Dr. Lutangu Lubasi, a former Systems Pilot was in March appointed head of the newly established regional office of African Enterprise to be based in Lusaka, Zambia. Dr. Lubasi’s passion and commitment are for organizations that restore the church to its original mandate, preaching the Gospel.
In modern Africa, the church has been marred by several challenges among them: diminishing zeal in evangelism, and the millennial challenge.
On his first tour of Malawi, Dr. Lubasi shared his thoughts on how African Enterprise will address these issues through developing and strengthening national and regional partnerships that move forward a collaborative agenda focused on advancing the Gospel agenda.
Q: Can you briefly share your background?
A: I have a big background, but basically my background is in aviation, I was trained as an aircraft engineer. But when I joined the airline as a junior officer for the airline, I decided to do inspection, I did not think I was a very good mechanic. So as a junior officer, I specialized in what is known as Non-destructive testing inspection. It means you tests the aircraft components and structures to make sure that they have no cracks and flaws, and then you put them back into service. Three years into that, the airline brought some new planes so the maintenance and the inspection really went down. So I decided to go back into my childhood ambition that was to fly. Initially, I wanted to sponsor myself, but that opportunity was denied, so two weeks after there was an internal advert for flights engineers or systems pilot. That’s how I applied. We were about seventy qualified pilots and engineers in total. I was fortunate to be one of the twenty that were selected. But what in interesting is that out of the twenty, the airline decided to slash off the number to just five people. And I was one of the five. Anyway, I was then sent to Miami, Florida to do the conversion course. And you know when you are on the flight crew, you are not expected to sit in an office, your office is the cockpit. So the drivers come to pick you on a bus from home to the airport, and when you return, they pick you from the airport and drop you at home. Therefore, if you are not working, you are not obliged to be at the office. So, having been to the US, I bought myself a car, TV and video recorder. So this was an opportunity for me to do ministry. So I used to find myself speaking to students in universities, colleges and lunch hour fellowships.
Q: Over the years, how has your ministry life been like?
A: Since then I really got busy with ministry, in fact I needed to have started in 1981 when I was in Form 5 (Grade 12), one of the things that happened was that when I got served, I had a friend whom we were staying in the same area and we did a lot of ministry work together. What stands out about those days is how a family of my Uncle, comprising seventeen people, got to know Christ because of my ministry. So, these early days of doing ministry and serving the Lord defined the kind of person I was going to be since ministry became a very important aspect of my life. So even though I was working with the airline, ministry was a top priority area. So I started visiting the aviation school, it had about 120 students on its highest. And at its lowest they would be 64 students. In the early days of my visits, born again students were just two, but when I started visiting as an associate staff, the group grew from two to thirty two in two years. In a nutshell, I found that wherever I went, wherever I worked, that component of ministry was always present with me. Perhaps, that’s one of the reasons why the Zambia Fellowship of Evangelical Students (ZAFES), which is the equivalent of SCOM (Student Christian Organisation of Malawi) here in Malawi, when the General Secretary left, they movement started looking to me and invited me to become the General Secretary. I hard to make the hard choice of leaving my career as a Systems Pilot to venture now into full time ministry, but because ministry was so heavy upon my heart, I felt it was the right thing to do, so I moved into ministry, it was a challenging job, it was not well paying, but I also knew that God was giving me an opportunity to be able to impact many young people, and I knew that was very important than for me to become a captain of the DC-10.
Q: That’s an interesting background, as the new Regional Team Leader, what excites you about the future of the African Enterprise Southern African Region that you are now leading?
A: What excites me is the great opportunity that we have now in terms of the extent and scope of our ministry. As we were saying, by coming together we can do more, even with much less resources. So, to me I feel we have an opportunity to excite the churches about the vision, not only in Zambia and Malawi, but even beyond. Here we are talking about countries like: Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Botswana and many others. But I think personally, I am very mindful that this is also a very young population so we need to pay attention to the younger generation, the millennials, they are in a world of their own. I think it is very easy for us as countries to lose this generation. So I would like us to use this opportunity to find a way to reach out to this generation.
But in many senses also, to help the churches to see that their main task is not anything else but the great commission. Evangelism and discipleship that is the reason why Jesus Christ came and died on the cross. So we shouldn’t be seen to be majoring in other things, When Christ came, He said; “I have come to seek and to save the lost”, (ref. Luke 19:10) that was His major thrust in terms of His ministry and we as the church, are an extension of His ministry so we should be seen to be focusing on that vision as well.
Q: In your own words, it’s evident that you are really passionate about ministry, so, why are you particularly zealous about the work that African Enterprise is doing in the continent?
A: Wow! That’s interesting. I think in a sense because it resonates with what I have been doing over the years, the passion that I’ve had as explained in my background. So, when I finally came in contact with African Enterprise, the first time was in 1984 when I was a student in college. And a little later I meet the likes of Festo Kivengere, at IFES, (the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students), it was an international conference that was held in Harare at a Teachers Training College. And Festo Kivengere was very involved with African Enterprise, I was in that meeting and I really loved what they had to say. But in the more recent past, it’s when AE Malawi decided to venture to do the Lusaka Leadership Initiative, I was invited to be one of the two national coordinators, but I was the one who was doing the major thrust of the work, although the one I was working with was also involved, but in a very reduced way. As part of the learning process I was sent to Malindi in Mombasa Kenya. What I saw there just blew me away. I saw 83 churches working together, 400 people from all over Kenya and another 800 from within Malindi locality. We are talking of a team of 1,200 working together trying to reach the city of Malindi and, of course it was a stratified evangelism. We went to market places, door to door evangelism, on the streets, in prisons, schools, colleges there were eleven rallies going around and we also reached out to the professionals.
But I also started paying attention to the statistics in the mission base. And initially it was a thousand, the next time I looked it was 42, 000, the day I was leaving I was preaching in the mission base, I had a look at the statistics again and I saw it was now at 62,120, and my mind started spinning. Because I started telling myself that I had never seen something like this. I have seen crusades done in Zambia, one, two, three days by an evangelist but it’s never been at this level. Just the whole scale and scope, the whole effort to reach a town. For me it was overwhelming because it resonated with what the Bible says make disciples of all nations. As the book of Mark says: “Preach the Gospel to all creatures”. And here was an organisation making that effort to literally reach all these people for Christ, for me that was very touching. And so when I got back home, that is now what the Holy Spirit started to use to challenge me, because in Zambia, I feel evangelism had started going down. In the 1970s, 80s, pastors were extremely aggressive, we used to say we only see two types of people; either you are born again or you are not and if you are not born again, then we will come after you. So there was that aggressiveness. But nowadays, we see churches that are not aggressive when it comes to evangelism, we have deacons in the church who do not know how to share the Gospel, we have elders who have never won a soul to Christ, and sometimes you have pastors who are not very concerned about the Great Commission. So, I see that African Enterprise has a compelling vision that pushes us back to the great commons. So for me the excitement is to use that compelling vision to call the church to its original mandate which was not given by any man, but the Lord Jesus Christ himself who says: “ All authority on earth and in heaven has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”, so that excites me because I think that is the main role of the church, the core business of the church.
Q: Any last words?
A: I think like I said to the AE Malawi team, I urge us to pray. This is the work of ministry and we cannot do it in our own strength, wisdom, expertise and experience. We are going through unchartered waters and we need God’s spirit to guide us step by step because if we can do it successfully, then the nations are going to benefit, and of course if we can not only have the vision, but also unite behind that vision, for the right course not like the people who were building the tower of Babel. I believe that God Himself will take us step by step and guide us to fulfill His will.
African Enterprise Malawi 