East Zimbabwe Conference of the evangelist Christian Seventh Day Adventist Church

"WORLD REPORT: More Than 40,000 Expected at  Evangelistic Series in Zimbabwe" 

by Andrew McChesney, August 2014, "ADVENTIST WORLD" newsmagazine: 

Seventh-day Adventist leaders in Zimbabwe are preparing to welcome more than 40,000 people to a two-week evangelistic series next year. The May 2015 event, which will be held in Harare, the capital of the southern African country, promises to be one of the most ambitious efforts to share Jesus under the auspices of the world church's "Mission to the Cities" initiative. Jonathan Musvosvi, president of the East Zimbabwe Conference, which is organizing the event, said the evangelistic series would begin with world church president Ted N. C. Wilson speaking to business-people and government officials at the Harare International Conference Center, an upmarket venue in the affluent section of Harare, for the first week. 

"This is a segment of the population that is difficult for us to reach, and where the church is not growing as fast and strong as we would like to see it," Musvosvi said by e-mail. Conference leaders are looking at working with wealthy Adventists to invite people to the meetings, similar to what was done for "Hope Manila 2014: iCare," a two-week evangelistic series that resulted in more than 3,000 baptisms in the Philippine capital in May 2014. For the second week, the evangelistic series will move to the 60,000-seat National Sports Stadium in a densely populated area of Harare, Zimbabwe's largest city with a population of 1.6 million. "We expect attendance to be in the range of 40,000," Musvosvi said. Zimbabwe has reeled amid political and economic instability for much of the past decade, a reality that Musvosvi said has made the time ripe for the 2015 evangelistic series. "Yes, we have passed through our political and economic turmoil, but this has caused us to turn to God," he said. "The people's receptivity to the gospel is high."