisle of the church hanging on to each other. Things were not going according to your usual church service!
When the congregation was told what it all meant, they started to cry as well. I have never been hugged by so many Methodists all at once. The service sort of dissolved after that. I never got any further with my story. Instead there was a time of rejoicing. Together we thanked God for his graciousness in letting us finally meet up. The two old ladies had seen the answer to their prayers. I thanked God that I had seen more evidence of his loving care for me.
That was the one and only time I met those dear ladies. I didn’t even remember to ask their names in all the excitement. But in the weeks that followed, I thought a lot about them. They summed up what the Bible calls ‘the fellowship of the gospel’. The Holy Spirit had led them to pray for someone they had never heard of, someone they could only imagine as ‘a gang leader’. And hundreds of miles away, in the violence and anger of a black township, the Holy Spirit had opened my spiritual eyes that night.
