Conrad Mbewe was born into a tight-knit family in the African country of Zambia. Yet he entered a dark period at age nine, when his mother—the sunshine of his life—passed away. In response to her death, his father turned to the bottle, even as Conrad and his two siblings were taken in by other relatives.   

In this Church and Family Life podcast, Conrad gives his life story, sharing how his elder sister’s faith in Christ floored him. As their father sold off treasured family belongings to buy liquor, his sister radiated joy—singing “Amazing Grace” while she prepared a meal that was next to nothing. But Conrad still thought his “good deeds” were enough. This changed when a friend declared to him that salvation is solely God’s work. Driven to his knees, Conrad repented and gave his life to Christ. After a short stint as a mining engineer, he accepted a call at age 25 to pastor Kabwata Baptist Church, located in the Zambian capital of Lusaka. Serving there since 1987, Conrad has helped to start roughly 40 other Reformed churches in countries across Africa. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we have Conrad and Beiwei with us to tell us his life story. And you know, he really didn't think he was all that bad of a guy until... Well, I hope you enjoy the story. So Jason, we have a great privilege to be with Conrad and Beiwei today.

It's fantastic. I can't wait to hear about his life. Yeah, pastor of Kibwata Baptist Church in Zambia. And you've preached at our conferences before, and I'm just so happy to have you come and preach again at the Making Disciples Conference. Thank you.

I really appreciate the opportunity to come again and be part of the ministry and fellowship. Thank you very much. Yeah. And we want to hear your life story. We want to hear how the Lord has worked in your life all these years.

So there you go. Your life story. Tell us your life story. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, I've been born and bred right here in Zambia in southern Africa. And my parents would have been among the first generation that was entering the workforce when Zambia was gaining independence from Great Britain. So those would have been the years, end of the 1950s going into the 1960s. My mom was Zambia's second registered nurse in the history of the country. So you can imagine it was early years.

And my dad was a teacher. The second, and I have an elder sister and a younger sister. So I'm slotted right in between. And my parents also raised another young man who was in the wider family, a nephew of mine, but they raised him up as my brother because they wanted to have two boys and two girls in the family. The three of us were born through caesarean section and consequently, my parents realized that the fourth one had to be brought in through our form of adoption.

So I grew up within the context of Zambia, but tragedy hit our family very early when in 1970, going into 1971, my mom developed complications. And before I hit my 10th birthday, I was only nine years old, my mother died. She was the sunshine in the family. Like any mom, we were truly endeared to her. So that was a very dark period in our lives as a family.

Our culture is such that when a thing like that happens, then you're, if you lose a mom, then your mother's sister comes in to take you to help raise you. If you lose the father, then your father's brother comes in, in order to help, especially across the teenage years. So in our case, it was my mother who died, saw her immediate elder sister came and took my two sisters and myself. They couldn't take the other young man was brought in because he was on my father's side and wasn't there for culturally to be taken as well. So we then went to grow up with their children.

They already had eight children, four boys and four girls, throw in the three of us. We went from being in a home of four people to a home where we were 11 individuals. But thankfully it was on a farm. So there was enough space. There was enough to do, helping out with farm work, raising chicken, collecting eggs, growing corn and sweet potatoes and so forth, milking cows.

So I went right from city life into semi rural living. But it was great. My cousin, the four boys that was with, were more gifted than I was, especially in sports. And therefore that really stretched me. They were also very gifted in music, and so again that stretched me.

So it was a place where I was always the last, but I was being stretched until I came to the end of secondary school and was preparing to get into university. And it was really during that period that the Lord dealt with me and in the process saved me. So let me just take a few steps backwards and deal with the spiritual aspect. My parents were going to a denomination that came out of the missionary society that sent out the great missionary explorer David Livingstone. It's called the United Church of Zambia.

So that's where we grew up. My great-grandfather was an indigenous missionary for that same denomination. So that's when I was born, that's we went for Sunday school and all kinds of activities up until dad died, rather mom died. And then when we moved on to live with mom's elder sister, they were still in the same church denomination. So we simply continued with the same activities.

The main downside was that it was not a gospel preaching church. So we got to know all the stories of the Bible, David and Goliath, Moses leading the Israelites out of the land of captivity in Egypt, Samson and Delilah, Solomon and his wisdom as he dealt with those two women that were fighting over a baby and so forth. So We enjoyed all that, but never quite wrestled with the demands of the gospel, Christ having died on the cross, the need for repentance and faith in Him. We missed out on that. So fast forward to growing up now in this family.

What happened is while I was still in high school, a friend of mine tried to evangelize me. That much I remember. He took me aside from everybody else and began sharing the gospel with me. The major difficulty I had with what he was trying to do with me was that his life was as bad as mine was. And I've never forgotten thinking, you know, what exactly does this guy want me to do?

Because we do the same things. We are in the same mischief. How old were you at this time? I would have been, I would say in my mid teens. So I'll put it around the age of 15, 16, thereabouts, when this friend of mine was speaking to me.

And so all the way until I finished high school, I was still the kind of person who thinks I'm a Christian because I go to church and I was baptized as a baby. And that's it. I may not be perfect. I may not be that good, but you know, I'm a Christian. Where that view got completely blown into splinters was when my elder sister got converted.

She got converted at a local Baptist church in her first year in university. So the transformation in her life was really extraordinary. What had happened is as we came back to dad's home, dad had become an alcoholic. And you can understand he lost his wife and lost his children literally in one sweep. Right.

So though he didn't really lose us, we're coming back. But there was that interval when he had to piece his life together again, and he took to drinking. And so when we got home, anything that could be sold and turned into alcohol was sold. So home became like a place where locusts have passed through and eaten anything that is green. So I was very depressed when I came back into that house and saw what was once a beautiful home reduced to basically a shell.

So I could not understand my elder sister because my elder sister was full of joy at that time. We were in the midst of extreme poverty, but she was singing amazing grace as she was putting together a meal that was literally nothing, just a few scraps being put together. Hey, Conrad, were you living in the villages or were you living in the city? We were now back in the city, in the capital city. But you grew up in the country.

In the capital city of Lusaka. So what happened is in the earlier years before mom died, because mom and dad were among the first government workers in the new republic. They were being moved around from one major city to the other by the government. But finally, as they were being promoted, they arrived in the capital city and then mom died. So we were still in the capital city then.

And then we moved into this farming community for about five years after mom died. Then we came back into the capital city. So this is now city life we are in. And at that time, Zambia only had one university, the whole country, and it was in the capital city. So my sister went to this university, and then a year later, I joined her.

So it was in the midst of that, that I was then seeing this extraordinary change. So with that, I began to speak seriously what I saw in her. And by the grace of God, One of my friends got converted and wrote to me an evangelistic letter. He shared with me how we are sinners, how deserving, how God in His love has provided a Savior in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, who has paid the full penalty for sin and consequently invites us to take on this free salvation through repentance and faith. And that there's absolutely nothing we can add to this.

We come simply with open arms, seeking to receive the gift from him. That came like a blow between the eyes because literally it was destroying the entire foundation that I had under my feet. I was thinking, okay, I'm not perfect, but I'm not that bad. I've been going to church. Surely if God weighs my good deeds against my bad deeds, I hope my good deeds will be more than my bad deeds.

That was the kind of view that I had. This letter swept all that away. And so on one hand, I had a real Christian in front of me. On the other, I now had the way in which I was to become like her. So it took about three months of wrestling with this.

So that was from December 1978 to March 1979. So finally, by the end of March, I came to the conclusion, I have failed to change my life. I need to go back to that same letter. So I opened that letter again, which I'd received the previous December, read it through, and again, it was pointing me to the cross. And so that's how I nailed by my bedside.

I remember the day, 30th March, it was a Friday, 1979. I knelt by my bedside and just prayed to the Lord to forgive me, to accept me, to transform me. And I did not realize how great an impact that moment was going to have on the rest of my life. I was thinking that I might begin to sense some real joy in my heart. That never quite happened.

But what I specifically remember was that the burden that I had came to an end. It was like it just melted away. And the previous day I had bought a Bible. So I opened it right in the middle of my eyes fell on the book of Ecclesiastes. And I literally read from chapter one to chapter 12, because it was sweet to me.

I could not believe how sweet the Bible was. Oh my. And so with that began my new life in Christ. The greatest challenge was really to change friends. That to me was the greatest challenge because I was fairly naughty and I had naughty friends and they now came with me to university and university life.

You don't have all these restrictions around you. So my friends went from being naughty to being even worse in their naughtiness. So it took me roughly just under a year to make a clean break from those kinds of friends. And my sister was a great help because she would come to my room and then would go off to the local Baptist church together. And that's how I began to grow in grace.

Somewhere after my first year, I got baptized. So I got baptized on exactly the same date as my conversion, but a year later. So Sunday, 30th March, 1980 was the day of my baptism. It wasn't planned that way. It was just the Lord's providence.

I began to sense a call to the ministry. I thought I was just being ambitious, so I kept rebuking myself a lot. Every time I would read a passage of the Bible, I would have this strong urge to proclaim what I have just read and understood. So I consulted an older Christian who basically advised me to pray about it to the Lord, accept what the Lord might be doing in my life and then wait for him to open the door. And so basically that's what I did.

I went back into my room, it was on campus. I prayed to the Lord. And what I did then was to basically say from now on, I'm really going to give myself to Christian service. So in the process, I became the primary leader of the Christian Union on campus at the university by the time I was finishing university. I also was made the primary leader of the Christian students in that movement across the whole country by the time I was graduating.

And This is where Kabwata Baptist Church comes in as well, because in the last two years, or three years of my being at university, the church I was attending, Lusaka Baptist Church, then planted Kabwata Baptist Church. And I was part of the team that began to go and do outreach on weekends. What year was that and how old were you? So the outreach work began in May 1981 and in June, July 1984, I left to go and work in the Zambian copper mines. So since 1981, I would have been, let's see, I would have been about 20 years old, no, in fact, 19 years old, because it was in May and my birthday is in December.

So I was still just still in my late teens when I was thus involved. In 1984, when I was 22 years old, I then left that city to go and start working in the mines because I now graduated. And it was while I was working in the mines that Kawata Baptist Church now called me back to come and be their pastor. So I'd been away for three years. I came back in 1987.

Tell us about the work in the mines. What were you doing in the copper mines? Yeah, well, I was a mining engineer. That's what my training was. And so, and it was a copper mine.

We were going underground. And basically, we would be changing from going underground for about six months to participate in one level or another of extracting copper ore. And then the next six months, we would normally be working from what is called a planning office. So you are planning what the guys going underground are going to do. So we kept alternating one thing to the other.

And perhaps the work that I did that really stood out for me was when we were putting a installing a crusher about you people speaking miles. So it probably would be like maybe one mile underground. So we speak in kilometers and meters rather. So I'd be speaking in terms of 1,500 meters. So installing the crusher down underground, which would then be the first to crush the copper ore that you blast and then with conveyor belts bring it out to the smelter.

So that's the work that I was doing in the mines and then very involved with the local church that I was attending in that copper mining town called Mufolira. And Teuka Water Baptist Church called me and then yeah, I moved over. I had been waiting for seven years for it to happen. So when the call came, there was nothing in me about struggling to hang on to my mining engineering job. I hung up my hard hat and left to go and start pastoring.

This small group of people that were still meeting in a rented hall, the membership at that time was about 35 individuals. And I've been there since. Oh, yes. I married soon after. What were you like, 24 years old or something like that?

When you started pastoring? Yes, I was, let's see, 1987. So I would have been 25 years old. 25, okay. Yeah, 25.

And then I married, so I began September. Then in January, I married Felistas, whom I met in that copper mining town. We're going to the same church. And the Lord blessed us with three children. We adopted another three from the wider family.

So the Lord enabled us to raise six children. They've since all grown up, they've left home, they fell in love and abandoned us, as you know. And, but they are all within the city. So we get to see them together with our grandchildren. Oh, that's wonderful.

That's wonderful. So you were 25 when you got your first church. I was 26. What was that? It was a little, it's a little young, isn't it?

Yes. Yes. Looking back now, and also when I see the 25 year olds in my church, I said to myself, what were those guys thinking? You know, the good, the good part of it is that you make, you make, You can make a lot of mistakes in your early first 10 years. Yeah, and people always say, yeah, he's a young man.

He'll grow out of it, yes. And then, but the Lord's really used you to plant churches all over Zambia. There's been a tremendous upwelling of Reformed Baptist theology. Can you just tell us a little bit about that? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, what basically happened is in the early 1990s, I would say roughly 1993-94, there was a church that was about to close in a town just south of the capital city where Capoata Baptist Church is. So they sent an SOS call to us asking us to help them. And at about exactly the same time, there were two couples in a poorer part of our city who had come to the Reformed faith and they couldn't therefore stay in the church where they were. So they also appealed to us to plant a church in that neighborhood.

So it was in the midst of that that as elders we convinced our members that we begin getting involved in missions. It was difficult because we had no church building, we were surviving on being helped from time to time by the Lusaka Baptist Church that planted kibwata. And so the members were really saying we don't have resources, but look, we were convinced that the Lord wanted us to do this and we began. So initially we were responding to people saying, come and help us. But somewhere along the line we thought, okay, let's be a little more deliberate, strategic.

So we began planting churches in what we call provincial capitals. So it's a bit like state capitals, so that those churches can then go on to plant other churches. So that's what we began doing. Along the way, we then began thinking, let's plant churches in the capital cities of other African countries, English speaking African countries. So we also began doing that while we are also still planting churches within Zambia.

So it's really been out of that church planting effort that we've seen roughly 40 churches planted both in the country and in different African countries. Praise the Lord. What a blessing. What a blessing. Well, Conrad, thank you so much.

I just am so looking forward to you coming and preaching at our conference. And we really appreciate hearing your story. It's a blessing always to hear how somebody is rescued by some of the strangest circumstances. And Your sister, her life was changed. What a joy.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. And you know, you can argue against a philosophy, but you can't argue against a life transformed. It's telling you the threats.

Yeah, and that's really what the Lord used. Amen. Amen. Good deal. Okay, well, there you have it.

We did it. We'll be putting it up. We hope people are able to hear your life story. Thank you, brother. Thank you.

It's all of grace, all of grace. Amen. Amen to that. Amen to that. Well, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast.

We really hope to see you next time. Life.com