Church Planter (Lozi People) Western Province, Zambia

Shannon and his family will be joining Sean and his family in going to preach and teach the Gospel and establish biblical churches among the Lozi people. The Lozi are an isolated people group living along the Zambezi River in Western Province, Zambia.

Testimony

I was born in 1970. When I was four years old God saved my parents, Michael and Linda Reece from a life of sin . The transformation truly was profound. A pastor friend of the family tells me to this day that in all of his years of ministry he has never seen a couple so radically changed as my Dad and my Mom. I am convinced of God's unconditional election and regeneration not only by scripture (Rom. 8:29, Eph 1:4, Jn 6:37) but also by experience. Looking back on my growing up years, I see a real inevitability to it all.

My brothers and I grew up in a home that I can only describe as a "gospel incubator". All of this was the grace of God at work on my behalf. I was reared, like Timothy (2 Tim. 1:5, 3:15), acquainted with the scriptures that made me wise for salvation.

When I was five years old, I realized, however simply, that I was an unfit sinner, God was holy, I deserved hell, I was sorry for my sin, I needed a savior, and that I wanted Jesus. At the time, I could not articulate accurately the change that took place in my heart. But I can remember to this day a strange new desire to read and memorize scripture, to witness to kids at school, to pray, and to obey my parents, all without being told or prodded. It is possible that this could have been from false motivation. Nonetheless, I had an experience of intimacy with the Lord and spiritual fruit as a child that is difficult to explain away.

I rebelled against the Lord for a time during my teenage years. I used my Dad's death in 1984 from esophageal cancer as an excuse to run from the Lord and to indulge my flesh. I was attracted and seduced by what the world offered. I was curious and wanted to find out for myself instead of heeding my parents' counsel and correction. This falling into sin came in cycles for a season throughout my teen years. By the grace of God, this lifestyle of sin did not continue long-term. The Lord granted repentance and restoration during college. Praise Christ! He did not leave me to myself and, during my time at college, He disciplined me and drew me back.

Stephanie and I were married during my last year of college, December 1992. Looking back on my marriage over the past 15 years, I see that God brought Stephanie into my life primarily to transform me into the image of Jesus and to train me to love unconditionally and sacrificially (and to be loved this way by my wife). Using Stephanie as a mirror, God has exposed all my hidden, wicked selfishness and pride and forced both reckoning and warfare. The battle against my own flesh grows in ferocity because of two great realities in my life: my hatred of my own depravity apart from Christ, and my desire to be with Him. I also see the seriousness of killing my sin in scripture. Jesus threatened hell if I will not wage war against sin (Matt. 5:29-30) and He said that only violent men will enter into heaven (Matt. 11:12). Not only did He reveal my sins and weaknesses and generated a resolution in me to fight them, but Christ also began to reveal Himself to me as the Great Reward.

I had an experience with the Lord in 2003 that I cannot fully explain except to describe it as an awakening. The Lord took me deeper and farther in, to another level of sanctification. The experience was so profound that it felt like salvation. I finally admitted that I was bored with God and with spiritual things. I went through the motions mostly out of a sense of duty but not out of true delight in Christ. I was explaining this condition to a pastor/mentor/friend who offered to go through the book Desiring God with me. We agreed to meet to discuss one chapter a week. It took about three months to get through that book, (I was also reading Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer at the time) and by the end of those three months, my life was turned upside down. I poured out all my heart to Jesus, repenting for my lack of zeal, and begging Him to show me what was so big about Him anyway because I just did not see it. Jesus said, "How much more does the Heavenly Father know how to give good gifts to those who ask?" God proceeded to blow my mind with taste after taste, discovery after discovery of His immensity, His beauty, and His excellence. I saw His glory everywhere - in His attributes, in the Gospel, and in His creation. He placed new taste buds on my spiritual tongue and gave me an appetite for things of which I had never known before - deep, hidden things. I saw the depth of my offense against a holy and just God. I saw some of his infinite grace in letting me enjoy anything good. I saw the absolute surety of Christ's covenant love for me - He bought me with His blood and His atonement was not wasted. In fact, it accomplished all that it was intended to accomplish. I began reading my Bible and other good books with my journal open right beside them, writing out prayers, scriptures and meditations. It was a very exciting time. I journeyed through books like: Don't Waste Your Life and The Pleasures of God, by John Piper; The Pursuit of God, by A.W. Tozer; The Normal Christian Life, by Watchman Nee; Absolute Surrender, by Andrew Murray; The Weight of Glory, by C.S. Lewis; The Enemy Within, by Kris Lundgard (a retelling of The Mortification of Sin); Morning and Evening, by Charles Spurgeon; and Honey From out of the Rock, by Thomas Wilcox. The discovery of the possibility of pure and unbounded pleasure in the glory of God has been the greatest discovery of my life.

Finally, I am learning to trust in the finished work of Christ. It is not an over-simplification to say that the answer to every problem, every question, and every dilemma is "Christ". He will do what must be done in my life and in the world. Will I rest in that reality? Will I abide there in Him? I believe I have an active role to play, but it is His power that must animate me to do anything (Col. 1:29, Phil. 2:12-13). What separates any dead work of the flesh from an act of faith that pleases God is conscious dependency on the supernatural power of Christ in that moment, in that action (Heb. 11:6, 1 Pet. 4:11, Gal. 2:20).

Life really is bittersweet. By that I mean that I have tasted just enough of the sweetness of Christ to be ruined. I can't go back. I wouldn't want to. At the same time I grow weary of battling my own flesh. Every year this becomes increasingly bitter. I know there is more of Him, far more than I experience on a regular basis. My experience of Him is blocked for a dozen reasons including my own remaining sin, my finite frailty, and the Lord's wisdom in occasionally hiding his face from me. Sometimes it seems that I live with one foot in eternity (at least when I catch glimpses of it) and one foot in the here and now - a very awkward and tiring position! My theme verse of late has been Romans 12:12 which says, "Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer." I really want to be more like that. I want to be filled with hope and patient in pain and constant in prayer because Christ my everlasting joy is just over the horizon.

Ministry Calling

In 2001, my wife Stephanie and I traveled to northern Botswana with Campus Crusade for Christ on our first short-term mission trip. Although we both came home with a distaste for some of the doctrines and methodologies that we witnessed in Campus Crusade, we were struck by the general intensity of spiritual and physical need in other parts of the world. Up until that point we had been sheltered Americans, living out comfortably numb, middle-class lives surrounded with a false sense of security and purpose just like everybody else. God used that trip to Botswana to awaken in both of us at least an awareness of lost, hurting, enemies of Christ, outside the borders of the USA.

At that same time, I began to learn more about foundational truths within the Gospel such as:
- the depth of human depravity
- the reason why sin is such an offense to a holy and just God
- the covenant love of God in election and regeneration
- the dual cross-work of Christ (freeing sinners from the penalty and power of sin)
- the freedom of living as a justified sinner
- the desperate need for the power of the Holy Spirit for daily living.

This was just a sample of the massive realities that I was seeing. God was using men like Charles Leiter and John Piper to open a treasure chest of incredible truths I had heard about but never apprehended clearly.

In 2003, I traveled to Guatemala City to work with EMI (engineering ministries international) on a design project at a seminary campus there. One day we went to visit a ministry that was reaching out to people who scraped out some kind of life in the city dump. God delivered a shock that jolted me even further into reality. The stench of that place was inescapable and it made me gag. I thought all kinds of things. It hit me that, apart from Christ, I was just like that stench in the nostrils of God. I saw that the condition of the people living in the dump was a result of original sin and the fall and the curse and it grieved me. I realized that the scriptures that talked about the "rich", the scriptures I had assumed were about somebody else, suddenly applied to me! It occurred to me that, compared to 2/3 of the rest of the world, I am rich. I felt a moral obligation that this crisis should be fixed; that I had to do something. Finally, it was as if I heard God ask me, "Would you serve me here? Among this stench and these people for the rest of your life?" I remember the dilemma of feeling repulsed and broken at the same time by my pride, selfishness and a general unwillingness to "stoop that low". I went home broken. It was like I'd been kicked in the gut.

I couldn't read passages like Proverbs 24:10-12 without weeping. I felt personally responsible. I believed in the sovereignty of God. I knew that salvation was completely an act of grace on God's part. Yet I realized that His delivery vehicle for the good news of this gift of grace is His Church. The Gospel is carried and communicated by people! Praise God He intends to use frail, little people and refuses to do it any other way so that He might be displayed and He might be praised.

I went back to Africa in 2004, this time to Zambia. Looking back, I see that His calling was progressive. He was in no hurry. Year after year, trip after trip God took me back to the same villages among the Lozi people in the Western Province. I began to realize that short-term trips weren't going to cut it. The work of the Gospel stalled out every time we went back home. I also grew extremely restless and dissatisfied with my job. I saw the absolute futility of what I was doing in the trade-show industry: designing fashion and sports apparel exhibits in order to entice people to buy what they did not need with money they did not have to impress people they cared nothing about. It was nauseating to me. I was working late in Orlando, Florida on a design project and I received two transcribed letters by email from Dominic Makwasa and Mweemba Njolomba begging us to come back and bring more bibles and teach them. The juxtaposition of those two works - promoting covetousness vs. teaching the gospel was gut-wrenching. These Lozi men might as well have been from Macedonia calling to the Apostle Paul. Again, it was specific. It was not like a general thought, "Boy, somebody ought to invest their lives in these people." I felt pricked in my heart and personally responsible for the work God had already started.

A few years later in 2006, Paul Washer went with a couple of us out to see the Lozi. We had asked for HeartCry's assistance because we knew we were in over our heads. After spending a couple of days with the people in the villages interacting with them, Paul said some very direct things to me that only confirmed the work God was already doing in my heart. He said, "Shannon, I watched you with the people today. You have a way with them. Are you sure that you are not supposed to come and live here?" One night he looked me in the eyes and said, "If you do not come here, these people are going to die and go to hell. If you don't care for these, who will? They have no one else. Short-term trips aren't going to cut it anymore. You need to teach these people the gospel day in and day out." And another time, "This place is worth your life. You could spend your whole life here and it would not be a wasted life."

I spent hours in private prayer with my face to the floor weeping and asking for God to give me more grace. I felt very unworthy and very humbled. Over three years (from 2005 to 2008) the Lord moved me into a position at Calvary Baptist Church as a director of missions and then on to join up with HeartCry in Muscle Shoals to prepare to move to Zambia to work full-time. I continue to be comforted by passages like I Corinthians 1:17-31, Isaiah 64:4, and Isaiah 66:1-2 that remind me that it is God's delight to use the most humble means to reach the world so that His glory might be seen and praised most clearly. My job is to play the part of the needy beneficiary. God is the mighty benefactor and His own zeal drives His work as Psalm 52:10 says, "The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God."