Stephen Lungu has served as International Team Leader of African Enterprise since 2006. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe (then Salisbury, Rhodesia), Stephen was the oldest of three children born to a young Zambian mother and a much older Malawian father. The hopelessness and despair his mother felt as a result of an abusive marriage resulted in her abandoning her three children in a Harare market when Stephen was 7.

Stephen ended up as a street kid, scavenging food from garbage cans and sleeping under a bridge. As he got older he earned a small amount of money collecting golf balls at a whites-only country club in the racially segregated Rhodesia of that day. Simmering anger at the racial injustices of the country pushed Stephen into violent behavior and an openness to involvement in a Marxist revolution in Rhodesia. Illiterate and unschooled, he became a leader in a gang of teenage thugs in Harare called the Black Shadows. His gang perpetrated acts of small-time rebellion and sought to foment chaos in the hopes of toppling the white government.

Because Christianity was seen by many young blacks as the religion of the white oppressors, Stephen had also become hostile to the church and to God. One evening, on their way to blow up a bank in Harare, Stephen and his cronies came upon an evangelistic tent meeting. Opting instead to blow up the tent meeting, they went inside for a few minutes to listen to the preacher. That was all the time God needed to touch Stephen’s heart. The preacher’s words seemed to pierce down into the depths of his being, both convicting him of his sins and drawing him to Christ. He staggered forward to the stage, grabbed hold of the preacher’s feet and began to sob. That evening, he committed his life to Christ.

In the following years, Stephen was discipled by a number of Christian leaders, including Patrick Johnstone, a British missionary best known as the author of the prayer guide Operation World. He learned to read and speak English. And he became a bold and irrepressible evangelist, working first with the Dorothea Mission, preaching all over southern Africa. In 1982, he joined African Enterprise, becoming Malawi Team Leader in 1986.

In his work with AE, Stephen has preached the Gospel all over the continent and around the world. He shares the Good News with virtually everyone he meets, whether passport agents at customs checkpoints or fellow passengers on the London Underground. He lives in Lilongwe, Malawi, with his wife Rachel, with whom he has five children.

Stephen says, “Because I look at myself as a miracle of God’s grace,“ so I believe that the power of Jesus Christ to save sinners still exists.  If he can change me, he can change anyone... Winning souls for Christ. It’s my calling. It’s my passion. It’s me.”