Education – a family passion!
I was born in 1951 in Harare, Zimbabwe (Salisbury, Rhodesia at that time), the oldest of three children. My primary schooling was at Avondale and Blakiston, and then I went to high school at Prince Edward, before heading down to UCT.
In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and editing to make it personal, I read that:
I was dead in my transgressions and sins, in which I used to live when I followed the ways of this world…
“Because of his great love for me, God, who is rich in mercy, made mealive with Christ even when I wasdead in transgressions—it is by grace Ihave been saved.
And God raised meup with Christ and seated mewith him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to mein Christ Jesus.
For it is by grace I have been saved, through faith—and this is not from myself, it is the gift of God— not by my works, so that I cannot boast.
For I am God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for me to do.
Ephesians 2:1-2 and 5-10
These verses are so true of my life, and of everyone who really finds Jesus as Saviour and Lord! In my case, before I discovered the truth of these words, I spent twenty-five years doing whatever I thought best. But first let me explain how I have been drawn into education.
Education is in my blood! My parents were both high school teachers in what was then Rhodesia. One grandmother, two uncles, four cousins and my sister were all teachers. I thought I had broken the mouldwhen I graduated as a Chemical Engineer at UCT. But, while doing my National Service in 1974, I was introduced to a most gifted and attractive teacher, who had recently graduated as the top student at Hillside Teachers College. A number of things came out of this (apparently) chance meeting:
The most significant result was that I discovered that God has good plans for our lives if we will allow Him space to work and, after some resistance on my part, by His Grace I was saved from my self-centredlife. Not only that, but He provided the most amazing wife for me and brought me back into the educational sphere. However, this didn’t happen immediately, as I married Vivian and took her away from Thomas Coulter School in Wankie to join me in my work for De Beers and Anglo American at Cullinan and Trojan Nickel mines respectively.
In 1980, having spent most of the first four years of our marriage in Bindura, and having endured numerous army call-ups, we headed for Dallas to attend Christ for the Nations Bible College. With David aged a little over three and Michael not yet two years old, this was a huge change of context. While there, Viv did a lot of research into Christian education, and brought much information and material back to Zimbabwe in 1982. She had a dream of starting a Christian School, and this is where we saw the truth of the last verse above – that God has prepared good works for us to do – because when we returned to Gweru we found a small group of men that had already been trying to start a Christian Tuition Centre. Their initial attempts had been unsuccessful, but we were able to join with them and get the project moving again. [It fascinates me, as I look back over my life, that God has good plans for us. We arrived in Gweru and were looking for a house, and the first two properties we visited belonged to members of this group! The work He had prepared for us both quickly became obvious.] With Vivian and Susanne Schalekamp leading the educational charge, I joined Marius Schalekamp and Heynie Liebenberg in negotiating with the Ministry of Education and the Gweru City Council for permission to start the school. This was a huge battle, but our faith that God was “in this” sustained us, and we eventually got the go-ahead a year after we started work on this project.
The next phase was equally daunting, as we had no finance to build the school. That is another story, but while Heynie and I worked on this, Vivian and Chrissie Hope started a small study group of 23 pupils in converted stables on a smallholding in Harben Park. A term later, when Government approval was finalized, they moved into Emmanuel Pentecostal Church with a staff of 5 led by Anthony Sheppard, and 105 eager pupils.
What is so remarkable about this is that this school was built in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, three years after the new nation was born – on a basis of Marxist philosophy and black majority government – and yet God enabled a group of young zealous Christians to build and flourish in this antagonistic environment. There were also numerous practical obstacles in our way, not least of which was the non-availability of many books to stock the new school. It was in this context that our two founding teachers, Vivian and Chrissie, wrote the first draft of readers for our youngest learners. The goal was to reach a small target group with self-printed readers, but again God intervened and moved the project from the brand new Midlands Christian School, via Longman Zimbabwe, to the national education market, as the well-known Sunrise Readers.
God prepares good works in advance for us to do!
