Chalcedon Conference on Christian Culture

Chalcedon Conference on Christian Culture

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject:

Genre: Conference

Track: 01

Dictation Name: Chalcedon Conference on Christian Culture

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1997

[Rushdoony] This is R.J. Rushdoony. This afternoon Mark Rushdoony and myself have had the pleasure of the company of some of the men who were in Africa - in Zambia in particular - for a Chalcedon conference in the capitol. It was a very important conference in that, we have in Zambia a country that is striving to be specifically Christian. Of the half dozen men who went there three are with us at present. Andrew (Sammon?), Brian Abshire, and Wayne Johnson. At this time I’m going to turn the meeting over to Andrew, in order to make matters easier - he knows what he has to report and I will occasionally ask a question, if I feel I’d like to know a little more about a particular point. Andrew?

[Andrew (Sammon?)] Thank you, Rush. This tape is being sent initially to all of you who specifically supported this trip and the conference in Lusaka June 36-28 on this year, 1997. It was a conference on Christian Culture, specifically called, I believe, the International Conference on Biblical Reformation. We had a stellar Chalcedon team over there to speak.

First maybe we should start a little background on the country of Zambia; a land lot country in the sub-saharan. It was like many of the African Nations a European colony, specifically a British colony, until 1962 or 1963 at which time it gained its independence and increasingly became a socialist nation. In fact, probably one of the preeminent socialist and Marxist influenced countries on the entire African continent. In the first freely held elections, however, in I think it was October of 1991 a Christian president and vice president were elected and the nation has --although struggling, of course, after a number of years of socialism (and we’ll talk about this at length, no doubt, in the rest of the meeting) has actually been able to implement a number of Christian policies, or at least to move in that direction. For instance: moving toward a free market economy, getting rid of the serious oppression; greater religious freedom, and so forth.

Well, at any rate, to get to the conference itself: we were able to send over Brian Abshire, who most of you know if you have read his articles in the Chalcedon report, and one of the leading deacons from his church is sort of an advanced team a week before him. So, I think what I’m going to do now is ask Brian to discuss what he saw when got there, some things that he did in preparation for the conference, and then, perhaps, we’ll get back to the conference itself. So, Brian, would you be willing to make a couple of comments along that line?

[Brian Abshire] Sure. Thank you, Andrew. I think perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when talking about the Zambia conference, is that Africa works differently than America. I don’t think any of us could have appreciated how great the difference was until he had actually been on the ground for a while. Peter Hamman called me, just a few weeks before he came to the states to visit us in May, to warn us about the problems we were going to encounter in Zambia. He said, “Brian, I’ve ministered there six times before, I understand these people, and quite frankly, they are making you promises that they can’t keep. This is the difficulty. African culture is such that they want to say things that they think you want to hear, and it’s very difficult sometimes to get a straight answer out of people. It’s a cultural difference that goes on.”

Peter warned us that if we wanted to make the conference a success then we needed to get somebody on the ground a week ahead of time to check over all the arrangements. Which is why my deacon, Dave Warren, and myself left a week early to see what was happening. I think it was very providential that we did. It was an amazingly funny time from our perspective! Looking back on it now, it was hilarious. At the time it was kinda scary because there were a lot of things that we had to get done. We had all sorts of problems, we had problems, for example, in just getting from one location to another!

Our Zambian contact is a very Godly man, and a powerful preacher, named John Jury. He’s a marvelous man of God and I love him like a brother. But he’s poor, he doesn’t have a car. So we’re renting taxis all the time that we’re there. Now, a Zambian taxi is something that has to be seen to be appreciated. All Zambian taxi drivers, I think, were trained by ex-Comicazi pilots from World War II. They drive in vehicles that are broken down, with shattered windscreens, tail pipes that are dragging on the ground! And after two or three harrowing days of rushing from one appointment to another and trying to get to someplace on time, we decided we would rent a car. And since renting from {?} purse was too expensive, we actually rented a car from a very lovely lady who was a widow whose husband had died, and she needed the money.

Well, after two days of driving the car, we suddenly found that the car didn’t have any brakes! And we found we didn’t have any brakes in the car when we were driving toward a hill and all the sudden, our driver pulled off the side. Since we were already late for an appointment we asked, “Why are you pulling off now?” He said, “Well, the brakes don’t work and I’m afraid that if we go up the hill in all this traffic, and if the traffic stops on the hill we’ll roll backwards or we’ll roll forwards and we’ll have an accident.”

Now, I went to Africa fully expecting to face Marxist terrorists, maybe the occasional poisonous snake or rampant lion, but I didn’t intend to go there to die in a car accident. And so, the funny part, the punchline of the story is that, after traffic had slowed down enough so that we could actually get on the road and go up over the hill and down the hill, there was a stop light on the bottom of the hill. On the way down as we’re traveling, the driver is saying “Please, Lord Jesus, let the light remain green, let the light remain green, let the light remain green!” Because we had no brakes to stop us.

That’s just one example of what the Marxist have done to that country. They ate out its heart. It is a country that is suffering from twenty-six years of socialism, the infrastructure is destroyed, and the things we’re talking about in terms of automobiles and poverty is simply one example of it.

[different speaker] Brian, I think all of us are wondering--

[Rushdoony interrupts] Did the light turn green?

[different speaker] Yeah!

[laughing]

[different speaker] You’re leaving everyone in suspense!

[Brian Abshire] Yes, the light turned green, by God’s grace, and we managed to make it. But we did put the car away after that point, and said, “Don’t drive that car.”

[different speaker] I think we need to add that Zambia was in a fairly sound financial state in the 60s, right after the British left. So it was almost totally depleted of its financial standing by the socialist regime.

[different speaker] Exactly. Because of the wealth of minerals, especially in the copper, Zambia was considered to be the jewel of Africa. All of the hopes for post colonial Africa were heaped on Zambia. After twenty-six years of Marxism they depleted the entire resources, drove the country into the ground. In fact, one of the things that came out most often is that as we were looking at this deteriorating infrastructure - bad roads, bad buildings, broken glass, elevators that didn’t work, poverty in the streets, all these kinds of things, the Zambians universally said, “But you should have been here ten years ago... As bad as things are today, they are a vast improvement over where the country was before.”

Well, so, Brian spent a great deal of time and effort in successfully preparing for the conference. And of course, John Jury, whom he mentioned, also did a lot of work and preparation. Handbills, the production of handbills, and I believe a couple--several radio interviews that Brian was able to do, and a lot of phone calling at various church leaders and teachers, and politicians and so forth were called. So we prepared for the conference on the 26’th to the 28’th. Before we talk specifically about the conference itself, however, I think it’s also fair to mention the contribution to Peter Hamman the frontline fellowship made to this conference. To those of you who don’t know, and if you read the Chalcedon report you certainly do know, Peter Hamman could very well be the next David Livingston on the continent of Africa. Just, the work he does is amazing. Most of it traveling around on motorbike! All over the sub-saharan, preaching the gospel, traveling among the troops preaching. In fact, I think he’s a chaplain in the South {?} armies, is that right?

[different speaker] Yes, he actually created their chaplain corp.

[other speaker] Yes. And that’s a whole different story we could talk about. But his work in Africa really is remarkable, holding Biblical worldview seminars and so forth. Well, we asked him to (in see?) the conference and I think that was a very wise choice. He did an outstanding job. He and his team in preparation along conjunction with Brian and Dave Warren and John Jury - at any rate, the conference started on the 26’th and we had (read?) any number of topics. Principles for revival and reformation, the great reformation, our Christian heritage, humanism on trial; just a stellar speech by our board member Wayne Johnson, from whom we’ll hear in just a minute (we hope that talk will be in booklet format at some time in the near future.) ...murder and capital punishment, all education is religious education; Brian Abshire talked on the role of Pastors in the work of reconstruction and reformation and that sort of thing - as well as on eschatology. And there were a number of others. We could talk more about that at length.

But at any rate the conference was well attended. I believe, the first night, the headcount we had was between 120 and 125. Among those were a number of pastors...I don’t have the exact breakdown; but a number of pastors and teachers, military personnel, some I would say were middle level politicians and some, there they have ministers and ministries and there were, I think, a couple of deputy ministers there at the first meeting. And various other political individuals that were there, those involved in politics.

But that was it. From the standpoint of the (messages?) themselves, those who attended the conference was indeed a distinct success. The response that we got after the conference was for the most part, quite overwhelming. People very appreciative, being able to hear exactly what we said and being able to put into practice a number of those truths. But, ah, at any rate, I’d like to get some response from the other men who were there and maybe that can lead to further discussion about the conference itself. Wayne, is there anything that you’d like to add? Along those lines?

[Wayne Johnson] Well, my first contacts with the Zambians probably goes back about a year to a year and a half ago. They were in the first term of the {?} presidency, Frederick (Chiluba?), who was a former labor union worker who was converted by the gospel and became the candidate of the multi--I guess the {?}--movement from {?} Democracy is the name of the movement which like a lot of movements is political forces coming out from underneath totalitarian systems there tend to be movements that then transition into parties. We’ve seen that on the left, with the ANC in South Africa, we’ve seen it with the {?} in Czechoslovakia, solidarity in Poland, and other places...where then they sort of break apart and become political parties. And what happened here in Zambia is that Chiluba, who was a former labor leader and {?} for (Muamba?), who was a former army general became the two candidates of the MMD. MMD in their first term won us a substantial victory over the former dictator Kenneth Kaunda who, as we mentioned earlier, ruled the country with something of an iron fist. He basically destroyed the country in his twenty-six or twenty-seven years of rule.

Zambia is very centrally located in Southern Africa, as you mentioned, it is a landlocked country. But, ah, it doesn’t really tell the whole story unless you remember that just a very few short years ago this was the center of the exporting of revolution and terrorism throughout all of Southern Africa. Now if we look at the borders of Zambia, you know you look to the North, {?} the West, and you go West you got Angola, Namibia, Botswana (the end of the former South African homelands), you get Zimbabwe, {?}, so then Rhodesia...which is to the South, Mozambique...which is to the major terrorist operations, itself a center of exporting terrorism, and then of course Malawi and Tanzania on the East.

So, you’ve got those eight countries surrounding it, which have been hotbeds of trouble and murder and terrorism. And they all found home in Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda. As he explained it himself, (we had an opportunity to get together with Mr. Kaunda while we were there, it was a most interesting forty-five minutes) he would describe himself as a nationalist, sort of an anti-colonialist. I don’t know that he would call himself a Marxist, so much as--actually, he was really quite honest about it, he calls himself a Humanist. He wrote a book called A Humanist in Africa, and he saw himself as the first one who transitioned to a post colonial era and did it bloodlessly. At least, they took over bloodlessly, there was plenty of bloodshed afterward.

He didn’t feel he could impose this system that they had used to take over Zambia on everyone else and so consequently he allowed Zambia to become the homebase. They harbored and fostered the terrorist armies, and so there constant cross border raids going on. Anybody going to into Zambia... Well, Peter Hamman, you mentioned, was with one of the teams that came in from South Africa. Peter was presidential detainee in the the, ah, prison system there. A guest, a houseguest of Mr. Kaunda, when he refused to allow him to steal a water bottle at the border out of his car. That’s how trivial it was. One of the times he was arrested.

So, ah, in fact, he was just in God’s providence. That’s where he met {?} Nuanda, who is now the vice-president of the country. They met in jail. Until now one ministers the gospel there and the other ministers in the state. But--

[different speaker interrupts] He is also a minister.

[Wayne Johnson] He is also a minister, that’s right! That’s one of the delightful things, if you know, if you remember when the finance minister, the assistant deputy finance minister, Daniel {?} could not handle all three days of the conference because a friend had called him and was unable to meet some other commitment and so he had to go to one of the outlying villages and fill it for that guy at Bible meeting, and preach for two days! And so he came to our conference one day and went to the village to preach for the other two days. And so yeah.

Can you imagine a government official in the United States not being able--first of all wanting to come to a conference on Christian civilization, and secondly having a high calling, a higher commitment to go preach somewhere as the reason why he couldn’t be there for the full three days. So despite all of these problems we talk about, the economic difficulties and so forth (and I do think we oughta take a moment to talk about the economy), in many ways things grew very very bright. There were many bright spots in the midst of this devastation, in the ruins that had been left, the ruins of Marxism...that, out of this rubble, there are many strong reasons for hope for the future of Zambia and Africa.

[different speaker] Well, we want to mention also, we talked about politicians and Wayne’s mention of...I think it was the deputy minister of education? That said he was in {?} Danny Cooley’s finance--

[different speaker interrupts] It’s finance.

[other speaker] I’m sorry, (Membe?). You’re talking about his education?

[different speaker] Wayne had left, but the rest of us quite providentially met the vice president in the VIP lounge at the Losachi International Airport. And Brian, you can tell us more about the conversation that we had with him, but, as I recall (and correct me if I’m wrong) one thing he said was that, “You know, when I see what’s going on in our country and I’m angry that things are not going as well as I would like...what I would like to do is to go out and preach.”

[different speaker] Didn’t he say something like that, Brian?

[Brian Abshire] Yes.

[previous speaker] But he’s another one that very evidently loves God and wants to advance the Christian faith. I asked him point blank whether he was going to run for president next term - I think the presidential terms are six years? Two terms?

[different speaker] No, five.

[previous speaker] Oh, two terms and five years. So Chalupa was constitutionally prohibited from running again and I asked him and of course, he gave a wise political answer, “well, I’m not sure yet.” But certainly from our standpoint we hope that he will run. But anyways. Brian, relate to us some of the things that he said when we talked to him.

[Brian Abshire] Well, first, there is a great story that has to be told about meeting the vice president. We had concrete assurances that the vice president would not only attend the conference, but would open with a speech. And as much as we wanted to check that out, as soon as Dave and I got there a week ahead of time we could not confirm that. We called his office, faxed him, we sent people over to see him... And eventually what we did was we talked to his pastor, and got ahold of the church administrator and sent the church administrator over to the vice-presidents house to talk to his wife in order to get a message through! It seems that his private secretary just would not relay our messages.

So the vice president did not come to conference, as we had been promised he would, and we felt very sad and disappointed by that. The day that we were leaving the country, as we were waiting in the VIP lounge for the airplane flight to come and take us away, some men walked in. We didn’t notice them because they were just some people in there - and a lady walked up and said, “That’s the vice president!”

[different speaker] We had actually been sitting there for a while. A while! Half an hour, maybe. He’d been there for at least about five or ten minutes.

[Brian Abshire] And so, I said, “Well, would you introduce us?” and she introduced us to the vice president. He asked why we were there, and we explained to him, and he was very upset that he had missed the conference, and he was very upset that his secretary had not passed the information on! And it was also at that time that we said, “well, we even had a speech written for you that you could deliver at this conference.”

[different speaker] Well Brian, Brian, that speech which was solicited by, uh, I’ve got the--[voices overlapping indistinguishably] --the vice president’s office... Right from the vice president’s office!

[other speaker] That’s right!

[different speaker] I got that on my fax machine...

[Brian Abshire] Well the vice president said, “that’s okay, I wouldn’t have given a speech at a conference like this. Speeches are for politicians. I would have wanted to have preached!

[laughing]

However, he asked us questions about what we did and what we wanted to do, he was very enthusiastic. He said, “You must come back again!” He deliberately took our email addresses, our fax numbers, our telephone numbers, and said he wanted to contact us and wanted us to come to the country...he made some mention of perhaps even speaking before parliament next time. We impressed upon him that, if we came back again, we would like the invitation to directly from him and his office rather than through somebody else in the country so we wouldn’t have this kind of confusion again. But he was extremely supportive and encouraging, and even in that brief half hour that we had with him, his commitment to Christ was unquestionable. Now, he lives up to his (going?).

Even though he was not able to attend the conference, I was impressed that some people who we didn’t expect were there! Including the ambassador from Malawi who was there, and the council from Botswana, and others, you know, that are stationed in Lusaka who were there! And were good Christian brothers, you know. It’s not just Zambia where things are happening.

[different speaker] Okay, I’m sure our listeners would like to know, what’s your general impression of the country? Just quickly, a couple of different things impressed me... I had been there for about three or four days, and I think I may have mentioned this to both Brian and Wayne. I said, “You know, I have not seen an immodestly dressed Zambian woman here.” I noticed, it must have been on Friday or Saturday, there was a woman that was immodestly dressed and I thought, well, she’s white. And I found out later from hearing her speech she was, I think she may have been French or maybe it was German, I don’t know, but the point was that most of the men there (the young men) wore nice shirts and ties--Did you notice, looking out the windows? Many of them, and not just the school age, and you realize that school age children wear them, but there really is this modest dress. And I think that’s not just a residue of the British influence but also reflects something of a Christian ethos.

Speaking of a Christian ethos, in the downstairs gift shop of the hotel in which we were staying - I walked in there looking for a newspaper or a gift, that sort of thing - and listened to the music, and Christian radio was playing!

[different speaker] I noticed that myself.

[previous speaker] And I’m thinking, you know, in what gift shop, in what main hotel (and this was probably the main hotel, certainly one of the three main hotels in the whole country)--

[different speaker] And the van that picked us up from the airport--

[previous speaker] Absolutely!

[different speaker] --to take us to the hotel - the man put in a tape! Now the thing that was interesting was that it was a tape of hymns being sung, but, it was a tape of American war English hymns being sung, or choruses being sung, by Zambians. Now that was one thing that stood out to me, because the Zambians, when they sang in the vernacular as they call it, when they sang in their native language...it was awesome. The harmonies...just beautiful music that they sang! When they tried to imitate what they had been taught by the Western missionaries it didn’t come across quite so well, but when they sang in their own style and their own culture it was powerful.

[Brian Abshire] Which was odd because I think that they wanted to honor us and impress us by singing our songs in their language, and that didn’t impress us; what impressed us was their singing their songs in their vernacular. Even Wayne Johnson was sitting there swaying and waving his hands! [laughing]

[Wayne Johnson?] Alright, here we go...

[different speaker] Brian, was this before or after you spoke in tongues?

[continued laughter]

[Brian Abshire] So, I think really, there is a Christian ethos that is ah--

[Wayne Johnson] Southern is not speaking in tongues, by the way.

[laughing]

[Wayne Johnson] I mean, just because you can’t understand it...

[still laughing]

[previous speaker] Wayne mentioned earlier the possibility of talking about the economy. I think, oh...yeah. Go ahead, Wayne, and start that discussion.

[Wayne Johnson] I think that, once again, as you arrive as Brian says and you see potholes in the streets, or you see a lack of consumer goods, or a lot of other things that you may expect if you were in a European city or an American city. What one has to do is to put it in context and understand where they were five years ago, and where the other countries, the surrounding countries are. And of course, some of the surrounding countries are doing much much better because they came out before Zambia did. But there have been some very strides they’ve taken; there’s relatively free exchange, no currency regulations, you’d have a harder time moving currency if you were a resident of South Africa or the United States than you would if you were a resident of Zambia.

So they’ve gotten rid of their currency controls. There is one major problem they have, and that is that South African’s have a very predatory economy right now. They are subsidizing their exports at about a 30% clip, and so both in Zimbabwe and in Zambia (which had textile industries) they’re simply being forced out of business by the predatory practices of the South Africans. And they’re saying, we wanna help our factories, and so the government subsidizes them, and in a free economy of course a subsidized economy is beating at the free market product. And so these industries are closing down, people are losing their jobs, and guess what...they can’t buy the textiles from either country as a result of that. So in the long run it’s a very very destructive practice and the South African’s oughta be ashamed of themselves. But it’s a problem that’s confronting the surrounding countries that are under the sway of the South African economy.

The major products that they do produce if Zambia is going to have a great economic future, it’s going to be as a breadbasket for this part of the world. They produce a lot of maz, or corn, which is a staple food crop. And two other things, which we have a lot of in the Central Valley, especially in the lower half of the valley here in California, which is soybeans and cotton. Land is, for all intents and purposes, land is free. They’ll do anything they can to get people to come over there and they’ll hand them all the land you want - you declare it and you start growing.

So, if you’re listening to this cassette and you’re a cotton farmer or a soybean farmer and you’ve got a, you’re about to buy all new equipment, take the old stuff and ship it over to Zambia. Then take a couple hundred acres and go into business! It’ll be a great blessing not only to you, but to the folks there.

They’ve adopted what they call a one stop shopping approach to allowing businesses to come in. You simply walk to one office, they stand there and they just stamp stamp stamp approved - come on in! So they want business, they want investment there, they want to see us there. They want to see capital invested and they’re very committed to that.

[different speaker] I was gonna say, and we met with the head of the investment center Mr. (Nutini?), who said that right now there are three counties in the world where you can make a two hundred percent investment on your money. The first, yes, Sudan is one, and of course there’s no investment right now because we’re in the middle of a war; {?} is the second, and of course they’re not doing anything because they’re in the middle of a war; and Zambia is the third. There is an incredible return now on your investment because of that.

[different speaker] Many of you no doubt are interested in the health situation in Zambia, being in an African country, and of course we know the justly deserved reputation of much of Africa with respect to diseases and sanitary conditions and so forth, so I thought I’d have Wayne Johnson discuss that for a few minutes.

[Wayne Johnson] Well, this is probably the most depressing part of what we’ll talk about, and that is that many of the practices that have culturally imposed otherwise on this part of the country, this part of the continent, have resulted in the rapid spread of some very terrible diseases, particularly up in the copper belt region. The AIDs virus, the majority of the population is HIV positive, and it’s pandemic. It’s everywhere. You do not see evidence of it so much, because it tends to - as I understand it - it tends to manifest itself very rapidly and a person is dead in two weeks. So it’s a different type of system; it affects people differently than it does here, where apparently the disease is detected soon and there’s a lot of different drugs that are given that prolong life and people go through, in some cases, a very long period of time they suffer with the disease.

There, when it’s finally reached its final stages it moves very very rapidly and is a terrible killer.

[different speaker] Wayne, would that be because of all the indigenes diseases like malaria, and typhus, and dysentery, and (bacteria?), and all those kinds of things which are very common in Africa but not very common in America?

[Wayne Johnson] Well, the...whenever you have other diseases that are common in an area - Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is just that, it destroys the immune system and so many many of the deaths will be recorded as death from infection or from typhoid, or, you know, just like they are here with consumption tuberculous. Things of that nature, oftentimes that will be the official cause of death.

I talked to one lady and in her village of about four or five hundred people, two hundred of the men had already died. The effect that this is having upon the churches...we’re over there talking about how churches need to take on the responsibility, churches become a parachurch organization it’s not things it’s supposed to do. We don’t care of our own we’re worse than an infidel; and so the church has an obligation to become, in effect the real true safety net for society - rather than the government. And yet, at the same time that you were preaching this correct Biblical doctrine, you can see how hard that teaching is to receive when you walk into churches in some of these cities.

It’s unlike here; the reason why we have a lot of churches in this country where there are a lot of women, it’s because the men aren’t taking their responsibilities very seriously. There, it’s because the men are dead.

[different speaker] Maybe you should mention how HIV is spread.

[Wayne Johnson] By cleansing...?

[different speaker] Well not, that’s one of them--[different speakers voices overlapping]--oh! I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It was the connective blood supply that was largely responsible, that, and dentistry was responsible for HIV.

[Wayne Johnson] Well, yeah...that’s a large part of it and there’s just, yeah, the obvious practices that have led to it. That is in my opinion part of the major reason. The questions we got, the questions answered...one fellow stood up, and there’s a terrible tribal practice that’s called cleansing and that is when if the wife dies the husband is supposed to have sexual relations with other female relatives of the family, to sort of dispel the evil spirit of the family. And so you can imagine that you’ve got this practice that--

[different speaker] It’s called the spirit, it disperses the disease.

[Wayne Johnson] Yeah, it’s a practice that has had a devastating impact on the population. So the churches are fighting this wherever you go, but you have to understand that when you have age old customs that die hard...and no they don’t die any quicker there than they do anywhere else in the world. In Chibwe the one widow that I talked to, which might illustrate the practical implications of how this is all working on the church, I had already told one of the women when she was talking...she was just a young widow, and she said, “what can I do? I’ve got these children to take care of.” And I said, “well, Paul tells in the Bible that the young widows should marry.” And she said, “Marry who? First of all, I’m not sure I want to get married because of this pandemic disease that’s out there, and secondly, there aren’t any men left.”

And so she’s taking care of several children, she’s taken several others in, one lady in Chibwe that I spoke with, she came up and she told me that after she heard one of my talks that the Lord led her very strongly upon her heart and told her to come talk to me, she was a dear Pentecostal lady, and as she showed the parts of the speech that made a particularly strong impression on her I recognized immediately that it was from Monty Wilson’s talk.

[laughing]

It wasn’t me at all, but I gave her a listen anyway. And she said, “I don’t know what to do, I just feel desperate.” I said, “Well, what’s the problem?” And she said, “I lost my husband to this disease and I’m a widow, and I can’t say no when I look at the little children in the streets. These beautiful little children that are orphans, there’s nobody to take care of them.” I said, “Well, what do you do?” She said, “I take them in.” I said, “So, in addition to your own children, you’ve taken in a couple of the neighborhood orphans.” She said, “Yes.” I asked, “Well, how many?” She said, “Eighteen.”

So here’s a widow taking care of eighteen children. I said, “How do you support them?” She said, “I get up very early in the morning and I bake pies and then I walk all the way down to the highway, and there’s a gas-petrol station there, and I sit there during the morning hours and the cars that come by I try to sell the pies too. And if I sell the pies I save enough money to buy materials the next day and whatever is leftover I go back and I buy food to feed the children. And if the Lord is very gracious and there’s a little extra, I realize that I was sending all the children to the government schools and they weren’t learning anything, they weren’t learning who their Lord was, they weren’t being evangelized...” So I asked, “Well, what did you do?” She said, “Well, I did what I had to do, I homeschooled them!”

So here she’s got eighteen orphan children that she’s supporting by herself and she’s homeschooling! I asked, “What do you homeschool them with?” She said, “There’s this company and there’s people in Lusaka here and when I get enough money together I buy these materials from this group called Accelerated Christian Education. Have you ever heard of it?” [chuckling] And I said, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of it alright.”

She’s using ACE curriculum! And she teaches these children in the afternoons, you know, and then she’s taking care of them, and get’s up the next morning and the whole thing starts all over again. She was particularly upset, she had run up a bill for ACE materials that she couldn’t pay and so we arranged to get her account clear and Monty, I think, was going to try to do something to see if we couldn’t do something to help a sister care for these eighteen children.

But that’s just one example out of many, many, many. I asked, “What do the churches do?” She said, “What, you mean the churches full of the other widows? They’re all trying to take care of themselves.” So this is one of the most difficult things to deal with, and I think the only way you can deal with it is by dealing with the problems that the Lord puts in front of you. He put this woman in front of us and we dealt with her problem, but there are many many more and we need to be back there. There’s much much more to be done. I would be so happy if all of the preachers that are going there to hold conferences and to make tapes and so forth, if every one of them would also take--I mean, I brought back a whole list of proposals and cards and this and that.

I have a (personal?) amount. One guy... I was on the phone yesterday, I talked to a friend of mine from the university. He was a mining engineer. I said, “What are you doing? Anything exciting?” He said, “Nah, doing the same old thing. Digging in the ground, getting gold, getting minerals.” I said, “Well, I’ve got a project for ya.” I’m shipping him all the materials from a guy, a Christian man who is over there, and the whole family they make their living by digging aquamarine stones and clearly could benefit from his expertise. So I said, “I’ve got a project for ya. I can’t follow up on it, you gotta follow up on it.” He said, “Okay, fine, done deal. I’ll take care of it.” So I gave that project to him.

I’ve got a few more, and I know that all the rest of you came back with the same sort of things, but that’s what it’s going to have to be. It’s going to be one on one solutions, where people learn how to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps, where we help them in non-governmental ways.

[different speaker] Absolutely.

[Wayne Johnson] Non civil ways that provide long term solutions.

[different speaker] You know, I think we should point out that if you’re looking for a place to invest, not only a place where you make money but also a place where your money would be well spent from a distinctly Christian standpoint, I think we didn’t point out till now that Zambia is an officially Christian nation. It’s constitution states plainly that Zambia is a Christian nation, although it permits freedom of worship and freedom of conscience which from my standpoint is a very good combination. So it’s certainly a place to put your dollars, and we’ve mentioned some cases in which you can do that.

I wanted to mention quickly the situation with regard to education. Of course, Zambia is just coming out of a socialistic system, a very strong estate financed education, under the present administration there is still state education. They’ve certainly not made the transition to a free economy in education at all, as our country has not. But they now let Christian schools be established, and homeschools, and that sort of thing. We were--

[different speaker interrupts and speaks mostly unintelligibly] ...based education? Whereas we’re trying to provide this free education, now if you want to use the government schools you’ve got to pay for them.

[different speaker] I believe that came out when we talked with the deputy minister of education. It was an interesting conversation. Of all the conversations we had with, or at least that I had, with government officials he seemed to be the one who was most adept, most intelligent, most articulate. They’re working on curriculum development, he pointed out that they had had a number of shortcomings as a result of twenty-seven years of socialism. I asked him, “If we were to send you some Christian curricula textbooks and so forth, would you be willing to investigate them with the possibility of implementing them in the classroom and so forth?” He said, “Absolutely.”

So that’s one thing that Chalcedon is going to do. We asked him, in fact I think it was Wayne who asked him specifically, about investment. He mentioned a couple of things. One thing that stuck out in my mind, however, was this... he said, “A Christian university, or a Christian Liberal Arts College.” Now, the university that they have there, University of Zambia there in Lusaka, which some of us visited, is of course not a Christian university as such. But he said they would really welcome that.

And of course the ministry of Chalcedon is dedicated almost totally to Christian education. Therefore from my standpoint I think one of the best investments we could make in Zambia’s future is a strong Christian Liberal Arts university. Of course they would have to start small, but if we’re concerned about the next generation...then obviously that’s something that we want to think about implementing.

[different speaker] Particularly like a teachers college, would be...

[previous speaker] And he brought that up. Absolutely.

[different speaker] One of the ladies - one of the widows that I talked to, she said, “You know, the Christian schools, it’s hard to survive on what they paid the teachers.” And I thought to myself, “How very much like the United States! [laughing] Zambia is in this regard, that, you know, Christian school teachers subsidize the education of other peoples children with their labors. That seems to be the case all over the world. I asked her if she could go back to teaching...she said, “Well, you see the guy standing out front?” Which was the private security guard, which is a relatively low-paying job in the United States as well as it is there. She says, “They make a lot more money than teachers.” And she was an English teacher.

And she said, it’s just very very difficult to survive on that. But clearly, that’s the future. Clearly the future is training the teachers to train the next generation.

[different speaker] When we visited the university we were not at all impressed with the library holdings.

[other speaker mutters] Oh boy...

[different speaker] They were really had top of the line latticed stuff, 1964, 1963 holdings.

[different speaker] Oh, you’d see whole sections. Clearly what had happened was, people had taken a bunch of books and instead of throwing them away in some library in England, they’d just ship them off. You’d look at a whole section of books and there would be used book price catalogs from 1962 in London. There would be these old, outdated, absolutely worthless volumes...and there would be a whole section of them! And you’d go to the next section and there would be a bunch of mineralogical reports from some country. But clearly, nothing that any student would ever have occasion, and I’m sure there books there that had never been opened in the thirty or forty years that they had been on the shelf.

The flip side of that is, what a tremendous marketplace for real ideas! If you put real books out there, there’s a tremendous thirst for good things to read. And that’s one thing we’re gonna do.

[different voices overlapping]

[different speaker] Chalcedon is gonna ship over a whole set of books for their library, and if you’re listening and you would like to support a worthwhile intellectual cause in shaping the future of Zambia, you outta sent the money to Chalcedon for that purpose. Not only in their library but also their bookstore, which we visited. It really was an amazing difference there. Of course, like a regular bookstore, there was a section on economics and there were fairly new economic texts in history and political science and so forth....and then we get over to the Christian section, and it was like, just small tracts almost. Small paperback books, very basic basic books. Of course that’s more, and much more Orthodox, than you would have in any secular university in this country...but nonetheless.

[different speaker] But there was also an L. Ron Hubbard section on the other side, [chuckles] which was of equal size. Somebody had obviously subsidized somebody. Obviously somebody, scientologists, had gone in there, realized that there’s this dearth of things to read, and so they’re providing it! They’ve stocked the bookstore.

[previous speaker] Exactly. And that’s why I asked one of the employee’s there, “If we sent you a number of our books, would you sell them here?” He said, “Oh, yes! Send us your books.” So, I think this is what Chalcedon is all about. Getting our literature, sound Orthodox Christian Dominion related literature into the hands of this country. And we can influence an entire generation that way. Education is so vitally important.

Before I get to the reformation society, is there anything else that you men wanted to talk about specifically?

[Andrew] Well, I think that’s an appropriate next topic.

[voices overlapping in agreement]

[Andrew] Yeah, let’s go right into that.

After the meeting, on...what was it...I think it was Saturday evening, Peter Hammond got a group together. All of you who want to start a society on changing Zambia for the glory of God, meet over here in the corner with Andrew Sammon. Well, it wasn’t until later that I knew I was supposed to leave the meeting. That’s the way Peter does things, he arranges. So, he says, I was walking out the door and he says, “Oh, by the way, you’ve got a group of thirty people over here and you’re gonna tell them how to start a Reformation society.” So I went over there and started talking with them and said, “Well, the first thing we need to do is, what is the society? It’s designed to apply the faith in very specific areas and I can’t determine what those areas are in Lusaka. You’re going to have to determine what those areas are.”

Well it’s amazing, the response I got. They said, “You know what we have to do? We have to influence the churches. Before we can change things politically or anything else, we need to get the churches on board.” And I said, “You know, that’s a very good idea. Who can do that? We need some men to lead this.” And sure enough, there were some fine Christian men there, several of them pastors, “Yes. We will lead the society.” The amazing thing is, we were talking, about ten or fifteen men, as I was telling them you need to do this and that, you need to meet here, you need to meet monthly or bimonthly, and so forth...We were talking about the mechanism of getting it going.

What I so delighted seeing, was that after about fifteen minutes I wasn’t talking anymore. They were saying, “Well, no, we can’t do that! What we need to do is this, we’ll all get together...” And one lady says, “You know, you could meet at my house, I have a very very big house!” And the guy over here says, “Now, we can’t meet from seven to nine because the public transportation doesn’t work then, so let’s make it two O’clock.” And I was just thoroughly enjoying myself, sitting there and watching these people talking about exactly what they’re going to do to apply this. And taking individual responsibility! That’s where it starts - self government under God’s authority.

But, in fact, I think that their first meeting was this weekend. Or it’ll be next weekend, I can’t recall. But they faithfully promised me, a couple of the men, the one fellow...I think his name...was it George? I can’t remember. The fellow who sat up in the front. He was a very articulate, bright fellow.

[different speaker] He’s gone to all the conferences that Peter has had.

[Andrew] Yes. Obviously loves the Lord. He said, “I promise you that I’ll keep in contact and let you know exactly what is going on.” But, the area that that reformation society is going to attack, before they deal with the problems of pornography (although it’s illegal in the country) and various other specific social problems, is to influence the churches to get them excited about applying the faith. We talked about ways of doing that - meeting with the pastors, getting the pastors involved, showing them that there is not going to be competition, there will be cooperation, and so forth. But I have very high hopes for that.

Because we need to understand this about Zambia, though it’s a Christian nation officially, and though it has a number of Christian politicians; society is not changed by politics. Societies are changed by Biblical religion. That is, Biblical Orthodox, Biblical Christianity infused by the power of the spirit of God. And so there is more hope in these churches and Christians, than in the Christian’s involved in politics. Although we need Christians in politics.

But that was very gratifying for me to see and I hope we can keep our readers apprised of what is going on in that reformation society and in Zambia in general.

[different speaker] Well, Andrew, I think you just put your finger on it, because the kind of Christianity that Zambia has known historically has been pietistic, retreatist, escapist, feel good kind of Christianity. And it has failed them! And now they are hungry for the Biblical answers. And what I think this conference has done, it has has influenced a number of people who are in positions of leadership and responsibility for a world conquering faith. We couldn’t have asked for an audience that was more hungry for what we had to offer.

[different speaker] And that was why this conference was a success! Anytime Chalcedon can go somewhere and influence people for a world conquering comprehensive vision, then we have had a successful conference.

[new speaker] Andrew, there are two things that I think highlight that fact. One would be, if when the tapes become available to listen to John Jury’s summary of--

[Andrew] Oh! Excellent!

[previous speaker] --the final talk where he sort of summarized what the message of the conference was. And he took a little bit from every single talk, and it was very humbling in some ways, some of us had taken a half-hour to say what he summarized far better in three or four minutes. [laughing] So that was, [chuckles] ah, a good thing. But to listen to John Jury summarize that... And the other thing is that the delegates, it was an interesting process - a drafting committee got together to draft a statement on behalf of the conference. They called it the Lusaka Concord. And then the next morning they actually brought this thing up on the floor and all the delegates that were gathered there, every single person had the opportunity to either approve or disapprove every single word. And it wasn’t like, okay, all in favor say ‘aye’, boom, it’s done and then it received the committee report. No. They actually went over it, line by line, and word by word, there were changes made on the floor, and yet...it was adopted unanimously by all the people there.

I think that if we’ve got enough time here, I think, Brian, you’ve got a copy of it there. I’d like you to share that with people so that they can see what the delegates at the Lusaka conference of Christian Reformation adopted. I think this is a magnificent statement. I wish we could get a unanimous group of Christians in the United States who could adopt something that is as thoughtful and as right on target as this statement of theirs.

[Rushdoony] You will publish it in the report?

[different speaker] Oh yes, not only so, we’re devoting an entire issue to the Zambian meeting, and this will be really the cornerstone of it. Go ahead, Brian.

[different speaker] in fact, I’m gonna suggest that in the future when Africa is totally reconstructed and the earth is full of God’s glory, the Lusaka Concord, it will be my bet that it will go down in history as one of their foundational documents.

[Rushdoony] Sounds great.

[Brian Abshire] This is what it says. This is the Lusaka Concord, and the verse picked was Psalm 127:1. “Unless the Lord build the house, they who labor, labor in vain.” And this is how the Concord reads:

“Poised at the brink of the third millenium since the incarnation of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the assembled delegates at the international conference on Biblical Reformation and Christian Culture convening in Lusaka, Zambia, at the {?} Conference Center, the 26’th - 28’th of June in the year of our Lord 1997, unanimously adopt the following Concord.

Whereas, the first commandment is to have no other God but the living and true God, and all of life must be submitted to his authority (Exodus 23); and whereas, Christ Jesus has declared that all authority has been given unto him and that he is the reigning King of kings and Lord of lords (Jude 24); and whereas, all of the Holy Scriptures are infallible and inherently inspired by God and given to direct every area of life (2nd Timothy 3:16-17); and whereas, there can be no neutrality in religion, ethics, science, economics, art, civil government, or indeed any other area of life, and that an effective Christian faith requires the subordination of every sphere of government - personal, family, church, and state - to the Lordship of Christ as revealed in the Bible (Luke 11:23); therefore, we unreservedly commit ourselves afresh to the comprehensive fulfilment of the great commission to disciple the nations.

Teaching them to observe everything that the Lord Jesus has commanded (Matthew 28:9-10, 20), specifically requiring a genuine and heartfelt repentance for the sin of failing to teach the whole counsel of God, substituting for a world conquering faith an escapist theology of defeat and thereby surrendering our nations to the world, the flesh, and the devil (2nd Chronicles 7:14); and that parents must accept their God given responsibility for the education and admonition of their children, recognizing that a consistent Biblical education is crucial to the development and the advancement of Christian civilization (Ephesians 6:1, Deuteronomy 6:4, Psalm 78); that the primary role of civil government is to act as God’s minister of Justice, to punish lawbreakers and to protect law abiders, as defined by the Word of God, and that it’s usurpation of education and social welfare is destructive to the family, business, church, and therefore the nation (Romans 13:1, 1st Peter 2:13-14); and that the church, as the whole assembly of God’s people must reclaim their responsibility to leave self governed lives under God’s law, and to heed Christ’s commands to minister God’s grace to the needy and oppressed (Isaiah 1:17).

We eagerly anticipate and pledge to work for that day in which every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father; for the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King, He will save us (Isaiah 33:22).”

[different speaker] What a fitting way to end the tape. Thank you for listening. [audio ends]