When we touched down in Harare, Zimbabwe, in January of 1997, so lush and green and beautiful, teeming with bougainvillea and hibiscus, fresh from the frigid blasts of a historically cold Manitoba winter, George Herbert’s 17th-century poem came to mind:
“How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;
…Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness?”[1]
Little did we know that “recovered greenness” would capture our ministry over the ensuing 30 years in Southern Africa. My wife, Ruth, and I were coming out of two decades of pastoral ministry in Canada, having launched our ministries and life together following graduation in 1969, now to be ushered into leadership-training ministries in the global South. There would be buildings needing refurbishing, properties crying for help, training institutions ripe for expanded curriculum and vision, 50-year-old church bodies and Fellowships poised for renewal and revival. Lord, how we needed recovered greenness!
Moving north to Zambia a year later, we encountered a Bible college that had been raising up Pentecostal leaders since 1967. In the 1980s, a racecourse had been purchased on the Zambian Copperbelt, and the downtrodden land—with many an old stable—had been converted into a new home for Trans-Africa Theological College (now known as Trans-Africa Christian University). We were soon welcoming Canadian agronomists who came to sample the acidic soil and prescribe intensive lime treatment to improve fertility. Soon, tractors and farm equipment began arriving from PAOC churches. How we welcomed the expertise and commitment of skilled Canadian contractors, builders and foremen who, with their teams, renovated every building, built several new ones, and trained plenty of young Zambian builders along the way! Over the ensuing years, Trans-Africa Theological College became a beautiful, renovated campus, a most popular site for retreats and conferences, graced with a 700-seat chapel and facilities for 200 full-time students.
Recovered greenness! The Holy Spirit was moving strongly on campus, and we had a fulfilment of Scripture: “he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth” (Hosea 6:3). How wonderful were some of the visitations during chapel prayer times, which spilled over into nights and ensuing days of deep spiritual renewal! The third floor of our administration building became the site for our Upper Room conferences, which brought together international speakers, challenging Zambia’s emerging leaders to renew their calling to Christlike ministries and living out the Great Commission. And indeed, excellent long-term ministries were formed! There were visions, prophecies and healings. Trans-Africa Theological College became a locus for spiritual renewal during those years.
Recovered greenness! Our graduates went forth at an average of 40 per year over the next 30 years, filling the region with church planters and community leaders. We compared them to Noah’s dove of peace, leaving the Ark. They went out as emissaries of peace; emissaries of good news; emissaries of young life, young love and yes, recovered greenness. Today, many of those graduates are in positions of vital leadership across Zambia: in chaplaincy; in the armed forces; teachers, preachers, evangelists and community leaders who are recovering greenness in a country that has had a long history of wilderness seasons, with one of the world’s highest poverty rates.
Recovered greenness! Ruth and I tapped into the fountain of youth during those years. Before we left Winnipeg, Man., our medical prognoses had not been entirely encouraging. But when we came back for reviews after our first term, our doctor was pleasantly surprised. He said, “You must be doing God’s work.” True enough. We discovered that investing our lives and ministries in Zambia’s young leaders was bringing some wonderful, holistic benefits our way in return! It was a season of new dimensions of ministry—in teaching and preaching, music and worship, plus many other surprising new gifts that were uncovered simply by responding to the great needs as they arose!
Looking to the future, we are passing the mantle to the Zambian leaders of tomorrow’s church, many of whom are former students! We pray and believe that Trans-Africa Christian University, with its 50-plus years of dynamic ministry training in Zambia, will continue to train and commission young leaders for the greatest assignment in the world—living out the presence and calling of the risen Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit.
We pray for our graduates, Brigadier General Bossy Nkhoma and Lieutenant Colonel Judy Mutale, in their most influential government-related positions with the Zambian armed services. We pray for the much-needed ministries of compassion and social justice carried out by our graduates, Linda Buneme, Grace Sakala Banda and Leah Phiri. These women address grass-roots poverty and disability every week from their churches. Even as their own budgets are stretched, they respond to the urgent needs around them.
We pray for the ERDO Conservation Agriculture project recently launched on our campus. Here is a centre where our shanty town neighbours can come, improve their agriculture skills and find new ways to support their families. We pray for our tailoring school on campus, which enables women from very impoverished households, many of them grandmothers looking after several children, to develop a skill and a profitable enterprise.
We pray for dynamic young pastoral leaders like Trachsel Mulilo and David Chasamena, who not only have built up their flourishing local churches to be strong self-sustaining congregations, but continue to send out elders and leaders to evangelize in their nearby communities and plant new churches. Self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating—these are among the dynamic churches of the global South.
We pray for Victor Chanda, Jesse Kipimo and Gabriel Mumba—leading theologians in an environment which constantly needs spokespersons for sound evangelical truth. With their teaching and seminars, they are dynamic, well-trained Pentecostal leaders who generate a passion for Pentecostal studies and experience, and who duplicate themselves as they share their ministries.
We pray for Zambia’s youth population, in a nation where the median age is 17; for David Banda Zulu and Tamara Phiri, with their very expansive hearts for Zambia’s schools, especially the youth culture. Tamara interacts with non-government organizations to maximize their investment in Zambia, while not forgetting the needs of women and children. We pray for our own Barnabas Soccer League and Discipleship program operating out of Brian’s Place Youth Centre, built outside our campus walls to reach out to the most disadvantaged youth of the Zambian shanty town—that their soccer league and skills-training initiatives might continue to see young lives transformed, that the shackles of poverty might be broken, that hope for the future might be reborn.
Among our graduates is Zacheus Zulu, crusade evangelist extraordinaire, calling people to faith, commitment and repentance in large gatherings from Chipata, Zambia, to Mbala, Zambia, and from Nairobi, Kenya, to Francistown, Botswana. We pray for Gift and Barbara Mukuka, who have recently been approved as Zambian missionaries to China. This outstanding couple is helping shift the status of the church in Zambia from “receiving church” into a 21st-century “sending church!”
Recovered greenness! As we think of the burgeoning church in Zambia with its flourishing growth since the days of David Livingstone, we just marvel. This work was done by our God!
Dry seasons, rainy seasons—this is the Zambian reality, with its yearly weather patterns. Of course, spiritually dry seasons are also a reality. And so, we pray that every dry season may be followed by “the sound of abundance of rain” (1 Kings 18:41, NKJV). May the flame of Pentecostal renewal, fuelled by the prayer life of the church, always continue to burn brightly in Zambia. May the days of abundant fruitfulness always be ongoing.
Indeed, we pray that future generations may look back on our own times and witness a season of recovered greenness.
Visit https://www.paoc.org/donate/JohnKerr. This article appeared in the July/August/September 2026 issue of testimony/Enrich, a quarterly publication of The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. © 2026 The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. Photo © istockphoto.com.
[1]. George Herbert, “The Flower,” Poetry Foundation, accessed May 25, 2026, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50700/the-flower-56d22df9112c4.