Newsletters
Thank you for remembering us as we stay hidden in our beloved Mozambique. Thank you for supporting all the hungry people Jesus has asked us to feed spiritually and physically. Even though months have gone by without as much communication as I would like, it amazes me how faithful you are to this ministry. You are our family. We so appreciate your prayers, extravagant gifts for the poor, and your love....
DECEMBER 2007 | his presence in the fire
The cool wind of the dark night blustered against our faces, and most of us were wrapped up snugly with jackets, sweaters, blankets and wool hats. We were gathered up on a little hill, and so felt exposed to the wind all the more, but we felt especially secure. It was the coziest, safest spot on our main Iris base in Pemba, and all who were there didn't want to be anywhere else just then. We considered it our hiding place in Jesus because...
MARCH 2007 | FLOODS OF REVIVAL
Heidi and I have one more day in the flood zone before we fly our Cessna back to Pemba. So we are up early at the World Vision compound in Morrumbala, loading our Land Rovers and big trucks for a trip to more refugee camps. We would especially like to get to the flooded Shire River and paddle our way in dugout canoes to people stranded on isolated islands...
DECEMBER 2006 | Christmas in Revival
The spinning wheels are spraying mud as once more we push and try to get the old Toyota Prado to move. Wiping globs of mud off my glasses, hat and shirt in the cold night air, I take another look with my dying flashlight. Need to dig more. Find more rocks. The seven of us slip, slide and fall in the deep, heavy muck as we try to figure out what to do. All of us are praying. No one is around to help but gorillas in the forest...
27 SEPTEMBER 2006 | OVERNIGHT IN THE BUSH
Village outreaches are Iris at its most basic. This is the core of what we do. Here is where we meet the poor, the remote, the forgotten lost sheep of the world. Here the Gospel shines deeply into the darkness, facing head-on our frail human predicament...
29 MAY 2006 | AFRICAN DIAMONDS IN THE MAKING
The sparkling edges of the Indian Ocean are rippling gently on the rocky sand before me at low tide here in Pemba. The brilliant noon sun is accenting ribbons of green, turquoise and blue tropical water with intense flashes of reflected light that add dazzle to the shimmering surface. The restful sound of surf is mingling with the rustling of shade trees that form a rich green canopy...
10 JANUARY 2006 | CHRISTMAS IN Revival
I can hear the waves of the Indian Ocean softly wash up on the rocks and coral of Pemba's beach out in the dark. The air is warm and still. All is peaceful at our funky, thatched house far to the north in Mozambique. And it is three a.m., time to rise. I have more than a thousand miles to travel....
14 September 2005 | Revival fire for the poor in spirit
I'm back in Africa after weeks of conferences in the West. And I'm facing another kind of conference: a gathering of the poor, hungry, ragged, barefoot and sick from among our churches in the central region of Malawi. Carpets, air conditioning and chandeliers have given way to dirt, blowing dust and the hot sun...
7 JUNE 2005 | CONGO AND BEYOND!
Dark rain clouds loom on the northwest horizon, directly in our flight path. Row after row of mountain ridges stand before us. We have no weather briefing. We have never flown this route before. We are heading for yet another country, but do not have a landing permit, or visas. No airlines fly where we are going...
23 April 2005 | NIAS ISLAND: ONWARD AND UPWARD!
Our Merpati Airlines Fokker F-27 is old. The interior is faded and stained. The seats are frayed, and tiny. My briefcase won't fit under the seat. But at least I am on the plane, along with Steve Lazar, director of our children's center at Maputo, and Mel Tari, my evangelist friend of almost thirty years and best man at Heidi's and my wedding. We are headed for Nias Island off the west coast of Sumatra...
8 April 2005 | GLORY FROM VILLAGE TO VILLAGE
Kakala is grinning broadly, so excited. Heidi is prompting her syllable by syllable, and she is answering perfectly into the microphone. This stirs the whole watching village, which knows that Kakala has been a deaf mute all her life. They run to get Kakala's mother, and soon the two of them are beaming as they stand together on our revival platform -- the flat bed of our 3-ton truck. The mother confirms to the whole crowd...
5 February 2005 | KHARTOUM TO CHENNAI: JESUS ON THE MOVE!
The children's voices are strong, determined, fervent. I hear them all around me. Down myself on dust and dirt, I look up briefly and realize this is no ordinary children's church. Eight-year-olds are pounding their fists on mud-clay walls crying out for God's mercy and power. Some are bowed to the ground, others kneeling on benches. They are connecting with God Himself...
15 November 2004 | ONE NIGHT IN PEMBA
The night is so dark. The road south of Pemba is finally paved, but the villages we drive through are the same as they have been for centuries. Each seems still, quiet, lifeless, almost ghost-like in the night. With no electricity, or even candles and lanterns, they melt quickly...
29 June 2004 | FAITH, LOVE AND JOY IN THE BUSH
Francisco is smiling, seated comfortably on the platform in a coat and tie, obviously very special for him. And this is a very special day -- Resurrection Sunday! It's Easter in this poor township in South Africa, and today Francisco is getting married. His bride is beside him in white. All his church friends are singing and dancing before him in their Sunday best. The weather is beautiful. The music is spine-tingling. These people know how to celebrate, even in poverty...
28 February 2004 | FAITH AND REVIVAL
The rain is beating on the windshield of our little Cessna. Five of us are packed in cozily together cruising along at eight thousand feet. The heater is on. My daughter Crystalyn, my niece Marissa and one of our boys are in the back, wrapped in sleeping bags and sleeping on soft pillows. They are totally at peace listening to worship music on their headsets. But deep inside the storm cloud it is getting very dark...
21 October 2003 | ON WE GO IN JESUS!
What does revival look like among our churches here in Africa? Big crowds, exciting meetings, singing and dancing until all hours? Sometimes, but here's one portrait that focuses clearly on what is different about the heart of our God...
27 August 2003 | PRESSING TOWARD REVIVAL
The quiet little town of Chimoio is getting dark. Cool wind is gusting in from the lonely hills, and the sun is disappearing over nearby Zimbabwe to the West. Heidi, Surpresa and I just flew in to encourage our believers here, and we are setting up for a local conference meeting in a brand new church we just built..
22 June 2003 | FROM GLORY TO GLORY
Silver streaks of smoke lie painted over the marshy plain before us. They stream north against us from dozens of fires, held low by strong winds. We descend through hazy, gray skies in the sunset, straining to see our dirt airstrip ahead. The headwind slows us down, and we will barely make it to our unlit field before Malawi's official last light...
16 April 2003 | THE CHICKEN CHURCH
Our churches in Niassa Province wanted another conference, this time somewhere we had never been before, like Mocuba, in the center of the province. There was serious food shortage in Niassa, and many of our people in the bush had not seen a good crop in a year or two. They were surviving on leaves, roots and worms, or just eating handfuls of ground maize once in awhile. We always fed everyone...
24 December 2002 | GATHERING THE HARVEST
It's Christmas Eve tonight. Maputo is hot. Thunderstorms gather and darken overhead. My fan is blowing on me full strength. We are far from a white Christmas Western-style. But through my office windows I can hear the shouts of our children playing. They are excited. Tonight at seven we will pass out five hundred candles for them all, and they will join in caroling and worshiping our Savior and King...
4 November 2002 | REVIVAL IN HEAT AND FAMINE
We have a thirty-knot headwind, adding an hour to our flight to Beira up on the coast of central Mozambique. The turbulence is rough. It's a hot day, even at seven thousand feet, and our air vents are fully open. There's four of us, Steve, Gordon, Anton and me, and we're trying to get north where we can see the latest famine conditions. Mozambique has had almost no rain all year...
14 August 2002 | MORE THAN CONQUERORS
Surpresa Sithole, our Mozambican national director, seems incapable of a negative thought. Brimming over with the Holy Spirit, he grins broadly and laughs easily in all circumstances. He is my constant companion in the bush, and we go everywhere preaching together. Jesus supernaturally called him away from his village witch doctor parents and has made him a powerful leader among our churches...
4 June 2002 | RAGS AND RICHES IN THE BUSH
Again I am racing for time. Malawi does not permit night landings in the bush, and I have only minutes before official last light. I just left Blantyre and am sinking down toward southern Malawi's sea level plateau, an area stricken by both floods and drought this past year. I can only stay a few days...
30 April 2002 | JESUS ON THE MOVE
It is late Saturday night, and again we are meeting in the moonlight among the poor in a far corner of Mozambique. A crowd is gathered at the front of our unfinished mud, stick and rock church watching the Jesus film. Children are sitting in the dirt in front of the screen, squeezed in by adults straining...
25 March 2002 | REVIVAL AND FAMINE IN MALAWI
The full moon is bright, casting sharp shadows from the thick trees overhead. The warm night air is loud with the cries of hundreds of voices. In the dirt alongside the road, without lights or sound equipment, village pastors are on their faces calling out to Jesus, "Be with us! Stay with us! Never leave us! We have to have you! We want you! We love you!"...
14 January 2002 | BACK FROM THE DEAD
Lino is intense. His eyes are wide and lit up, his hands are waving and gesturing. He turns and shifts excitedly. He can't be quieted. He knows what he's talking about, and he sounds like it. He speaks with authority, and I am listening, taking down every detail. I hit him with every question I can think of, and he answers me transparently, effortlessly. He has been raised from the dead, and I want to know all about it...
12 December 2001 | JESUS IN THE HEAT AND DIRT
"We have to go to the east bank," Surpresa tells me. "Nobody ever goes there. The people need to see you. We must encourage them." And so we plan a bush conference in a tiny village across the river to the east from the main road leading down through southern Malawi. Actually, our believers all over this part of Malawi are desperate for visits, and are asking for conferences in every possible place...
21 November 2001 | A MISSIONARY LEGACY
The rocks are slippery in the dark. I slide, catch myself, and notice with my dimming flashlight that I'm at the edge of a cliff. The footpath gets steeper and even rockier. I come to streams and choose stepping stones carefully. I and half-a-dozen others press on down the mountainside, and I just follow the leader. It's late and getting very cold. We crash through bushes and inch along, carefully keeping our balance as the trail gets narrow. The ground rises comfortingly on our right, but disappears into blackness on our left...
5 November 2001 | THE FACE OF REVIVAL
Night is falling. Towering rain clouds threaten across the horizon ahead. Lilongwe has been reporting an intense downpour all afternoon. Our pastors have been waiting for us there, patiently and eagerly, for days. We've been promising them a conference all year, and we keep getting delayed, but we are finally on our way...
21 August 2001 | WHAT HAPPENED AT MORRUMBALA?
"Nothing's getting across the Zambezi," Darrel announces over the phone. "The ferries aren't running and I had to drive my Isuzu back down the Caia road. The truck got so damaged I barely made it home!" Our Morrumbala conference plans are already in pieces. Without our trucks, we're going to have to fly all of us and our equipment across the river...
5 August 2001 | HOW TO HAVE A CONFERENCE
Zambezia Province wants a conference. Our hundreds of churches there are far away and have been left out of previous conferences. They don't have telephones or post offices. The people live in mud huts. Heavy rains have washed away their crops. Their children, thin and covered with sores, wear filthy rags...
16 June 2001 | I WAS THIRSTY AND YOU GAVE ME DRINK
Nampula's lights finally appear dead ahead in the fading sunset as we descend out of the clouds. We followed the coast up from the Zambezi, then turned inland, and now we see the rocky hills of Mozambique's northern interior, a thousand miles from our base in Maputo. The runway lights blaze brightly, standing out from the town's dim streets...
3 May 2001 | EASTER IN MARROMEU
The East is glowing. Resurrection glory is painting itself steadily and irresistibly across the Mozambican sky. Dark, gray layers of cloud low over the sea yield one after another to color and warmth, and then pure, fresh brightness. The air is still. The fields are wet and glistening with dew. Morning is here, and I am ready to fly...
25 March 2001 | JESUS IS IN MARROMEU!
The rain is pouring down. It's pitch dark. Mud and water are all around. Clouds of mosquitoes are biting. The air is steamy hot. Heidi and I are tightly packed on a little cement platform under a tin roof along with hundreds of villagers. Our sound system is turned up high and our generator is laboring under the load. We are preaching our hearts out...
28 February 2001 | DANGEROUS CHOLERA OUTBREAK/God's response
Challenges to our faith in Jesus do not stop. Last week, even as we received daily reports of desperation from the flooded north, a terrible outbreak of cholera hit our center at Zimpeto near the capital city of Maputo...
21 February 2001 | DISASTROUS FLOODING AGAIN THIS YEAR
God isn't done with his drastic dealings with Mozambique. Almost ceaseless rain for the last month up and down the country has resulted in the overflowing of major river systems again this year. Last year's incredible flooding, the worst in memory anywhere in the world, affected one million people. Already the current flooding is "affecting" 390,000, and the weather forecast is for much more of the same...
26 December 2000 | CHRISTMAS FOR THE POOR
We gave a Christmas banquet at our Zimpeto center, and to us it was a foretaste of the King's great banquet given for us all on that Great Day. We called in beggars from the streets, the destitute from the dump, prostitutes from the brothels, drug addicts and gangsters, and they all sat down together with our children, missionaries and Mozambican staff...
2 September 2000 | CRUSADING IN THE BUSH
Malawi stretches ahead, its hills rising seven thousand feet below us from the Zambezi River valley of Mozambique. Pure, dazzling cumulus clouds add grandeur to the fresh, clear air of the north, far from the smokey brush fires that have polluted the skies of Maputo around our center in the south. Heidi and I are squeezed into our Cessna light plane, sharing precious space with everything we need for a crusade in the bush: sound system, generator, tents, sleeping bags, lights, tools, lots of water. With worship music on in our headsets, we prepare our hearts...