This episode of Launch is the audio track of a conversation between GCC's Director of International Ministries Corey Schmatjen and international church planter, Baron Mbala, who's looking to return to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Watch this conversation on Vimeo.

Episode Transcript

Marty Duren:               
Welcome to Launch, the GCC podcast. I'm your host, Marty Duren, director of communications for the Great Commission Collective. We're a global network of churches partnering together to plant churches and strengthen leaders. On today's episode of Launch, you'll hear a conversation between Corey Smidgen, GCC's director of international ministries, and Baron Mabala, a Congolese church planter who's leaving the United States to go back to Congo in order to plant a church. This is a great conversation. It's fascinating in the sense that all that Baron has to say about where he's going, why he's going, and the things that God has already used him to accomplish there.

Corey:                         
Well, welcome. My name is Corey Smidgen. I serve with the Great Commission Collective as the director of international ministries and I'm here today with Baron Mabala. He is one of our newest international church planters. He is planting a church in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and we have hopes and desires and dreams that Baron would be used of God to open up a new region in Africa for the Great Commission Collective. Well, Baron, welcome. It's so great to have you with us.

Baron:                         
Well, thanks for having me. I'm really delighted to be here.

Corey:                         
I was just thinking about the first time we met, which was this summer in Seattle.

Baron:                         
In Seattle, yeah.

Corey:                         
Had a chance to meet Mimi, your wife, and your children as well. Baron, that begs the question, what is someone from Congo doing in cold and cloudy Seattle? I like Seattle.

Baron:                         
Yeah.

Corey:                         
But what were you doing there? How'd you get there?

Baron:                         
Yeah, that sounds a little weird, I know, but I got there through a friend of mine that I met in Nairobi where I was attending a school called Nairobi International School of Theology, a professor of Old Testament. And when he moved back to Seattle, then I connected, I stayed in touch with him, and when I was looking for an opportunity to go for further studies in theology, that's how he connected me to Seattle, and I headed up to Seattle.

Corey:                         
And what have you been doing in Seattle for, how many years have you been there?

Baron:                         
I've been in Seattle for now 19 years and, well, been there with my family, three children, and also involved in church planting. I planted a church there in Seattle, and the church has been around for about 16 years now, and I've been serving the Lord and reaching out to the lost for the Lord Christ and building disciples.

Corey:                         
And what type of church?

Baron:                         
The church is, yeah, in terms of demographics, our church is mainly an African church and we have about 85% Congolese people and some other folks from other parts of Africa, but it's mainly an African church.

Corey:                         
So Baron, you've lived in Seattle 19 years. You're established. You have your three children there. You have a home there. I find it pretty remarkable that, and unusual, that you would want to move back to the Congo from where you're from, you and your wife. So tell me why go back to Congo and why now?

Baron:                         
Yeah, I know it might sound a little weird to some people, and then actually I faced such a question when I met with some folks in Congo, when I was telling them that, hey, I'm coming back here. Ministers were like, "What? Really? Coming back?"

Corey:                         
For most, the American dream, you made it to America, right? Yeah.

Baron:                         
Yeah. America, this is the most un-American thing that one could possibly do, go back to Africa, and with sort of challenges associated with living there, but what's leading me back to Africa is the gospel, is the gospel of Christ. When I was leaving Africa back in 2000, in year 2000, really, my heart was really beating at the rhythm of the gospel. So I wanted to go outside of my country, and learn, and be trained, and go back there to serve. But once I got here in the west, it became really difficult to go back because of the comforts that I find here, and ease of life, and all that. But God somehow really led Mimi and I to decide to go back because of the burden of the gospel. And that became so intense in our heart, and particularly myself, when I've been traveling back home from time to time, while I'm in Seattle, and realizing that the church was dominated with the so-called prosperity gospel, which is an American gospel, and another distortion of the gospel called deliverance gospel or spiritual warfare type of gospel.

So it's so prevalent and seeing that, my heart was really broken to see that, and realize that why should I be living here in the west and living comfortably while the people of God are being lost and discipleship is not taking place, at least in the church, and unbelievers are rejecting the gospel because they see that it is a false proposition? If you give, you're going to get more. Why not work and get more? Even unbelievers, some of them can tell that this is not right about the gospel, about the reason why one should come to go to church. So it is that burden that really God has been working on in my heart. And lo and behold, in 2017, I lost my job in a mysterious way.

I lost my job and I was so shocked because I couldn't believe that they would tell me that I wasn't the fit for the job. I was a budget analyst at the University of Washington, working with the Department of School of Communications and managing basically all the grants and the resources that we're receiving from INH and these other big organization like Gates and Foundation and others. So I was told that I wasn't fit for the job while I had gone to school, to University of Washington, and did a Master of Public Affairs. So out of that crisis, the Lord started talking to me that this was the right time to do it. And guess what? 2017, was the great celebration of the 500th anniversary of Protestant reformation. And then I was go, "Oh, really?" So this will be the launching pad, really, of this ministry. I need to go back home and hold the conference of the issue of the reformation and call the church back to the centrality of the person and the work of Christ in the gospel and the life of the church.

So that happened following year in 2018, and when we got there, I had about 1500 pastors and church leaders who came for the conference. On the third day, the last day of the conference, there was a Q and A, and people asked, "So what do we do now?" And I was like, "Okay, now we're going to start a Bible school. We're going to start a Bible school. We're going to call it Praxis." And so that year, I started gathering pastors and the first cohorts, we had 157 pastors, and the second one, we had 700. And it started snowballing that way and I quickly realized that with this reformation, we needed, really, a new movement, a movement of church planting, churches that are gospel centered, gospel centered. And so that is why we figured that this was the moment for us, for me, to go back there and with Mimi, because kids are going to stay here because they're going to school.

Corey:                         
So even though you're looking at planting a church in 2022 in Kinshasa, you've already been at work there.

Baron:                         
Yeah.

Corey:                         
I mean, hosting an annual reformation conference.

Baron:                         
Exactly.

Corey:                         
The Praxis Bible school as well. It's really a comprehensive vision that you have for Kinshasa and church planting. So just share, how does that work together, the conference, church planting, any other works that you are doing there, work together towards the goal of advancing the gospel and planning churches?

Baron:                         
Exactly. So, because the whole thing started with a reformation conference, we decided to keep that as a entry way, where we draw people attention to the necessity of reforming the church and we reform the church by bringing back the gospel at the center of the church. And once people are caught into that crossfire, so this speak, so what we do next is to say, "Hey, we can now train you, for those who are already involved in ministry, we can train you." In our Bible school, we have a six module program of four courses each to help reshape their understanding of the gospel, and that's the Bible school.

And then on the other side, some other people are coming, attending to our conferences, and they were like, "I can't go back to my church. So how do I do that because I can't sustain the prosperity gospel or the deliverance gospel anymore. So what do I do?" Say, "Okay, now we want to start a church planting movement." We're going to plant our first church this year, by God's grace, and that's first church is going to be like a model that we're going to set, that we're going to replicate in many places throughout all, not only the Congo, but the region, the west African, the Francophone Africa.

Corey:                         
What would some of those countries be?

Baron:                         
That would be Congo-Brazzaville, the immediate neighbor, Congo-Brazzaville, and actually, we're already there with our school. We started training pastors already there in the Congo-Brazzaville. These are two neighboring countries. We have Gabon, we have Cameroon, we got have [inaudible] and we are also working in [inaudible] the East Africa, because Congo is now also merging into East Africa. So we basically now strategically located between these two areas, so the Francophone Africa and the East Africa, which is more Anglophone, and it is no wonder that I've been living in the US. So a little bit of English that I know can now help me and now we're working with regional leaders, like John Sangura, that you know very well. So to see how we can strategize the expansion of a church planting movement in the Great Lakes Region, which comprises Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi, and Uganda as well. So bringing that whole region into a movement of gospel centered ministry.

Corey:                         
I love it.

Baron:                         
Yeah.

Corey:                         
Yeah, I'm just amazed as well, just to hear that, I know that you're a French speaker.

Baron:                         
Yeah.

Corey:                         
You know several languages, as does John Sangura, our leader in East Africa.

Baron:                         
Yeah.

Corey:                         
And Kinshasa's French speaking. I just want to add as well because I was fascinated by this, part of the vision is for a French printing press.

Baron:                         
Right.

Corey:                         
There at your church and Center for South Theological Works in French.

Baron:                         
Right.

Corey:                         
That's incredible as well.

Baron:                         
Yes, it is indeed, and that is a powerful tool for us to [inaudible] that reformation because a lot of people have been consuming, church leaders have been consuming GDX, Joyce Meyer, [inaudible] the whole word of faith movement thing. So now, to change that sort of panorama of biblical literacy, we need to bring in a printing press to take those healthy theological books that are in English and translate them into French and spread them across the area.

And we've been working with a wonderful brother of ours, Daniel Anderson, in Canada, he has what we called a [foreign language] An organization that does exactly that. They translate books in French and they sell them. So now we want to work with them so that we can print them locally and distribute them that way. And to accompany this, basically what we want to do is to change the narrative in the church, bring the narrative of the gospel back into the church, because what the damage that the prosperity gospel and the deliverance gospel have done in the church is to change the narrative. It's now about Jesus being the best means to get what you want, the best means to get what you want, but what we want to do is to show that Jesus is the only way to get Jesus.

Corey:                         
Baron, I love hearing your vision and just so well stated. I know there's some challenges, obstacles, for this to occur, and for you to move back there, and to get this church up and running, and developed as a hub model church for others that you hope to plan. So just in closing, how can we pray for you as you begin? You've already begun, but continue this journey of church planting.

Baron:                         
First of all, the first challenge is as far as my family. So I'm going to go ahead of them there. Ahead, even, of my wife. She's going to be left behind a little bit to help our last born to transition into college. She's wrapping up her high school years. And so, we really need prayer to be able to stay in touch and read so that the minister doesn't break family life. And I've been traveling back and forth. I will go for three months or so, but I need help in that prayer.

And secondly, I need likeminded people, likeminded churches, and I'm glad to that extent to be part of a GCC. Really, I'm seeing the GCC vision and way of doing church planting is just amazing, but we need many more others to come around so that we can work together, and there's a way of working together. I know that this is a Francophone area. Some say, "But no, no. We're English speaking churches or something like that." So it is always possible to do that, to work together. So we need that kind of support.

And thirdly, we need finances, and this requires a lot of money. Now, to be able to launch our church in June, we're planning on June of this year to be able to launch our first church there. So we need a place, a location of property, where there's a property that we're looking into that costs quite a lot of money to be able to at least rent it and start establishing the ministry, because we have the school and the church together. And while we also doing humanitarian, and because that is another component, so we want to help women and children, and we've been already start helping some folks down there who are really in poverty and difficult situations. So we need all that kind of help so we can move forward with the work of the kingdom.

Corey:                         
Excellent. We're going to be praying for you, but even more than that, with the Great Commission Collective, we want to be behind you.

Baron:                         
Yes.

Corey:                         
And to help that become a reality financially.

Baron:                         
Yeah.

Corey:                         
And any other way that we can as well, Baron.

Baron:                         
Yes.

Corey:                         
So thank you for sharing your heart and my prayer for you is that God would give you the desires of your heart.

Baron:                         
Thank you.

Corey:                         
And he would fulfill every resolve for good and work of faith by his power.

Baron:                         
I would've lived happily to see that vision materialize. For me, it's a matter of life and death, and this is not a luxury. This, for me, is a matter of life and death because of the glory of Christ.

Corey:                         
Yes. Amen. Made it happen, 2022.

Baron:                         
Yes.

Corey:                         
Thank you so much, Baron.

Baron:                         
Appreciate it. Appreciate it.

Corey:                         
Thank you so much as well for listening. You want more information? You can check out Great Commission Collective at gccollective.org.

Marty Duren:               
Thank you for listening to Launch, a GCC podcast. If you haven't subscribed already, why not take a moment to do that in your favorite podcast app? Also rate and review the podcast when you get a moment. That helps us with search results. And recommend us to your friends, maybe other pastors that you know, who'll benefit from the content from this podcast. Also, don't forget to check out our website if you haven't done that already. It's gccollective.org. That's gccollective.org, and there's a lot of helpful information. There's articles. There's how you can join the GCC, whether a church planter or an existing church, and plenty of other content that'll help you grow spiritually and encourage you in your leadership journey.