Blog
Where the Gospel Lives:
Lessons from Zambia 2025

MY 2025 ZAMBIA TRIP REFLECTION
By Chip Huber

As we finally made our way out of the new Lusaka Airport and into the twilight of a Zambian late afternoon, the first words I heard were, “Welcome back to your second home,” from my dear and longtime friend David Temfwe. We exchanged a long hug, and our group moved over to take a group picture around the new “I LOVE ZAMBIA” sign after our 32-hour journey to get to this beautiful country in sub-Saharan Africa. The song “I’m Coming Home,” which I heard hundreds of times when LeBron James went back to play basketball in Cleveland, rattled around my head as I climbed onto our bus for our first drive back in the nation that has truly grabbed and changed my heart.

HOME has a lot of meaning for us as human beings. It is a special place where we feel safe, secure, and able to be fully ourselves. It’s a place where memories are often created and treasured. And it’s a place where we often experience the things that shape us the most into the people we ultimately become.

This particular trip to Zambia with 22 others from the NPC community was my TENTH visit to my African home away from home, but it was my first trip in several years. There were a few questions about whether it would still feel the same, but they were answered with a resounding YES—despite differences in the people and places I visited during our time in Africa.

Over 20 years ago, I believe the Holy Spirit connected me to a place I had never known much about—besides seeking to learn African country names for a geography quiz in college. I have learned so much about its history, its economy, its government, its land, its resources, its struggles, its needs, its loves, its food, its culture, its church, its people, and its deep reservoirs of faith and hope. I’ve watched its national soccer games on TV, I’ve read its newspapers online, and I’ve built real and lasting friendships that have become treasures in my life. And I continue to learn more, ask better questions, and see new things in different ways each time I return.

Home, in my mind and life experience, is a place where God does some of His most important work in helping us to discover in tangible ways who He is, what He wants us to do with our lives, and why following Jesus is indeed the best way to live our lives. It can and should be a place where some of our most significant discoveries take place as we build out our worldviews and place the foundation that supports us for a lifetime—as we grow, change, and seek the full, good, and purposeful life we were created to pursue and receive from our Creator God.

I was reminded once again on this trip to Zambia of five specific things I’ve discovered in new and fresh ways in Africa:

1. God’s Church is a global Church — To only be part of, learn from, and worship like the American Church is to miss out on the full expression of the Acts 2 & 4 community.

2. The KINGDOM is growing and invites us to join in — Sometimes seeing the vibrancy of ministry and passion for the Gospel in Zambia sharpens and stimulates me to believe and live like I truly trust and embrace the reality that GOD is on the MOVE.

3. Meeting the needs of others truly matters as a life calling and practice — Serving and seeking to bless others, rather than just gathering and accumulating for myself, is indeed a more beautiful way to live.

4. Joy is found in how we relate to and treat one another — There are seemingly so many more waves and smiles and hugs and high-fives in a community and culture built on relationships…and it lifts my spirit and fills my heart to full.

5. The passions God places in our hearts can lead to transformational relationships and experiences — My interest in and love for the beautiful game of soccer/futbal has connected me to a soccer-crazy nation producing a decade-long campaign to help end one of the world’s deadliest diseases, caused players to come play on the other side of the world, and has been a vehicle for incredible connection and a compelling means to share the GOSPEL.

There’s always a moment of relaxation and comfort when I get back to my home in Grand Rapids after a trip to Zambia—One’s own bed, favorite foods, and familiar family and friends are gets you embrace with gratitude. But often a few days later, there’s moments of sadness and a feeling of missing the people and place of Zambia. It truly is as I recently texted another coach “my happy place.” It might seem strange due to the obvious outward differences between the two settings of here and there, but in God’s supernatural and upside-down Kingdom ways, it makes all the sense in the world to me.

I’m fairly certain I’ll be back in Zambia once again in the months and years to come…and I can’t wait to hug all my friends from Jubilee Centre waiting outside that airport terminal. And I’m hopeful that some of them can come and see and experience a new home for themselves by one day coming to play on our NPC soccer field and eat Chick-fil-A after a worship service. And more than anything else, we will experience just a taste of the eternal HOME we will live together in for eternity….. and in the meantime I will daily thank God that He’s brought me to Zambia to experience just a little bit of heaven on earth….