Miraculous Provision

Our God, he’s a God of the impossible. It just so happened that a day or two earlier, I had heard from our mission in the United States, and they told me that one of the churches that supported us had just closed. The final thing they did before they closed was they sent in three years of support for each of their missionaries, and we were one of those missionaries they supported.

Do you know how much it was? It was $20,000 so now there was $20,000 but it did me absolutely no good because it was in the bank in the United States and all the banks were closed. So what do you do?

I remembered that there was a local businessman. In the past, a couple of times we had gone to him to change money from dollars into the local currency. We barely knew him. He barely knew us, but that was really the only thing I could think of. He was about a 20-minute drive from where I was at the airline.

So, I went to this guy’s factory. Amazingly, he was there in his office. I went in. I reminded him who I was, and I explained the problem of the tickets and getting our family out. And then I said, “I need $20,000 in cash.” I also said, “I don’t have a check to give you for it right now, because it’s back at my house and I don’t have time to get it. But if you can trust me, I need $20,000 in cash, and I will bring you a check in a couple hours.”

He looked at me and then walked out of the room. At this point, I have no idea what he’s thinking. And I guess, what would you think? I mean, would you give almost a complete stranger $20,000 not even with a check in your hand? About 15 minutes later, he came back into the room. He had a brown paper bag, and he dumped it onto the table in front of me. It was crisp, brand new $100 bills, adding up to $20,000.

He said, “Take the money, get your tickets, bring me the check.” So that was the first miracle. That was astounding and shouldn’t have happened, but it happened. First, the fact that the money was in our bank. Second, that the guy would actually give it to us based on the promise of a check.

Well, as quickly as I could, I got back in a taxi, and we raced to South African Airlines. I ran in. It was 10 minutes to 12, and I found the manager and I dumped the money on his desk in front of him. He looked at it, and he looked at me, and he said, “We’ll print you the tickets right now.” I just breathed a huge sigh of relief. And I thought, God, you are you are good. You are a miracle-working God.

When I got home, my wife came running out the door. She said, brick the US Embassy phoned us. They said that the situation was bad, that the rebels were about to advance to a place outside the city where they’re going to turn off the electricity, they’re going to shut off the water, and then they’re going to invade the city.

Escape to Cameroon 

The Embassy has told us it is so bad that for the first time in history, they are evacuating all of the embassy and they’re evacuating all of the Americans. They said that we have one hour to get there if we want to be on that plane. The other thing they did was they reminded me that we have no passports because they were lost in immigration. They said, if you don’t leave with us now, nobody will give you passports. You’ll never leave.

So there we were, one hour to leave, one hour to get to a place that was 45 minutes away. So we had something like 15 minutes to pack. Have you ever packed in 15 minutes? We were allowed one carry-on suitcase for each of us. It was throw it all in, grab a taxi again, and head for the US Embassy.

When we got there, we found dozens and dozens of Americans being processed to be evacuated, and we also saw that they were getting ready to shut down the American Embassy. Now that was significant, because the American Embassy had huge walls and all kinds of guards and soldiers, and for them to have to shut it down was very unusual, and it meant that they were expecting the worst.

So there we were getting processed along with everyone else to leave the country. We finally get to the airport, we get on the plane, and we are evacuated out of the country to the country of Cameroon. Oh my gosh, was that a sigh of relief when we got out of there and we got to Cameroon.

Also, had we bought tickets back to the United States from Cameroon, it would have cost us about twice as much as the tickets that we had from South Africa. So we actually were able to afford to go back because of those tickets that we had bought, even though we didn’t use them starting in the Congo, but rather used them from Cameron. So that was very good. Within a couple days, we found ourselves on the plane back to the United States.

So on the one hand, it was a sigh of relief, but on the other hand, it was something much different. It was devastation, emotional and spiritual devastation. This had been planning and trying and working for years and years and years of preparation and a calling that was from God, and we had tried over and over. And what’s the end result? We’re on a plane headed back to the United States, the job isn’t done, and our vision and our calling seem to be destroyed.

The Call to Congo

Now I want to change the direction of our story. I want to go back to the beginning of this story, because there’s an ending that’s significant, but I want to work my way there. I want you to understand what was happening in all of this.

My wife and I met at Bible College in 1982 and during that time, we knew that we were called to the Congo, and we knew that we were called to go work with an African Bishop and Evangelist whose name was Alexander. We were excited about that.

Initial Mission and Challenges

We spent five years preparing for it, and when we arrived, it was incredible. We were rejoicing. We were so glad and we knew it was a call of God, and we knew that what we were going to do was very significant. Why? Because we were working with a group of 3000 churches, and when we arrived there, one of the things that leadership told us was out of the 3000 pastors, two had been to Bible College. The rest of them had not had a chance, and they were hungry.

Some other things happened during that time too, which really made an impact on our lives and our knowledge of ministry and missions. The first thing that happened was, after a couple months, I was approached by a missionary from another group who had been getting to know. He’s a good guy and and we liked him, he liked us.

He approached me and said, “Brick, why are you working with a cult?” I said, “Well, I’m not working with a cult.” He said, “You are working with a cult.” I said, “I’m not working with a cult.” So we argued over it.

Because he said that, I started asking around with the other missionaries in different groups. I said, “What is the reputation of the group that we’re working with?” They said, “You’re a cult.” Well, that was astounding, because this group of churches had been started 30 years earlier by one of our own missionaries, the group that we were with.

I found out that after he started the group, he had passed away the first year. A national named Alexander who had a tremendous ministry of evangelism, miracles, and healing, had taken over the work. He’s a wonderful man of God. There’s only one problem, he had never been to Bible College. He was not a teacher.

He had a huge and tremendous apostolic anointing and the church exploded. It went from one church to 3000 churches, but it was 3000 churches and 3000 pastors with no training, with no knowledge of the Word of God. So what do you do if you’re a pastor and you’ve never been taught the Bible? Well, a lot of what is your own ideas is going to enter into your preaching, a lot of misunderstandings, things from the religions around you are going to enter in what you grew up hearing, and in many cases, even the old superstitions, the witchcraft and animism and spirit worship, those things get mixed in too, because there’s a void. There’s just a blank place where there’s no teaching and there’s no knowledge.

These were not pastors who didn’t love God. These were not pastors who weren’t filled with the Holy Spirit. These were pastors who wanted to know the Bible and wanted to know the Word of God, but had no way to do that. As we’re getting to know this and starting to minister to these needs so they won’t be a cult any longer, there are some other things that  struck me and impacted me for life.

One of those things was having a pastor friend. His name was Boswamina. He said, “One of our twins died yesterday.” As I got to know what was going on in the country, I found that it was very common at that time in that country, for one in five children to die before the age of five, of very simple childhood sicknesses.

Many things they were dying from that were not necessary, but the people didn’t know. They didn’t have the meager resources that they needed to take care of them. For example, later on, I found out that if you just took a glass of water and a half teaspoon of salt, seven teaspoons of sugar, and mixed it together it’s a rehydration formula. If they had given that to their baby, the baby would have lived. Things that simple they just didn’t know, and so their baby died.

Miracles and Healings in the Congo

Another thing we found out was that God is a very, very powerful God. Alexander would have crusades at least every month for three or four days. Typically there would be something like 5000 people who would come to it. He would preach a very simple salvation and repentance message. He’d also have a time for people to repent of witchcraft and animism.

After people receive Christ, He would go on to say, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. Jesus was a healer when he walked the earth. He’s still a healer today.” Alexander didn’t play a lot of games, he never even went near people or touched them, or did any kinds of shenanigans, none of that.

He would just say, “Okay if you’re sick, I want you to take your hand and I want you to put it on your body, wherever you are, whatever is wrong. I’m going to pray a simple prayer.” And so he would do that. He would pray for two or three minutes, just a very, very simple prayer.

Then he would say, “Okay, now test your body, see if you can do whatever it was you couldn’t do before. And if you can, please come up and tell us about it.” Every single day of these crusades that happened. There would be lines of 50 to 100 people each day coming to testify of them being healed. I remember lame people being healed, and blind people being healed. I remember all kinds of different things happening.

One of the ones that still is stuck in my memory like it was yesterday, was two men came up carrying a wheelchair on their shoulders. In front of them was a man who had been paralyzed from the waist down for 11 years, and he was walking up to the front unaided.

Later on, I found myself in the main church downtown. And the main church was a church that held about 2000 people, but in Africa, it held about 5000 people, and then another 5000 people often would be outside listening to the speakers, because there was a move of God happening.

I remember having to go to the bathroom. So I went to the men’s bathroom, but it was very problematic. I could barely use the bathroom. Do you know why? It’s because all these people who came and got healed would leave behind their crutches and their walking sticks and their wheelchairs and all these things they left behind as a testimony that God had healed them. When I went into the bathroom, it was full from floor to ceiling with all these things that had been left behind as a testimony.

Now I know that some people have questioned, “Well, okay, it seemed like a miracle, but maybe it was psychosomatic. Maybe, you know, later on, whatever it was came back.” Well, I wondered about things like that too.

After I’d been there about three months, they made me the pastor of a church of about 600 people. And one of the things that I did was every Saturday, I would visit three or four families from the church to get to know them. So in order to work on learning the language, it was Lingala, and to get to know the people, I’d say, “Hey, please tell me about how you came to faith. Why did you put your faith in Jesus Christ?” More than half of those families would then tell me the story of a healing or a miracle that happened to them or someone in their family or a very close friend.

These things that had happened a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, things that remained. It wasn’t something that was a moment and gone another moment, but tremendous miracles of healing.

Lessons Learned

So those are the things that we saw and that we learned while we were there. At that time, we saw signs and wonders, the power of God, and the work of the Holy Spirit. We saw that there were pastors who needed the Word of God desperately, and if they didn’t get it, they would become cultish. We saw that there were people who were dying and children who were dying for reasons that just shouldn’t have been happening.

So our prayer, our question to God was, “How can this need be met across these countries? When there’s going to be civil wars, when there are not enough missionaries when this old way of doing things with these brick-and-mortar schools only works for about 10% of the people. What can what can be done?”

The Lord led us to a lot of different ideas. He reminded me of a ministry that I had been in contact with when I was at our church back in the US, it had a Bible college done by satellite. Well, satellite wouldn’t work in Africa at that time, and it still won’t in most places. And then we came across a ministry that had recorded some things on video and put it out in different languages. We could tell that was a good idea.

We also realized something else, and that when Jesus walked this earth, he met people’s spiritual needs, but he also met their physical needs. You know, he fed people, he healed people. It was a holistic ministry, not just to the soul, not just to the spirit, but to the body as well.

Development of a Holistic Christian University

We realized, if we’re going to create something, it’s got to be holistic. We don’t want someone saved today and dying tomorrow, or saved today and their children die tomorrow. That’s not in the will of God. And so by the grace of God, something happened, and that is God gave us the help and the idea over time to put together a complete Christian University.

We filmed it for 12 years. We brought in teachers from all over the world. We also brought in not just professors of the Bible and of ministry. We brought in medical doctors, nutritionists, agriculturalists. We brought in people to teach on small business and micro loans and micro financing.

We were able to put together something that had never existed in history, a complete Christian university that was on a flash drive with over 200 courses, and 1000s of hours of teaching. These teachers had worked in the developing world and knew the cultures and how to meet the needs that were there.

We also had a new vision for the pastors, that God had called them to pastor their entire community and to transform it holistically. We give that vision now to the pastors, and then we say, “Here are the tools.” We turn their churches into the center of the community, meeting the needs of the community, making the church more relevant than it’s ever been before, and opening the hearts of the people to salvation.

The end result is seeing churches explode in size as they’re now meeting the felt needs of the community. We’ve now spread to four continents, 52 countries, and we have dubbed the curriculum over into seven languages.

Now, the other thing that makes this astounding is how simple and inexpensive this is to do. It doesn’t require missionaries. It doesn’t require a lot of money. In fact, what it requires is a projector, an SD card, and a speaker.

We buy the projectors on Amazon for $70. These projectors have a place where you can put in an SD card. The SD card will fit four years of our school and cost about $40. We use a speaker that makes it a lot louder. So you put the three things together, and it costs us less than $150 and we have a Bible school anywhere in the world. With the languages we have now we can cover half of the world’s population.

This is where we’re at now in ministry. The interesting thing about it, though, is that we thought we had failed when we left Africa. We thought that the vision was done. Everything was over, and we’d never be able to do anything significant in the Congo again. But God had other plans.

It was because we left the Congo and went to other countries that we learned other languages, we got to know other missionaries, and we got to know other nationals. We gained a reputation, and we had all of the people that we would need to work with later on, when we developed these schools.

Expansion and Impact of the Ministry

Our vision was the Congo. It was 3000 churches. It was living there until we died. That’s our plan. That’s what we thought that God had called us to. What we found out was that was God’s training pants for us. That was God’s beginning for us, to get us on the road that went many different directions under his leadership and guidance that we couldn’t see, to get us to the place where we are now.

Instead of having a ministry in one country, we have a ministry in 52 countries and four continents. And in fact, we’re getting ready to now to move into India and into Asia and into China. We’re all over Latin America, we’re in Europe. We’re all over Africa. These things happened because of crushed dreams.

This is the God we serve. He takes what looks like complete and total failure and shows us that he had a plan all along and turns it around. The next thing you know, you’re living a dream, you’re living a ministry that you never, in your wildest dreams, would ever have imagined.

By the way, we have schools all over the Congo now, even right now in eastern Congo, there’s a horrible civil war taking place, and yet our schools there are still operating. Why? Because they don’t require missionaries to be there. They just require trained pastor facilitators who have a projector and an SD card. They have student notebooks, and they can do the classes send us the grades, and receive their degrees.

I just have to say this, as I’m closing, I don’t know what God’s call in your life is. I don’t know the things that you’ve experienced, but I do know this, he has a purpose for you, whatever it is he intends to accomplish. If you don’t give up, if you continue moving, if you trust in him and just keep going, our God is a God of miracles, a God who loves to carry out the destinies of those he’s created because he created us for good works that he prepared in advance for us to do in Jesus Christ.

I just want to tell you that from what I’ve seen and what I’ve experienced, our God is a God of the supernatural. He’s a God of miracles. He’s a God of signs and wonders, and He’s a God who carries out His purposes in mysterious ways. His ways are higher than our ways, but in the end, when we continue with Him and persevere, it’s astounding what He does with our lives.