Zambia & Botswana (08-2010)

In August Steef travelled to Zambia, at the invitation of Williams Phiri (one of his former students) to teach 2 courses on world missions to pastors and mission executives of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, in Chipata, close to the border of Malawi. For about 10 days there were about 30 people on average. All teaching had to be translated, which took quite some extra time, but with at least 6 hours of teaching a day we covered a lot. Since the guesthouse and the church were a few miles apart, a little truck was made available by a pastor-farmer for transport, since taxis always came late.

In the weekend after the second week, Steef and Williams travelled back to Lusaka, where Steef spoke at a small missions conference on Saturday afternoon, organised by Youth with a Mission. People were challenged again to seriously consider their active participation in world missions.

On Monday Steef flew back to South Africa, where he borrowed a pick-up truck from the church in which he used to serve as missions pastor, and drove to Botswana the next day. For 2 weeks he taught at the missionary training school, recently established by CAPRO, Calvary Ministries. There were 17 students from 6 Southern African nationalities and Steef taught 2 courses on world missions there as well. It was very encouraging for him to see that an increasing amount of African believers are training to become missionaries, from all countries where he used to conduct mission awareness seminars. These students were also very enthusiastic about his lessons.

In the second week the car broke down and an evacuation team came from South Africa with a trailer to transport the car (repairs in Botswana would have become too costly). Ps. Basil Carter and his son-in-law Ian Cillie did a superb job, so that they were all back in SA in time for the church service the next morning, where Steef delivered his last sermon of that month-long trip.

Steef taught and preached for almost 100 hours in that month, which was a very enriching experience for him and was refreshing rather than tiring!