Robin Brown Testimony

0:36And I come from Africa, born in Zimbabwe, as Tom said, back in the 60s. That tells you how old I am. And we just knew that we had an amazing privilege, not only in education, but just hearing the gospel, not as kids, but later on. I only got saved later in the 80s when we had moved to South Africa. And so we just knew that we wanted to go back into missions. And I think the way the Lord formed that in our hearts and lives was in his providential care. Being raised in Zimbabwe was a very difficult time. As my brother and I, all we knew was war. It was just a war situation. It was a civil war. It was a racial war between black and white in that country as well.

1:30And as a pastime, my brother and I used to make a lot of money pulling the bullet heads of bullets, just the top part, and drilling a hole through it and making necklaces and selling those. That was our hobby. And then we used to take the gunpowder and make bombs. That's what we used to do. I remember blowing up my dad's front yard. I didn't realize how big the explosion would be because we got one of those big soda fountains and crammed it full of gunpowder from bullet heads and put a fuse on it. We wanted to see what was going to happen.

2:07Yeah, the resultant 20-foot crater in his backyard caused us not to come home that night. So yeah, so that's the kind of life we live. We lived in a world that was in turmoil. We lived in a world of hatred, hatred between black and white. My parents weren't Christians, they weren't believers. In fact, my dad forbid us from going to the church because, in his mind, the church was involved in terrorism because all he understood about the church was the World Council of Churches, and he had heard that they were supporting the terrorist effort in Zimbabwe. And so we were banned from church. Basically, we were not allowed to go to church, which we didn't really care about because we wanted to play in the bush anyway. So that was our life. And then We had to move because my dad was in the government in Zimbabwe. He was high up in the government. So he was the city treasurer of the capital city. And that's since you got the keys to the treasury. He was targeted and we were put on a train overnight and we escaped through Botswana. This is when I was like 14 or 15 on the train. It was about a seven-day journey through Botswana into South Africa. And then he got out another way and we ended up in South Africa. And so my worldview was: you know, never to trust governments, never to trust anybody. You can't trust anybody. And so my worldview was: certainly, you just need to make enough money so that you're not dependent on anyone. And so if you can get rich enough, then you can just crawl over everybody else and make a name for yourself. And that's why I ended up studying. Actually, I studied law for several years to become a lawyer because I hope there's no lawyers in here. Is there such a thing as an honest lawyer?

4:03But I studied law for quite a while. The goal to just make money. And then when I was in university in South Africa, really the situation happened there again. The storm clouds were already brewing. And so my university experience was mostly tear gas and rubber bullets during the time people being shot on campus. That was kind of a regular experience there. And so I got pretty disillusioned with law. But still wanting to make money, I decided to switch to accounting. And so, what you call a CPA here, and I ended up working with Price Waterhouse.

4:40You must not want to say that anymore after Oscars last year, you know. So, and that's my goal. My goal was to make money and be rich. So, I did that, ended up with Price Waterhouse in South Africa. And we went through, South Africa was in turmoil, and this is in the 90s. It was people were being shot all over the place. It was a very violent society. And so, in South Africa, I met my cousin, and I hadn't seen my cousin for a long, long time. And she was a Christian. So, this is the first time I'd met a Christian. So, this is when I'm like 26 years old, six years old, never met a Christian before, even though my family would have called themselves Christians, right? They would have called themselves Christians. And she said, Well, you know, she said she wanted only to come down to the church down the road. And I happened to be living near this church down the road in Cape Town. And it was a church of England in South Africa. They are an evangelical church. They broke away from the Anglican church in the 1920s when they felt that the Anglican Church had become too liberal. So they had preserved the gospel, they had preserved the fist. Sufficiency of Christ and the sufficiency of the scripture. And so they preached the truth. So I went along, not because they preached the truth, but because I was interested in my cousin's friend. And so I went along because she had a nice friend.

6:15So very altruistic motives, as you can see. And then I started hearing the gospel there for the first time. And I remember it was a well, it was a bishop actually, because they still maintain the hierarchy. Bishop Frank Ratif preaching on a Sunday. And I just felt so angry because I don't know how this person could tell me that I was going to hell. I mean, who's this person? How can he say these things? My concept of church was you leave your brain at the door when you go inside. And when you come outside, you pick it up again. That was my worldview about church. So I started hearing the gospel there. And my cousin, who was, I think she was very intimidated by me because I'm the big man with the degree, the accounting degree. I was this, I was quite in those days at that age, I was the CEO already of a corporation there in South Africa. And she was, if you like, I guess like a simple farm girl.

7:16And she gave me the gospel. She said, you know, you need to give your life to Christ. And I was like, well, I don't know what you can tell me, in my arrogance and pride. And she invited me still then to a Bible study. I went along mainly because I was interested in a friend and sat next to somebody. I remember this guy with a huge beard. I thought he was something from the early settlers, the way this had this, you know, because we had settlers come out in the 1600s there. And he turned to me and he said, when were you saved? And I was like, saved from what? What is this?

7:55And then at this Bible study, to my horror, I found out that all these people believed that the earth was no more than maybe 10,000 years old. And, you know, being an evolutionist, it's kind of horrifying. You need to fix people like that. You really need to fix them because they're obviously deluded, right? So I said to my cousin, I said, okay, just this book, you're reading this Bible, where can I get one? She said, oh, well, you know, here's the various bookstores. I said, no, I want the big one like that, the study Bible. I'm just going to show you guys. You guys need to be helped, really, if this is what you believe.

8:31So she directed me to a Bible store, and I went in there and I said, Can I have a Bible? And I said, which one? I said, what are they? Different kinds. And the lady says, well, do you want a study Bible? She said, yes. So she gave me a study Bible, a big study Bible. And I remember sitting down and I started reading through the study Bible, Genesis, just started reading through Genesis. Okay, that's fairy tale. Get to Leviticus. Don't know what's going on there. And so I just about gave it back to my cousin. I said, I. I can't believe you guys believe this stuff. So she said, well, just try and read the Gospel of John.

9:08So she showed me where that was, and I started reading it. And then I read through it, and I was, okay, I'm starting to think now that Jesus is a real person, because I thought he was just a myth. That was my understanding of who Jesus was. And then she said, read through Romans. And so I read through Romans, and I got to, I only got as far as Romans 3. And I remember being so convicted about my sin. This is in about late 80s. Just being driven to my knees because Jesus Christ was real. And so the tears flowed. And I just knew if this is true, if it's true about this man, then I'm headed for hell. I'm headed for hell. And so that was in 1986. I was convicted just through reading through Romans.

9:58The next day, I think it was a Saturday, and my cousin and her friend came again and said, are you coming to church? And I said, I'd love to come to church. And they said, you'd love to come to church? I said, yeah, I think I understood who Jesus Christ is. And he's brought me to my knees. And they said, oh, you better come speak to the pastor because we're not sure about that. So after all the trouble I'd given them, so I was required to speak to the pastor, you know, sit before the pastor at the end of the service.

10:31And he just led me through the scripture, really through John again, and through the gospel, things that I'd read already. And the rest was history. That's how I got saved, through really a simple presentation of the gospel from my farm girl cousin, who never gave up, who was tenacious, who kept on at me, even though I really hated Christianity. I was an evolutionist. I didn't have all the answers either. So I didn't have all the answers to the earth being a young earth. I didn't have a young earth view or anything like that. But I just knew one thing, that I was headed for hell, and that without Christ, that's what I deserved. And I needed him.

11:15And so that's how I got saved. And the church, that was St. James Church. In a very short space of time, I was a voracious reader, so I had to read everything about Christianity. My best friend was a Catholic. He was my canoeing partner. I used to do a lot of canoeing in those days. It's called K-1 Racing, they have there, where you race canoes, and I had a doubles partner, Laurie. And I just read, I had lots of zeal, but no knowledge. I just read something that the Pope was the Antichrist. So I was horrified, so I rushed to their house, sat him and his Italian wife down. And I said, let me tell you, the Pope is the Antichrist. Let me show you. This is this, really.

12:00And that night he phoned me that same night and he said, You know, my wife said I've got to choose between you and her. You know what? I'm choosing her. I'm sorry. And so that was the end of my best friend. I never saw him again, never phoned me again. And so I lost a lot of friends in that short space of time. But I'd really gained brothers and sisters in the church. And so that's how I got saved. And it was in this church then, in St. James Church. You might have heard of it. It was a church that was attacked by terrorists in 1994, 1993, actually, where I'd met my wife. And I'll tell you more about that tonight. Where terrorists came in in 1993 and they fired into the congregation and they threw grenades and many, many people were killed. And my wife was in the church when it happened.

12:50And it was through that that I had realized that you just cannot hate people like this. It's not possible. And racism runs so deep. It's so deep. It's such a deep, rooted thing. Even after that attack, we had to sit down and think about where our hearts were. Because black men had come in and perpetrated that attack in a multiracial church. And so those roots run very, very deep. And it was as a result of that that I felt really needed, well, two things happened. Number one, I got married pretty soon after that, realizing life's pretty short. And secondly, it was a very good thing. Is that I felt the call to go to the ministry. And so I ended up at TMS.

13:35That's a long story how we got there. But it was through that and through the circumstances in Africa I realized that the only difference that can be made in a country like South Africa, the only difference that can ever be made is in the gospel. It's not possible to make a difference in any other way. And a friend of mine who also got saved, in South Africa, his job was to put bombs underneath taxis, right? So in other words, there's a lot of taxis in South Africa. They move taxis around and black people mostly use the taxis and they're rival taxi groups, right? They rival each other for the routes and they usually carry automatic weapons, these guys. And so if you mess with their taxi route, they'll kill you.

14:23And so what he did is he used to put bombs under one taxi and blow it up so that it looked like the rival taxi group. So then that these two taxi groups would kill each other. That was his job. And then he got saved. And then one of the taxi people that taxi drivers that he used to work with so as to know which bomb to put where also got saved. And I remember seeing these two men on a platform like this just giving the gospel of Christ together. You you would have never seen that.

15:00It was unbelievable that here you would have these two men speaking about Christ to a multiracial congregation of their backgrounds, and you realize the power of the gospel, how it breaks down that dividing wall. Certainly in Ephesians, it talks about a breaking down between Jew and Gentile. I mean, and that is a racial division as well, racial and ethnic division. And we've seen it in South Africa. And so I felt that I needed extra study and went to TMS and stayed in the U.S. for several years. Just had to work because we didn't have much money to pay for TMS. I worked there, and that paid our seminary fees. And then, because compared to South Africa, California is really expensive. I read Southern California compared to the rest of the U.S. is quite expensive anyway. And so this is where we are. We've been here for three years now. And there's the family there. So we're thankful for that. We didn't know what we would do in South Africa. We don't know what we would find. We don't know if we'd even get them into university there. But by God's grace, they're studying at the university there, and we're able to minister now in South Africa. So our goal in South Africa, well, first of all, let me tell you what the problems are in South Africa.

16:21It's about three times the size of California. It's twice the size of Texas. It's got 18,1800 miles of coast. 55 million people and 80% profess to be Christians. 49% live in the suburbs and 51% in the townships and squatter camps and rural areas. So you can see the mix there of South Africa. The big problem in South Africa is crime. It's probably one of the most dangerous places in the world. The rape rate is one of the highest in the world. 55 people are murdered every day. It has the highest carjacking rate in the world. A child goes missing every five hours, second highest abortion rate in the world. And 83% of companies are affected by white-collar crime. So these are the needs we've identified.

17:12Well, I think I need that slide. This is the problem. The problem in South Africa is dead churches and false teachers. They are rampant there. They are stains and blemishes, and arrogant and vain. That's what you see in these teachers. There's an Afrikaans church, which is mostly liberal or charismatic. So those are the people that came from Dutch descent when the Dutch settlers came in the 1600s as a result of persecution after the Reformation. So they sailed all the way down to the tip of Africa and they started settling in Africa. And then you have the English church, obviously English-speaking. So the English were also in South Africa. The English came down also in the 1800s and to In terms of colonizing Africa, and so you have these two big groups, the Dutch, now called Afrikaans, and the English. The English church is very charismatic, and there's few exceptions. There are some solid English churches.

18:15There's an indigenous church, which is mostly a mix of animism, ancestor worship, and Christianity. They mix it all up. They mix it all in. They'll call themselves Christians, but they'll worship ancestors, their ancestors at the same time. The biggest false teaching is the health, wealth, prosperity gospel. That is rampant there. In other words, Jesus is there to make you rich on this earth, to make you wealthy, to make you healthy. The biggest church is the Zionist church. It has about 12 million members. So it is a big church. It is a single, the ZCC, the Zionist Christian Church, which is an offshoot of the Zionists. They meet once a year together, that is, in a place called Zanin. It's about five hours from us, and one million people will meet there. It's the most amazing sight to see. As far as the eye can see, they are just people. In fact, it looks like the sea has come inland because there are at least six or seven thousand buses that come and park there, bringing these people in. And when the sun reflects off the roofs of the buses, it looks like you can see you're looking at the sea. It's an amazing sight to see this the Zionists come together. And they have a mixed belief. They mix up Christianity. They believe that this site four hours from us is Mount Moriah.

19:30So it's really cultic. They have a bishop, Lechawani, drives around in a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. They take up one offering at this meeting. That's millions. They wear uniforms. You'll see them wearing uniforms when they worship. They worship under any tree. So any tree is a church. And so you'll see four or five people gathered worshiping, wearing uniforms. Some of them look like military uniforms. That's the Zionist church. So that is the biggest church, so-called church. So we need, in South Africa, we really need to plant at least 2,000 biblical churches.

20:09The churches that are there are dead, or they're cults, or they're affected by the health, wealth, prosperity gospel. There needs to be evangelism with the true gospel. We need to build more seminaries with a strong link to the local church. A lot of the seminaries are not linked to the local church. And so they became liberal like they did here. Similar problems. And eventually they become totally secular. They're not even connected to the church. Many of the seminaries now. We need to train shepherds and preachers. And we have to train in biblical ecclesiology. And almost what is the church? People don't know what the church is anymore. What is the church?

20:45You know if I just sit at home and I download a sermon and I just pray by myself, that's the church. That's what they'll tell you. You say, well, no, that's not the church. Just one person praying and never meeting anyone else, never seeing anybody else. We need to send out men to plant new biblical churches. So that's really what our focus is in South Africa right now. Okay. And so our strategy is to recruit men from the university. So we've got several strategies. So this is where we work. We work with a university near us, Monash University. It is 99% black people from all over Africa. These are the children of usually businessmen or political leaders or wealthy people because they can afford to go to this university. By the way, this is an expensive university in South Africa. It will cost you $7,000 a year. You say that's expensive there, okay?

21:41So we work with this. We made some amazing inroads. We have a Bible study that runs at about 50 people. And we've identified several leaders already. This is Luke Mwheeler. Sure, Peyton knows him. He's stepping up to be a really good teacher. He's from Zambia. This is Michael Foyer. And so Michael a couple of years ago was saved in our ministry. And so he's another leader. This is Carney Katunga, another leader of this ministry that we've built up. And here he is teaching. He's a very, very good teacher, hoping that he'll go into the pastorate. So another one that really has okay, this is Daniel. This is kind of my son. He's from Zambia. He stayed with us for like three years while he was at university. And I wasn't sure if he was a believer, but actually he's going to I don't know if Peyton, you may know this, but he's going to be baptized next month, which is amazing. So Zigi, my wife, there's giving him a MacArthur study Bible because we set him a lot of work to do, memorizing verses, understanding the gospel, and he passed. And so now he gets his Bible. But he's a great guy. So we'll see what the Lord does with him. Then another strategy is we take interns. And so we have just finished this Daniel there. This is Hadza. He's from Mozambique. Not Mozambique, Madagascar. Anyone know where Madagascar is? I mean, you've seen the movie, right?

23:17Well, I can tell you, Madagascar is nothing like the movie, right? There are no lions there, okay? Yeah, I know the lion went there, but there's no lions there. So he spent three years with us. He's the senior pastor of the biggest church in Madagascar in Antananarivo. And so we intern men and we train them. They sit in all our elders' meetings. They do everything at church. They do church work. And so he's teamed up with a guy called Fally.

23:44You might know Fally Tom. And to plant a seminary in Madagascar. We consider Madagascar part of Africa, even though they kind of think that they're out there. There's 26 million people in Madagascar. I was there last year. There are some places you can Cannot even get to there. You have to go by foot. And it's amazing. For us, it's right on our doorstep. And we were told you can walk into villages and you can say, I'm going to tell you about Jesus. And they'll say to you, well, well, he's not here. You want to try the next village? Because they've never heard of Christ there. It's right on our doorstep, Madagascar, 26 million people. So this is a way to start tackling just the fact that nobody has heard the gospel in the remote places of Madagascar.

24:31So this is what we're doing as well. Sorry. Oops. We also run the Simeon Trust. We do expository preaching through the Charles Simeon Trust. And so we usually have many. Now, this is an interesting photo, but at least half these men are from the Zionist church. You say, wow. Because we advertise to the Zionist church and we brought these men in for preaching workshops. And they've never heard expository preaching. They don't even know what expository preaching is because they belong to a church which really is more like a cult. And so probably half of them are not even saved. But that's the only way we can get them into our church so that they will hear the gospel because they want to come and learn how to preach. And so, yes, we teach them how to preach, but we use that as a vehicle for the gospel so that they will hear the gospel. And so that's another strategy we have.

25:24He's on the right-hand side there. Tim. He spoke here in this church. So Tim and I. Work together in the church, and we run all these workshops. So it's Tim. Let's see, next. Okay. And then, of course, then, if you go to the next slide as well, this is our church. The local church really is the incubator for shepherds. And so we bring them in, we train them, they do church work, they work with us, they live with us, they see how Christ is reflected through our lives. So, all these men we bring into our local church as best we can. And so, we've recently just moved into this building.

26:07So, growth, we're a growing church. We've gone from about 250 to 490 in two and a half years, which is a lot. You need to pray for more trained workers for us, especially in the area of biblical counseling. People don't know what biblical counseling is when they have problems. It's similar to the situation here. They just don't see the need to go to the Bible for difficulties and issues. They'd rather go to a psychologist or something like that. And if you think about that, surely if we have the word of truth, we should be able to help these people, right? And so, biblical counseling is something we really want to instill in our churches as well.

26:50This is our youth group. So, I do a youth group on a Friday. We have about 50 young people that come. Your usual youth group in South Africa is you just go. Come along and you have a social time, you have some good food, and then you go home. There's no gospel. Nothing is preached. And we've completely changed that. We preach the gospel and it's growing. It's amazing. Many other churches who have almost died have said this will never work. If you go and you preach for 30 minutes to young people, they'll be gone. Well, we've grown from something like 30 up to 50 in a very short space of time.

27:29And so that's what we do. And they still have a social time. They still enjoy themselves. We still have frisbee competitions and all those kind of things. But this is our youth group on a Friday night. We enjoy fellowship dinners. This is another way to cross racial barriers, is to just have fellowship dinners together. So we do a lot of those. I'm just running out of time here. So just pray for inroads. We want to make inroads into African Zionism.

28:00We've got to make inroads. It's a cult. There are so many people that are just trapped in this cult. And it's on our doorstep. And so we are looking for ways to get into African Zionism. Here's a man. I don't know if you've got sound. Can you hear the sound on this? Maybe not. But basically, when they preach, I was invited to a funeral. There were only three white people invited to this funeral. They don't usually invite white people.

28:30Because I know one of the members of the Zionist movement there and his daughter died, and they invited me to preach. At a typical funeral, they would have eight sermons and eight eulogies, and it lasts 12 hours. And so you sit on the stage up there for about six hours. It's very painful, I can tell you, especially when it's in Zulu, and my Zulu is pretty bad, okay? And so I went up there and I preached. Most of the people understand English, so it's fine. They gave me a translator, but this friend of mine, whose daughter died, who invited me there, so this was because his daughter died, this funeral, he said to me that you were the only one that preached the gospel. Everyone else takes a text and they jump off it and they just start singing and dancing, but there's no gospel. There's no gospel. And so pray that as a result of this, we will have inroads into the Zionist movement. Because there's people there that need to hear the gospel. They haven't heard it. But they call themselves Christian. Christian Zionists. That's what they call themselves. So be in prayer for that as well.

29:35All right, I know it's time to go and get, I won't go through all this. This is the seminary we've started, so you can talk to me about that later and some of the townships that we're involved in. And let me just go ahead, if you can. That's one of the townships. You can see the violence there. This is, yeah, that was a tornado that hit us. All right, so I'll leave you. With this challenge, if you come to South Africa, you've got to eat infinkubala. That caterpillar is about this big. We dry them out, and this is the infinkubala challenge. You see, I just ate it. Riley just ate it. Nathan bailed out, and there's Cameron. He's about to eat it, but I think he's about to bail out.

30:22You watch him. He's going to bail out. Oh, he's gone. He didn't make it, okay? All right, so if you come to Africa, I'm going to give you Infinkubala. All right, let's pray. Lord, thank you for this opportunity just to share what's happened in Africa. And I pray, Lord, that you would work in everybody's hearts to realize that we do not serve a village God, but we serve the God of the universe. And Lord, I pray that every person here would think about the gospel in all these different countries and the great needs there are. And Lord, that they would send people and prayers to these places. So, Lord, I pray that you would give them a great vision of the need for the gospel in the world and realize we serve a God, a God of the universe. In Jesus' name, amen. Thank you very much.