Last evening, in our sanctuary, I was with many friends as we worshiped God and listened to the story of Jim & Sallie Collins and their time in a Christian community in Zimbabwe. Then, we had the Lord’s Supper together.
Linda and I led worship, and John Collins accompanied my guitar-playing on the violin. There were times last night when I felt so moved by God, especially as we sang about what the cross of Christ means, that I could not sing. At one point I just told everybody that I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this, so they should just keep singing. For me, it was one of those presence-of-God moments that was tangible and manifest and experiential. I’m thinking about this now, and I am thankful for it. Thank God that he sent Jesus. Thank God for the cross.
Then Jim and Sallie shared. They did such an excellent job! And, it was hard for them. Why? Because they served together with 16 white Jesus-followers for several months together, and this group called Community of Reconciliation helped the dirt-poor Zimbabweans in the area, raising crops, collecting water in a parched land, worshiping together, holding Bible studies, and any other things.
Then one evening, during a Bible study, anti-government rebels carrying guns and grenades and AK-47s invaded. And threatened to kill them all. At one point a rebel held a gun to Sallie’s forehead. Jim and Sallie were separated from their 4-year-old son Michael. The rebels did not kill them that evening. But they vowed to come back in a year. And they did come back in a year. That’s when they killed 16 Jesus-followers, including children and babies. They killed them, not with guns, but with knives and hatchets. They tied each one’s hands behind their backs with barbed wire. Then, one by one, forcing the others to watch, the rebels hacked them to death. They threw grenades in the buildings and burnt them. One little boy escaped. And one 12-year-old girl who was forced to watch the one-by-one torturing of her family and all her friends was given a note by the murderers and told to take it to the government officials. Which she did. She and the boy are alive today.
Jim and Sallie left before this happened. They had to return to their home in Kansas City. One day they got a call and were told the horrible story.
This slaughter in Zimbabwe was international news. I’ve put one of the New York Times articles about this below.
A memorial service was held. People came from afar to honor these slain, good people, who possessed no weapons to defned themselves, which was a rarity in Zimbabwe at the time.
The day after the memorial service the rains came and filled up the dams and ponds the Community had built for the people.
Jim and Sallie shared this story last night, accompanied by many photos of the people, the Zimbabweans who were helped, the buildings and dams, and the aftermath of the killings to include a photo of a blood-spattered wall in a room where the executions were held. Then we took communion. During communion we played a tape that was made of the blacks and whites who loved Jesus with all their hearts worshiping together in their African dialect. I sat there, as did many of you last night, pondering what happened to Jesus on the Friday following the Last Supper. I thought of the Cross. Of sin defeated. Of Satan and evil and the spiritual battle we are in and the victory over evil we have in the Cross and Resurrection. I thought of death. As Paul said, now death has lost its sting.
For me last evening was a communion service I shall never forget. So today - remember the Cross. Worship God. Follow Jesus.
ZIMBABWEAN VOWS TO PUNISH KILLERS
Special to the New York Times
Published: Sunday, November 29, 1987
Enos Nkala, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Home Affairs in charge of the country’s police force, today viewed the macabre scene at Olive Tree Farm near here where 8 of 16 murdered missionaries were hacked to death Thursday.
The somber Mr. Nkala stood in front of the small guest bedroom where the Christian missionaries, hands tied behind their backs, were killed by 20 anti-Government rebels.
Mr. Nkala left the room to walk among the acres of neatly tended vegetable and corn fields, commenting on the new irrigation pipes and new corrals and sheds for animals.
”This is so tragic,” he said. ”These religious people had really developed their farm, and they were working very much with the local peasants.” Helped Surrounding Peasants
He was told how the Pentecostal group, calling itself the Community of Reconciliation, held classes for the surrounding farmers. The members had allocated plots of their irrigated fields to black farmers who could keep the vegetables they grew.
”This land will never be so well cared for,” he said. ”A dark cloud of death has settled here.”
Then Mr. Nkala became angry. ”We are going to account for this,” he shouted. ”We are going to get these dissidents.”
”This Gayigusu is their leader, and he is still around here,” the Cabinet minister said, pointing to the granite hills surrounding the farm. ”Our men are out there now, all around, and we are going to get him. We want that Gayigusu, we want his head.”
Mr. Nkala’s vow of vengeance contrasted sharply with the nonviolent Christian spirit that pervaded the two homesteads, Olive Tree Farm and New Adam’s Farm, where the other missionaries were killed, about 30 miles south of Bulawayo. She Watched Helplessly
Esnath Dube, who had helped care for the children on the farms, told Mr. Nkala and other officials how she had watched helplessly as the victims were led, one by one, into the room where they were hacked to death, apparently because the rebels felt shots would alert nearby soldiers and policemen.
”They were peaceful, silent as they died,” Miss Dube said. ”They didn’t scream or cry. But I was screaming and crying. I vomited. It was awful.”
John Russell, 74 years old, had been living at New Adam’s Farm for five years but was away on vacation when the killings occurred. Two of his daughters and four of his grandchildren died.
”I don’t think I can come back here again,” he said. ”I love these farms and have been very happy here, but I just can’t come back.”
Mr. Russell said his daughters and their husbands had helped found the Community of Reconciliation to help bring Zimbabwe’s blacks and whites together after the 10-year guerrilla war to end white-minority rule.
”We all decided that we could not have armed guards and security fences to protect us from the dissidents,” he said, referring to the standard security measures taken by white farmers here. ”How could we live in a fortress and expect the people to trust in God? No, we couldn’t.” Squatters Are Denounced
Although the missionaries were highly respected by small-scale black farmers, they were not so popular among the poorest of the poor, the landless people forced by the shortage of land and the current drought to become squatters on the land of others.
”I hold the squatters responsible for calling in the dissidents against these missionaries,” Mr. Nkala said. He said that when the Government last week ordered squatters off the two mission farms, some of them issued threats.
There are thousands of squatters in the region, Matabeleland, and Mr. Nkala said the dissidents were acting on their grievances.
”These are problems we have in Zimbabwe,” Mr. Nkala said. ”The dissidents and the squatters are our own political and ethnic problems.”
”But we live in southern Africa, and all our problems are intertwined,” he said. ”You cannot separate them. South Africa is involved in backing these dissidents, just as they are backing Renamo in Mozambique and Unita in Angola.”
‘THOSE PEOPLE HAD A VISION’
KANSAS CITY, Nov. 28 (Special to The New York Times) - Members of the Community of Reconciliation knew the risks they were facing in Zimbabwe, according to the pastor of a Kansas City church that has helped support their mission.
”Those people had a vision,” said the Rev. Noel Alexander, pastor of the nondenominational Kansas City Fellowship Church, who has twice visited the missionary community with a team of supporters from his congregation.
”They knew the risks,” he said, ”because they had had confrontations with the dissidents before.”
His church was one of several that supported the little community of Pentecostal Christians. To give the community ”cash flow,” Mr. Alexander said, his church had helped them buy cattle. He said they had used some of that cash to buy blankets for Africans.
”They were a humble, selfless people who literally laid down their lives for their cause,” he said. ”That cause, as their name implied, was the reconciliation of man with God and man with man.”
Speaking of one of two Americans who were slain, David Emerson, 35, a native of Minnesota, Mr. Alexander said he was to have been married to Penelope Lovett, another victim. The other American was Karen Alice Sharon Ivesdahl, 34, a North Dakota native.
