Big Work To Do

Stuart Foster has familiar plans for the future--after a few years of graduate school, he's going home and joining up with the family business. But here the familiarity ends: home for Foster is the tiny Southern African nation of Angola, and the family business is, in his words, "the one thing God wants us to do on earth--to serve other people."

Foster has two surprisingly simple reasons for his exotic plans. "To begin with," he says. "I'm homesick. I really love Africa--I was born in Zambia and I grew up there and in Angola."

Second of all, he continues. "I believe God created me. He created the world. and the most important thing for everyone is to know God and understand what He wants from us."

Foster admits that Angola is a risky nation to make definite plans about; political division and partisan warfare have erupted there sporadically for the past six years. "I know I'll go somewhere in Africa, though," he says, "If not Angola first, then Angola later. People are becoming Christian there at a greater rate than ever before."

But the number of Christian leaders in Africa is small, Foster says--about 90 per cent of all trained ministers work in North America. "That kind of imbalance means there's big work to do at other places," he says. In Angola, for instance, "there is one pastor for ten churches." It is this need that Foster hopes to fill--after he graduates from the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in nearby South Hamilton, Mass., he will be ready to begin training church leaders.

The young people there are dealing with a whole set of problems and issues their parents didn't have," he says. "In Angola, a lot of issues came in with the Marxist government. Marxism tries to redefine what a person is: a unit in a social machine as opposed to a person loved by God, whose life is important to Him and of infinite value."

Aside from a year at Gordon College, a small school in Massachusetts with Christian emphasis, Foster's years at Harvard have been his only years in the United States. "It's been exciting," he says. "I needed to be challenged in my faith. And it's been interesting to meet all these people who are going to do great things and become very rich, and realize how sad they are and how much they need God."