A Tribute to the Life and Ministry of Joshua Ekpikhe

By Don Kencke

Early in 1957 in Kaduna, I met Joshua Ekpikhe, who was a newly-hired employee
at Baraka Press, which had just been established a few months earlier by my parents. I
cannot say that I remember him from those days because in June, 1957, I left home in
Kaduna and traveled to the USA for my secondary and university education. However,
from what Joshua wrote in his autobiography Fire in the Dry Bush, and from having
known him over the past 41 years, it seems as if I did know him even in those few
months before he resigned his position at the Press and, with Elizabeth and Mishael
Nathan, founded the Christian Witness Team in clear obedience to what he understood
that God was leading him to undertake. After my father Clifford Kencke died in Kaduna
in 1958, just two years after the Baraka Press opened its doors, Joshua made a point to
keep in communication with my mother Ruth Kencke who had continued to work at the
Press. He has written to her as a son, honored her, and watched that she was well cared
for.
After completing university and graduate school, I was married to Judy January in
1965. Even before the marriage, Joshua wrote from Nigeria to extend her a warm
welcome to the country as a sister in Christ and to encourage her to look to the Lord for
all that she would need there. When we sailed to England en route to Nigeria, we looked
forward to meeting him in London, for he was studying at Moorlands Bible College in
the UK at the time. He traveled to London to visit us. The weather that November had
turned bitter cold, so Judy cooked a huge pot of stew that helped keep us all warm, and
we all enjoyed the fire and even the hot water for washing dishes. We and Joshua
marveled to see the representation of Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa among the wax
figures in Londons Madame Tussauds history exhibit. From those days shared in
London forward we became life-long friends.
In 1965, Judy and I continued our journey to Lagos on board the SS Aureol, the
flagship of the Elder Dempster Lines. We arrived in Kaduna in December, 1965. The
next year, 1966, was filled with turbulence including the disturbances in the North.
Joshua was still far away in England studying the Bible, and his family was staying in
Kaduna during that time. I will never forget that day, the first of October, when we
arranged to get Elizabeth, David, Comfort, and John on an old DC-6 aircraft along with
99 others who needed to be evacuated from Kaduna. The chartered plane was overloaded, and it seemed that it would never lift off the Kaduna Airport runway as it moved
ever so slowly on take-off. We were praying. At the last moment the airplane did lift off,
just enough to clear the fence at the end of the runway, and slowly made its turn to the
south heading for Port Harcourt.
Later, when Joshua returned to Nigeria from studying in England, we had the
opportunity to work together and establish our life-long friendship. He would come to
our home and we would talk and pray and eat together. Joshua had become a leading
elder of the Kaduna Christian Assembly. There had been difficulties and challenges
within the small fellowship, which at the time had not yet constructed its first building. It
was not at all certain that the small church would survive. Joshua was the one who

addressed those issues and called for revival and renewal, teaching books of the Bible
with careful attention to each verse and challenging us to trust God for great things and
rely upon Him to provide.
As the church grew, it moved from meeting under a mango tree to holding
services in its own new building; at that time Joshua and Elizabeth opened their home to
Judy to teach a weekly class designed to prepare others to teach pre-school and schoolaged children and youth. That class contributed to the way the Evangelical Literature
Fellowship of Nigeria developed a set of lessons for Sunday School teaching, and in 1970
those lessons began to be published in several languages for many churches to use.
Because of Joshuas vision and leadership, that local church not only survived but
flourished, later multiplying by establishing many other congregations within the greater
Kaduna area.
In the same way that the classes in the Kaduna Christian Assembly built a work in
teaching that helped even more churches, so did the Christian bookstore and coffee shop
that Joshua established in that same building along Junction Road where he and Elizabeth
were living. The coffee shop with its evangelistic witness multiplied, and we are all
grateful for how his vision and faithfulness also led to the founding the Bible and
Missionary Training Center with its active work in Bible teaching, general education,
medicine, and agricultureall devoted to glorifying God in bringing people to know the
God who meets our needs.
One of the goals that we identified early-on was to somehow find a way to
transfer the ownership of Baraka Press from an American not-for-profit corporation to a
Nigerian non-profit organization. Originally, I had thought that a new organization could
be formed with leading Nigerian Christian leaders as directors. That would take some
time and effort. Then during a plane ride at 37,000 feet over the USA in 1968, during a
time of prayer and meditation, a new idea came into my head: Why not find a way for
the Christian Witness Team to become the owner of Baraka Press? That seemed to
make a lot of sense. You see, CWT was already registered as a Nigerian non-profit
organization and we knew that Joshua was in agreement with the mission of Baraka to
print and publish Christian literature and probably would be eager to carry on the work of
his mentor Clifford Kencke.
Upon my return to Kaduna, I met with Joshua and laid out the concept. Although
he was very interested, he gave no immediate answer. He said he would need time to
pray about it and hear from God whether this was the right path to take. It took many
days before the answer came, but when it did, it was clear and unambiguous: CWT
would definitely buy Baraka Press. The story of how that step of faith played out is well
documented in Joshuas book, so I will not attempt to retell it here, except to say:
1. Joshua was confident in his conviction that God would provide the funds for
CWT to buy the Press.
2. He was willing to pray, work, and wait for God to provide the money in His
way and in His time.

3. He gave God the credit and praise when many people contributed the needed
funds.
When the ownership of Baraka Press was officially transferred to the CWT, it
became possible and necessary to appoint a new Board of Directors. Joshua was named
Chairman, and, with the appointment of others, the Board was composed of a majority of
Nigerian directors for the first time.
There were many challenges to be overcome at Baraka Press in those years. But
with Gods help, under the ownership of the CWT and Joshuas leadership, both CWT
and the Press expanded in size and scope of operations.
After Judy and I departed Nigeria in 1980, along with my mother Ruth, we
continued to keep in touch with Joshua, Elizabeth, and from time to time with David,
John, and Comfort. David attended Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, not far from
our new home, and we were glad to visit him at the seminary and have him visit us as
well as to celebrate his graduation. John also stopped by on one of his trips to the US,
and I remember meeting Comfort at Wheaton College briefly while she was studying
there. What a big welcome she gave to us!
Not only did Joshua and Elizabeth visit us in Dallas several times, but I also was
able to spend time with Joshua in both New York City and in Orlando, Florida, and often
by phone when he was visiting the US on his many trips to this country.
Here are my recollections of Joshua from all the years that I knew and worked
with him:
1. Joshuas life had been transformed by the power of God when, as a young man,
he became a Christian. The change was dramatic.
2. Throughout his life, he was willing to share his life story with anyone who was
interested. His story focused on how he became a Christian in Kaduna when he
was young man. He would explain the important role that the printed Word of
God played in his coming to Christ and in his continuous growth as a disciple of
Jesus Christ over the years.
3. He wanted everyone he met to hear and understand the Gospel: the good news
that God loves each of us and invites us through Christ to enter into a relationship
with Him that will last forever.
4. He understood that God had called him to serve Him in an extraordinary way of
living that would require him to live every day by faith, trusting God to provide
for himself, his family, CWT, and those in their care.
5. God gave him a deep love for his own people at home in Ikwa and the
surrounding towns and villages and as a result he developed a willingness to make
many sacrifices to bring them the Good News of Jesus.
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6. Joshua devoted his life to serving Jesus Christ with an uncommon passion and he
lived out that discipleship wherever he traveled.
7. He was willing to trust God in every situation, especially when there was no way
out or no solution to a pressing challenge. And he enjoyed telling about Gods
faithfulness in providing remarkable solutions, often just in time to meet those
challenges.
8. Joshua was a man of prayer. He understood the power of prayer. He and
Elizabeth were real prayer warriors.
9. He was not one to take the easy road of life. He made many decisions that
brought difficulty, pain, separation from family, and other discomforts because he
believed those were the decisions that pleased his Heavenly Father.
10. He was willing to stand up for what he believed was right, especially for Biblical
principles. Sometimes this brought him into conflict with those he confronted.
But he was a man of principle and he stood his ground, willing to take the
consequences.
11. However, he was ready to admit that he was not always rightthat he could and
did make mistakes of attitude, action, and direction. When the Lord showed him
his error, he was quick to change, to seek forgiveness and reconciliation.
12. Joshua loved his family and greatly missed them during times of separation. He
wrote this while about his first six months at Bible School in England: I was
so homesick I just couldnt say anything. I even told God that I would never
take another trip unless my wife went with me. I cant really express how terrible
it was. I was looking for every excuse to go back home.
13. He was a faithful friend to countless people in Africa, Europe, North America, and
probably other continents as wellespecially to my Mother, whom he
unofficially adopted years ago. He was always checking up on mein a positive
mannerto make sure that I was caring for her properly.
14. Joshua was a proclaimer of the Gospel, a preacher gifted by God the Holy Spirit.
And we all know that he enjoyed putting his gift to good use.
15. Above all, Joshua was a visionarya man who could dream big. And he did
dreaming ambitiously for God and working hard to turn those dreams into reality.
Not all of his dreams came true, but many, many did. For all the successes he
enjoyed, he gave his Heavenly Father the credit.
In paying tribute to the life and ministry of Joshua Ekpikhe, it is clear that here
was a man who searched for meaning and significance in life in all the usual places that
men search but he found them all to be inadequate, incomplete, temporary, and in the
end, empty. And then he discovered that he could know God personally through Jesus
Christ. This revolutionized his life, and he became a warrior for God, unashamed and
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unafraid, so that he not only quoted these famous words of the great missionary, William
Carey, but he also put them into practice:

Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God.
And then there was that other one thatas far as I can tellJoshua wrote
himself. But even if he was not the original author, it was one of his favorite statements
apart from Scripture:

When we make Gods business our business, God will

make our business His business.
Joshua broke new ground, laid important foundations, and, as one of Gods
unusual servants, cast a large vision for what can be done in Nigeria and beyond. I am
convinced he is expecting us to carry on where he left off. It was an honor to know him,
serve with him, and learn from him. We shall meet again before too long at the feet of
our Lord and Saviour.