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From Jesus Army’s Radical Christian History series:

A building seating 10,000, crammed to capacity each week. 1,000 seekers daily. Healings. Deliverance. Radiant joy. A story from a revival of old? No. It is happening today in South Africa.

When Afrikaner Erlo Steegen was converted as a teenager he found the cry welling up inside him:

“Lord, I want to preach like You did!” He also felt his heart drawn to his black brothers. After some missionary training he acquired a tent and for twelve years preached the gospel among the spiritually starved Zulus.

Many came to the Lord as a result, yet few continued in the faith. Erlo was indignant that God was not being glorified and so he gave himself to prayer and the study of the Bible as well as reading about past revivals.

As a result God dealt with Erlo, humbling his ambition. Once he was approached by a widow, who begged him to prove the power of Jesus’s name by healing her mentally deranged daughter. With three others he prayed day and night for three weeks, but without success. A broken man, he returned the girl to her mother still unhealed.

Worse still, in a country racked by apartheid and centuries of oppression, the Zulus constantly challenged him: “christianity is a white man’s religion. Show us that Jesus loves Zulus, and show us that whites can love blacks.”

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