A Vision for the Ndau - An Unreached People Group

At the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in 2011, Tom Elliff, President of the IMB challenged churches to adopt an unreached people group and seek to reach them. After hearing this challenge, Pastor Tim Hight of Christiansburg, VA shared this challenge with his church to cast the vision to them. One member of the church, Jim Rice, is a retired IMB missionary from Uganda and Kenya, and when he heard about this possibility he got very excited and suggested the possibility of adopting a people group in Africa. They investigated to find what people groups were listed for Africa and began to pray about the various groups. They settled on the Ndau people of Southeastern Zimbabwe. Then they began to work with Tom and Cindy Melvin, the Engagement Personnel for the Kingdom to Kingdom Cluster, (made up of Botswana, Zimbabwe, Western Zambia, and the Limpopo and the Northwest Province of South Africa), to begin making plans for a Visioning trip.

In August, Pastor Tim Hight, Jim Rice, and Chris Webb traveled with the Melvins, Pastor Isaac Mabvumba, the Baptist Convention Evangelist and Pastor James Tembo, Executive Director of the Baptist Convention to the Chipinge Dictrict in Southeastern Zimbabwe to meet with Pastor Karakadzai Munyanga (seen below) of the Chipinge Baptist Church. Pastor Munyanga received them with great joy and gave them a tour of the area around Chipinge.

“This sounds funny”, said Pastor Tim, “But at first I was a bit disappointed to find that there were a few churches in the area already. As I thought about this, though, I realized it could be to our advantage in that part of our ministry could be to disciple the believers in Chipinge and to get them involved in church planting in the unreached areas away from town.”

As they were traveling, they stopped at several places to meet people and get a feel for the area. They discovered that it was a vast remote mountainous area dotted by very small villages that were quite far apart. This has been one of the main barriers to reaching the Ndau people.

Pastor Tim had the opportunity to preach to some of the head men of the area who had gathered for a meeting.

One of the challenges of working in Africa is dealing with the dependency issue. “If Grace Life Baptist Church decides to partner with Pastor Munyanga,” says Pastor Tim, “our goal will be to share the gospel with the lost and disciple the new Christians. We don’t believe that pouring money into buildings and projects will help spread the gospel and it is not reproducible on a local level. We hope to model a ministry that is reproducible by those with whom we work and train.”