July 16, 2025

Not By Bread Alone: Capturing the Inspirational Stories of the Saints in Africa on Film

37 minutes

by Junior Banza and Jeffrey Bradshaw at the 2024 FAIR Conference

Introduction to the Session “Faith and Growth of the LDS Church in the DR Congo” – Dan Peterson

That’s fun to do this, because if you’re an academic, if you’re a professor, you talk for a living. So, you’re glib; you don’t have to know anything about what you’re talking about, but you can sound really convincing.

So that’s what I’m going to try to do here. I’ve been asked to chair this session, I guess because I’m the president of the Interpreter Foundation, and this project is really fascinating. The project that they’re going to be talking about is under the auspices of the Interpreter Foundation, so I’ll let them do that talking. Then we’ll see how this goes.

But I thought I would first introduce Jeff Bradshaw, who will then introduce Junior Bonza, and then we’ll get the ball rolling.

CONTINUED HERE

Junior Banza was born and raised in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. In October 1979, his parents joined the Church in Geneva, Switzerland, but they returned to the DR Congo soon afterward. Junior was baptized in June 1986 right after the Church was officially recognized there. As a young man, he began his full-time mission in the DR Congo Kinshasa mission and finished in Johannesburg, South Africa. Junior and his family live in West Jordan, Utah, where he works in the financial industry. He and his wife Annie are the parents of two daughters and a son. Department in efforts to encourage outreach and historical engagement.

Jeff Bradshaw is a vice president of the Interpreter Foundation and a Church service missionary for the Church History Department. See www.TempleThemes.net for his Church-related publications. Jeff and his wife, Kathleen, began to research and recount the stories of Church history in Africa during their first mission to the DR Congo in 2016. They have four children and sixteen grandchildren. Professionally, Jeff is a senior research scientist for the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (www.ihmc.us/groups/jbradshaw).

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