17/10/2026
Experience Counts... 🙌
THE JOURNEY OF A VILLAGE PASTOR
Part One: Nemangwe, Gokwe — 2001
There are seasons in life when you are doing your best, giving everything you have, and yet, when you look at yourself beside other people, you feel as though you are not making much progress. You know you are working hard. You know you are sacrificing. You even know that God is using you. But somehow, the evidence of your progress does not seem to match the effort you are putting in.
That was the kind of season I found myself in when I was deployed to pastor a church in Nemangwe, Gokwe, in 2001.
For those who may not know Zimbabwe very well, Nemangwe is in the Gokwe area of Midlands Province, in the western part of the country. It is a rural community associated with a business centre that serves the surrounding villages. The wider Gokwe region is well known for cotton farming, which has historically been an important part of the local economy. Nemangwe was a growth point, but it was still very much a rural setting.
That was where my journey as a young pastor was taking place.
I was single at the time, young, and full of zeal for the ministry. I wanted to become a better pastor. I wanted to lead a successful church. I wanted to see growth, progress, and the kind of results that would demonstrate that God had truly called me into ministry.
I was not entering the ministry casually. I had a genuine desire to serve God and to do well in the work I had been given. I wanted to make my spiritual father, Baba Guti, proud. I wanted to grow in the teachings I had received from him and see those teachings produce fruit in the lives of the people I was leading.
But there was something I had not fully understood at the time: having a calling does not mean that the journey will be easy, and being sincere does not automatically make your circumstances favourable.
The church I was pastoring was small. No matter how much I tried, it remained a rural church. I could preach, pray, visit people, conduct crusades, and give myself to the work, but I could not simply transform the church into a large congregation because I wanted it to grow.
Yet there was something beautiful about that church.
The people loved me.
They loved my leadership and appreciated my preaching. They welcomed me, listened to me, and gave me their affection. I knew that I was not ministering to people who had rejected me. I was among people who genuinely valued me as their pastor.
That meant a lot to me.
I was sincere in my work. I taught the doctrines and teachings of Baba Guti, my father in the Lord, and I wanted the people to grow spiritually. I conducted small crusades, and during deliverance sessions, I witnessed people manifesting what I understood to be demonic spirits. I saw what I believed to be the power of God working through my ministry, and those experiences encouraged me greatly.
They gave me satisfaction. They reminded me why I was in ministry.
I would look at what was happening and feel encouraged that, despite my age and my circumstances, God was using me.
But while I was enjoying these spiritual experiences, another part of my life was becoming increasingly difficult.
I was poor.
I do not mean that I was simply living modestly while everything else was in place. I mean that my financial circumstances were a genuine struggle, and they affected how I saw myself, particularly when I compared my life with that of other pastors.
Some of my contemporaries from Bible School had been deployed to city churches. Others had gone to churches that had greater potential for growth. Their circumstances were different from mine, and those differences became especially obvious when we met at pastors' conferences in January.
I would look around and see my fellow pastors wearing new suits. Their churches had bought them clothes for the conference. They looked smart and well presented.
Then I would look at myself.
I had only one jacket, which my late sister, may her memory be blessed, had sewn for me. It was velvet and cream. I appreciated that jacket because it was what I had, but it had lost its shape from being washed by hand.
I also had a Scotch shirt and a Scotch trouser. Fortunately, they were the same colour, so I could wear them together.
I had one pair of shoes.
And one pair of football socks.
That was enough to remind me that I was a village pastor!
When I attended those conferences, I could not help noticing the differences between my circumstances and those of my contemporaries. They seemed to have moved forward in ways that I had not. They had churches that could provide for them, while I was serving a congregation with very limited resources.
I wanted to be recognised like them. I wanted my ministry to produce results that would show that I, too, had a calling. I wanted to see progress in my life.
Looking back now, I can understand that some of those feelings came from being young and wanting to establish myself. I wanted to succeed. I wanted to know that my efforts were taking me somewhere.
But at the time, the struggle was real.
I prayed. I fasted. I walked long distances to visit believers in their homes. Most of the time, the people were happy to see me, and I was happy to minister to them. But many of them had very little to offer materially.
They loved their pastor, but they were also living within their own limitations.
I could not blame them for that.
Still, I had needs of my own.
My weekly schedule was extremely demanding. Mondays were for prayer. Tuesdays were for ladies' prayer. Wednesdays were for Bible study. Thursdays were for youth prayer. Fridays were for night vigils. Saturdays were for leadership meetings and youth services, and Sundays were for church.
There was always something to do.
I was so thin and stressed because I wanted my ministry to be recognised. I wanted to be seen as a pastor who was making progress. I wanted the kind of results that would make people look at my work and say, 'God is using this young man.'
In those days, at least in the environment in which I served, recognition was closely connected to tangible results. You needed evidence that your ministry was productive. You needed to demonstrate that the church was growing and that it was making financial progress. Access to higher offices and opportunities could feel difficult without such evidence, and I also felt that gifts could play a part.
I had none of those things to offer.
My church received very little in tithes, and that created a problem because financial performance was part of how the work was evaluated. The local church was expected to grow financially so that the province could also contribute towards the pastor's allowance.
You could not simply receive an allowance while your church produced very little and expect everyone to be satisfied. You risked being regarded as a liability, regardless of how anointed you believed yourself to be.
After all, you could not be eating the sweat of other pastors!
If you know what I mean. I have to laugh when I think about it now.
But behind that humour was a difficult reality. I was doing my best, yet the financial results were not there. I could point to the people I had ministered to, the crusades I had conducted, and the deliverance sessions I had witnessed. I could speak about the believers I visited and the hours I spent praying.
But those were not necessarily the things people were measuring.
Nobody seemed to talk about what God was doing through me in that village. Nobody seemed to talk about the demons I cast out during deliverance sessions. Nobody seemed to talk about the crusades I conducted or the sacrifices I made to reach people.
Nobody talked about the strange things I encountered while walking through the bushes at night.
After some of my night crusades, which sometimes ended close to midnight, I would begin the long walk back to the C*D where I stayed. Along the way, I sometimes encountered what people believed were spooks, tiny fires known in Shona as magoritoto.
I do not know what those things really were. I can only tell you what I experienced.
I would see them, and my body would react. I would feel goosebumps, and the hair on my body would stand. The journey home could be frightening, and sometimes I arrived almost in the morning.
Yet the following day, I would continue with ministry.
I spent a great deal of time in prayer, asking God to let the spirit of Baba Guti rest upon me. I wanted to grow spiritually. I wanted to become more effective in ministry. I wanted God to use me in ways that would make a difference.
I was not bitter about my circumstances. If anything, I was humbled that I had been given the opportunity to pastor in that church. I felt unworthy of the responsibility, and I was grateful to be there.
But gratitude did not mean I had no ambitions.
I wanted results that would show that God had called me too.
I wanted to grow. I wanted to make progress. I wanted my life to reflect something of the calling I believed God had placed upon me.
And then there was Catherine.
At that time, I was already dating her. I loved her, and I believed that one day I would pay lobola for her and marry her. That was my dream, even though my financial circumstances were nowhere near where I wanted them to be.
The funny thing is that Catherine did not really know the circumstances surrounding my life as a village pastor.
I never told her that I was in the bush.
I would simply say, 'I'm at work.'
That was it.
I wonder what she was thinking about me during that time. Did she know how difficult things were? Did she understand how little I had? Did she realise that the man she was dating was trying to build a future while struggling to make ends meet?
I cannot say for certain what was going through her mind. But from what I remember, she did not seem too concerned about where I was or what I was doing, so long as the prospect of marrying the man she loved remained alive.
She wanted to marry her lover. That was what mattered!
And there I was, a young village pastor, trying to balance ministry, financial struggles, the desire for recognition, and the dream of marrying the woman I loved.
I had no collection of smart suits. I had no impressive financial standing. I was not pastoring a large city church. I had very little money, and I was working in a place where the results of my labour were not always visible to those who could recognise them.
Yet I was still dreaming.
I was still praying.
I was still preaching.
And I was still convinced that one day I would marry Catherine.
That season was thorny and complicated. It tested me in ways I could not fully understand at the time. I wanted to do well, but I was learning that ministry did not always reward a person in proportion to the effort he put in. I was learning that being useful to God and being recognised by people were not always the same thing.
Most importantly, I was learning to keep working even when the circumstances were not what I had hoped for.
I did the work with joy.
I did not have everything I wanted, but I had a responsibility to serve the people entrusted to me. They loved me, and I had to honour that love by giving them the best I could.
When I look back at the young man I was in 2001, I see someone who wanted to prove himself. I see a pastor who was hungry for spiritual growth and desperate to make progress. I see someone who compared his life with that of his contemporaries and sometimes felt that he was falling behind.
But I also see a man who kept going.
I kept preaching. I kept praying. I kept visiting believers. I kept conducting crusades. I kept believing that the God who had called me had not abandoned me simply because I was serving in a small rural church.
I did not know how the story would unfold. I did not know what the future held for my ministry, my finances, or my relationship with Catherine.
I only knew that I had to continue.
And so I continued.
That was my life in Nemangwe, Gokwe, in 2001: a young pastor, a small church, a single jacket, one pair of shoes, a pair of football socks, a demanding ministry schedule, and a dream that refused to die.
I had very little in my hands, but I still had hope in my heart.
And perhaps that is one of the most important things I learned in that season: you do not need to have everything in place before you can keep moving forward. Sometimes you must keep serving faithfully while you are still waiting for your own life to come together.
I was a village pastor.
But I was still a pastor.
And I believed God had called me too.
To be continued...
