Digging Ditches and Building a Church in Malawi

“My name is Sandress Msiska, and I’m the pastor of Capital City Baptist Church in Malawi. I’ve attended several Global Leadership Summits, but last year when I attended there was a pastor [Steven Furtick] who spoke on digging ditches in a place where there is no water. It challenged us to believe in God for what we know is needed, and trust God to bring the resources.

So I went ahead, and bought a shovel. When I got back to the church, I started praying about this, and thinking about this very seriously and wondering, how do I turn that commitment and that step of faith I took at the Summit, and put it into action? I went ahead and bought more equipment. I bought a pick needed for the ground breaking and equipment to finish a building. And one Sunday morning, I brought this equipment into the church, and challenged the congregation to look at our situation.

Our church is filled up every Sunday, and some Sundays, we have to ask children to come to the front and sit on the floor, to give room for others to sit on the chairs. I challenged the congregation, and said this is not good, it is not normal. In our own homes we don’t ask children to sit on the floor. In schools they don’t sit on the floor. If we have a school where children are sitting on the floor, we take them out of that school. So why should that be allowed in the house of God? We need to plan to do something.

I said we are going to build, and we are going to ask God to help us. I asked the whole congregation, and they prayed, and we dedicated our plans and desires to God so we can move from our current church building with a capacity for about 480 people to a 2,000-capacity church. This is way, way beyond what we could do on our own.

But God will not be involved in something that we can do on our own. If we want God to be involved, we have to do something that only God can do.

That is where we are now. We’re in the process of planning, and engaged in designing a building, and once the building is designed, we’ll get into a fundraising capital drive venture and challenge the church to raise funds for building the church. But it all started with the challenge at the Global Leadership Summit from Pastor Steven Furtick.

We can believe in God for what looks to be impossible, because God is more than able.”

• Pastor Sandress Msiska, Malawi