We went to a well-attended conference today in Miyoshi, a suburb of Nagoya, where the main speaker was a pastor from Tanzania named Josephat Gwajima whose church, Glory of Christ Tanzania Church (old website), has some twenty six thousand members and 4,800 leaders.

Pastor Gwajima told an incredible story of how he was paralyzed from the neck down for six years as a child. One day after the doctors told him he was going to die, he had a dream. In his dream, he was below a man on the cross whose blood flowed down on him. The man told him that by his stripes he was healed. When he woke up, his neck started to shake. His arms and legs began to work. He sat up and went to his parents door shouting. His dad and mom looked through the window at him and didn’t believe it was their son even though he told them, “I am your son Josephat!” Finally they went out and terrified, asked him what happened to him. He said over and over: a man on a cross, a man on a cross. “Who is this man on the cross?” the father asked. Josephat said, “I don’t know.” Josephat was one of twelve children and lived in a village with no church. No one in the family had ever been to church. But the youngest daughter said, “It is Jesus!” And she told the family that they had to believe in Jesus and be saved. Incredibly, she apparently led the family to Christ even though she had never been to church or heard the gospel! So the whole family knelt down and believed in Jesus. Afterwards, Josephat laid awake that night unable to sleep but ended up speaking in tongues nonstop for two days. Then he went to Bible school, became a pastor, raised people from the dead and now is leading a huge church and traveling the world doing revival meetings. What an incredible story!