Pastor Stephen Lungu had led the life of a sinner before he found Christ. At the age of five, he was abandoned by his mother and sent to live in an orphanage where he was beaten every day. At the age of twelve, he was living under a bridge, addicted to drugs and was the leader of a violent gang called the Black Shadows. Lungu remembers spiralling into a cycle of bitterness and hatred towards God and made it his aim to terrorise Christians and kill anyone who carried a Bible.

“I had embraced the Marxist ideology because we were told that the Bible was brought to Africa by the white man to brainwash the Black people and make them slaves. I hated anything to do with Jesus,” he remembered later.

When he was twenty, Lungu and his gang planned to attack a tent church in the capital city of Harare, by setting off petrol bombs and killing Christians as they fled. “I want everyone inside that tent to die,” he told his friends, “At 7 PM I will whistle, and everybody throw their stones and petrol bombs into the tent entrance.”

Some minutes before the clock reached 7, Stephen entered the tent and was struck by the testimony of a young girl speaking. “There was a strange, uncanny authority and resonance with which she spoke of forgiveness and a new start in life,” he said, “and I suddenly felt very dirty and shabby.”

After her testimony, the preacher quoted 2 Corinthians 8:9 – “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes, he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.’  Stephen recalled the significance of this moment: “Suddenly I began to understand what Christianity was all about… It was for someone like me!  I could identify with this Jesus.  He had suffered in all the ways that I knew so well. Poverty, oppression, hunger, thirst, loneliness.  I had known all of these, and so had he… My wages were death, but Jesus paid the price for me.  On the cross, he had become a nobody that I could become a somebody”. 

Lungu accepted Christ as his saviour that night and began a new life preaching on Zimbabwe’s streets. He was taught by Patrick Johnstone, a British missionary and author of “Operation World.” Lungu began a successful career as an evangelist, first at Dorothea Mission, then as the Malawi Team Leader at African Enterprise. In 2007 he became AE’s second International Team Leader until he retired in 2013. Lungu authored his autobiography, Out of the Black Shadows: The Amazing Transformation of Stephen Lungu, where he shares his full testimony. He is survived by his wife, Rachel, and their six children.

Source: Persecution.org