Elias Moyo was sent to London in 1980. He and his family came from Zimbabwe to start a ministry on behalf of Brethren in Christ World Missions. For decades, the church they planted was the BIC’s sole outpost in the United Kingdom.

It might have closed in 1995 when World Missions, citing dwindling resources, asked Moyo to return to teach at Theological College of Zimbabwe.

But he stayed and became a self-supporting church planter. That decision bore fruit a few years later when he found himself well-positioned for ministry with waves of immigrants from Zimbabwe fleeing the former British colony suddenly rocked by political turmoil.

Today the Brethren in Christ Church in the U.K. counts 10 congregations in urban centers around England and new ministry clusters developing in Scotland and Wales. Like elsewhere around the world, the pandemic impacted participation, and today those congregations include roughly 500 people.

“I would just summarize it as grace, the way the Lord works in such a way that he allows the ones who come in to lay the foundation,” said Themba Ndlovu, deputy overseer for the congregations in the United Kingdom. “When you are digging a foundation, it doesn’t seem like you are building a structure very fast. The structure goes deep, but once it is set in place, then the building up of the walls to the roofs becomes, not easy, but is easily achieved. So, we give credit and thank God.”

An estimated 128,000 to 500,000 people of Zimbabwean origin live in the U.K. Some are White and left after the 1980 transition to Black majority rule. Greater numbers of Black immigrants followed in the 1990s during economic hardships. A later wave began in 1998 as social unrest grew during President Robert Mugabe’s persecution of political opponents.

The U.K. did not require visas for travel from Zimbabwe until 2002, making it an attractive location for political asylum. Another wave of arrivals has come in the last few years as the country seeks workers to fill jobs.

A majority of participants in the BIC congregations were born in Zimbabwe and immigrated to England; 10% to 20% come from Zambia, Botswana, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Nigeria, Jamaica and elsewhere.

“The African community — when it comes to trauma-coping mechanisms — is not an individualistic society,” said Ndlovu, senior pastor of West Midlands Brethren in Christ Church in Birmingham. “Because of that, the society finds ways of gelling together from a collectivism point of view, so we are collective in our suffering. We are collective in our success. We are collective in our storytelling.

“In ministry, it means the ministers of the gospel, the deacons, their work is the Lord’s work. Easy isn’t the right word, but it is fairly light because of the cultural approach of the African community. The concept of ubuntu [interconnectedness] becomes the main glue, so that regardless of where you come from, when we meet, we look at this as ‘this is my brother, this is my sister.’ In terms of how the church is growing, it is on the basis of that. It is very practical for people to come in, and they find a home.”

The congregations are closely linked to the mother church in Zimbabwe, which counts more than 300 congregations and continues to hold the credentialing process for BIC pastors in the U.K. Nearly all Anabaptist churches in Zimbabwe are BIC. Doctrine and policies are also consistent, though Ndlovu said the European context makes church life different.

“One of the objectives that we are pursuing actively is multiculturalism,” he said. “Yes, we are now in the United Kingdom and — not that we want to deny who we are — we want to find ways to make our gospel relevant to the natives.

“We believe that our immigration to the United Kingdom is to make sure the gospel of Jesus Christ is preached. Now that we are gathered, we have 10 churches and two church plants. How do we minister to the Welsh, to the English, to the Chinese, all the nationalities in our communities?”

It is one thing to be relevant to your neighbors, another to be relevant to your children. Most young people in the BIC congregations under the age of 24 were born in England, with a binational identity and some African heritage.

Ndlovu is thankful that young people have remained connected to BIC congregations through home discipleship in family settings and youth camps. As they mature into adulthood, members of this generation have begun asking questions to understand their Anabaptist roots.

“The young people want to know, ‘Who are we? Where do we fit in?’ ” he said.

Unlike the binational BIC English youth of today, Ndlovu spent his first 16 years in Zimbabwe as part of the racial majority before social media was around to introduce a world of new ideas in mere moments. The United Kingdom has grown more diverse but is still majority White.

Ndlovu and other BIC leaders are planning to meet with the Anabaptist Mennonite Network to explore hosting a course called Black Light, which explores the contributions of Black people in the Bible, church history and in Britain today. It’s offered by Urban Expression, an organization related to AMN.

Anabaptist author and educator Stuart Murray founded Urban Expression and led it until last year. He has known Moyo, the first BIC church planter in the U.K., for decades, but Murray’s connections with the congregations have grown stronger in the last five to six years.

“The AMN has been predominantly White, so the BIC bring to us a much-appreciated ethnic and cultural diversity,” he said. “They also have many young adults and teenagers in their congregations, lowering the average age of the Anabaptist movement.”

Dumisani Ncube is a member of the congregations’ national leadership team and serves as an AMN trustee. Murray has served as a consultant to BIC churches and spoke in February at a leadership symposium hosted by the West Midlands congregation.

“We are exploring ways of deepening our partnership,” he said, “through launching church-planting teams with mixed ethnicity, involving BIC leaders in our Incarnate [church planting] initiative and developing an internship program for young adults in the AMN and BIC constituencies, which will include time in Zimbabwe.”

As AMN works to walk more closely alongside BIC congregations, those churches are also hoping to connect with members who have arrived in the last few years.

“We have heard of so many BIC members who have come in from southern Africa to the U.K. over the past two years when the United Kingdom was looking for a lot of workers,” Ndlovu said. COVID-19 pandemic restrictions temporarily challenged church attendance, but numbers are bouncing back. “They have work commitments that might have them be elsewhere, but so far the number of our church membership has grown,” he said.

With collectivist ubuntu on their side, integration will happen, but only intentionally. Migration rarely happens without trauma — such as under authoritarians like Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe, who died in 2019; or Eswatini’s King Mswati III, who has ruled since 1986 — and it doesn’t stop by switching continents and cultures.

Ndlovu credits God with orchestrating these hardships “so that the presence and the preaching of the gospel will perpetuate.” In May he visited a BIC congregation in London made up of people from several African nations.

“After the service, they laid tables, and everyone eats in church every Sunday,” he said. “Anyone from Africa, particularly in the BIC, finds it easy to break bread together, to sit together and get to know each other, and that makes our story a little bit unique.”