The following is a transcription of The Art of Volunteering Episode 18: Adonia Magwaza, Zimbabwean Pastor.
Stormy Bell (00:00): Welcome to another episode of The Art of Volunteering. Today, I’m interviewing my friend Adonia Mag- Oh, I messed that up. I’ll get it.
Adonia Magwaza (00:20): Magwaza.
Stormy Bell (00:21): Magwaza.
Adonia Magwaza (00:22): Yes!
Stormy Bell (00:23): Adonia Magwaza. There we go! He’s my friend and he’s coming to us from Zimbabwe this morning. Welcome!
Adonia Magwaza (00:36): Welcome. It’s good to connect with you. I’m so privileged and happy to be with you.
Stormy Bell (00:44): Oh, I thank you so much. Well, as you know, the podcast is about volunteering, so I’m just gonna start off with, tell me about yourself. Tell me about the church that you pastor and we’ll go from there.
Adonia Magwaza (01:01): Thank you so much Stormy. I’m married to my wife, Lee. We are blessed with four children, two boys and two girls. All of my children are serving in the Lord. We are the lead pastors of Power and Light Church here in Zimbabwe, a ministry that we founded about eight years ago. We are best in Harare, which is the capital of Zimbabwe and we have continued to be serving the Lord and the community. It is our pleasure to serve the Lord but one thing for sure [is] that you’ll have to have a lot of faith to be serving [the] Lord here in Zimbabwe. This is in reference to the, maybe some of you might know that over 90% of our people are unemployed. We’ve been having over two decades of economical hardships so most of the people that we are serving here are people that need help.
There are very few people or none at all that are able to help most of the people that are needy in terms of employment, because most of the people are not employed. Just before COVID things were beginning to take off, but because COVID, we had some lockdown. As you may know that most of our people depend on vending or self self-employment kind of selling and buying business. Things tend to be very difficult for our people in terms of how to make up their own living. That definitely had a great impact to the church.
Stormy Bell (03:17): Okay. You serve with your wife and your kids. Do you have other people in your church that help you meet the needs of the unemployed?
Adonia Magwaza (03:29): We currently do not have some people that are employed in our church at the moment. One person that I must be very grateful and thank God for him is Dr. Jim Henry.
Stormy Bell (03:42): Yes.
Adonia Magwaza (03:43): You might know Dr. Jim Henry. He has been a really great blessing to our ministry and to our church whenever he can. He been really standing with us. Other than that, the church itself is really in a believing mode. We just have to believe, and that’s all I can say.
Stormy Bell (04:06): That’s all you can say. What are some of the things that you do to reach the people that you mentioned, the unemployed? What are some of the things that you’re actually doing to help them?
Adonia Magwaza (04:19): One of the things that we’ve attempted to do a couple of years ago is doing some corn farming. We have been trying to, because the last year we had better rains. We depend mostly with the natural rains. So we rented out a piece of land and put some corn there. We were able to have two tons of corn, which was quite fair and most of that has been just channeled to help the underprivileged in our church and to take care of our needs. Other than that there are some projects that people might think of and that we’ve been trying to work off. For instance, I and my wife have been involved in sewing, making some bed covers and knitting in the past years. Since the COVID pandemic came in, that has been very difficult because most of our stuff were being sold to South Africa or neighboring countries, and the borders have been closed. We just have machinery here. There are no consumers in our country who can buy our stuff. This is one of the things that we are doing at the moment.
Stormy Bell (05:54): Okay. All right. Do you have other people in the community that help you sew and help you do these things when you’re able to sell? Like, do you have other people helping you?
Adonia Magwaza (06:06): Yes, my wife and I had 10 other members of our church that were helping with the sewing and mostly because the orders would go in South Africa, so they would help with sewing before we had the pandemic arrive. My wife and I taught them and imparted skills on them to do that. We also have some other children that we help whenever we can with fees, the tuition fees.
Stormy Bell (06:40): What does that look like for nutrition fees?
Adonia Magwaza (06:47): The tuition fees we are talking about school fees.
Stormy Bell (06:50): Oh school fees.
Adonia Magwaza (06:53): For instance, at high school, they are paying 70 USD to attend, which is four months. We have not been able to help all, I mean, maybe five or five families whenever we can. It has not been consistent, but when we can, that’s what we also try to do.
Stormy Bell (07:16): Okay. So you give up your time, you give up your treasure. That’s awesome. That’s really cool. Why do you do this? Is it because of your faith? Is this why you do it? Do you have a heart for your people, which I believe you do. Tell me why you do this? Why do you serve?
Adonia Magwaza (07:44): I believe that God called us to be delight and shine to our people. This is a hard thing. It’s very difficult if I can either even think about myself, but this is something that we are. This is who we are and we feel that God wants us to serve the community and reach out to the people.
Stormy Bell (08:08): That’s awesome. How many people do you have in your church?
Adonia Magwaza (08:14): Before the COVID, our numbers were getting up to 1,200 members, but that was not in one location. We had seven locations throughout our country. At the moment, things are just starting up and I’m still here to visit some of the churches because the government just relaxed the restrictions a couple of weeks ago. So I’m in the process of going there and seeing them physically. One thing that I’ve also been trying to do is that I have been trying to reach out to those that, which are very few indeed, to them via WhatsApp during the lockdown. There are very few people that have access to internet and smartphones so that number obviously doesn’t represent the number of our congregation.
Stormy Bell (09:20): Right, right. Wow. Now, if you could give from your heart, why people should serve, why should people should volunteer? What would that be? If you could give people a message?
Adonia Magwaza (09:38): One of the things that we all know is John 3 verse 16. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Apart from just reaching out to the people, we also are convicted in our faith that there is God in heaven, and we are just passing by the Earth. We need to fulfill the commission to reach out to the people, to receive Christ as their savior. Other than that, there is so much turmoil that is happening even to unbelievers, those that are not part of our church. They’re going through some life struggles that there are very few people that are giving themselves to the community and to do this work.
Stormy Bell (10:40): Okay. Very good. Those are all my questions for today. I have so enjoyed talking with you. I will have to have you on the show again to talk about some other things. Oh, actually I was checking out your Facebook page and talked about you’re part of the Legacy Minded Men. You’re a crew member. Do you do that now? Are you still a crew member?
Adonia Magwaza (11:09): Definitely. I’ve been part of the Legacy Minded Men since 2007. I must admit that this has been one of the pillars in terms of the strengthening up, understand, especially when you are serving international like us, that you need some people around you. You get to a time that you need people that you can lean on, people that can give you a shoulder, people that can encourage, pray for you. So I specifically want to appreciate, especially the president of Legacy Minded Men, Joe Pellegrino, his crew team, Craig and Ron. There are a lot of guys that they’ve been praying for us. I’ve been also trying to on [a] monthly basis, bring men together and encourage them.
Stormy Bell (12:08): Okay. Very good. Well, again, thank you so much for coming on. We will have you on another time, so I wanna thank you and God bless you and the ministry that you’re doing and how you’re serving your congregation and your people. Thank you so much.
Adonia Magwaza (12:29): Stormy, you are a great blessing. I pray that this will be just a beginning. In fact, this is my first time to be in a program like this. So be patient with me and I’ll get this right. Thank you.
Stormy Bell (12:49): Thank you.
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