The Message Trust is a global ministry that seeks to reach young people, particularly those in urban and marginalized communities, with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Founded over 30 years ago in the UK, the organization has expanded its work to South Africa, Uganda, Ethiopia, and other African countries. The Message Trust’s approach combines bold gospel proclamation with practical, transformational programs that address the holistic needs of young people. This includes initiatives like GangStar Enterprises, which provides job skills training and discipleship for youth involved in crime and gangs. The organization also partners with local churches to establish community hubs that offer educational support, sports, and other activities to draw in young people and disciple them in the faith. Under the leadership of South African director Tim Tucker, the Message Trust is focused on equipping the African church to effectively engage youth in urban settings.
Learn more about The Message Trust: https://www.message.org.uk/
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King. I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today, I’m here with a very special guest, Tim Tucker from The Message Trust. Thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast with me.
Tim Tucker – The Message Trust (00:12):
Thank Daniel. Great to be here. Thanks for the invite.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:14):
So you are with the Message Trust and right now we are in Zimbabwe, Africa, and it’s been so beautiful to be here with the Global Network of Evangelists. We’ve been doing a gospel festival and you’re from Cape Town, you live down in
Tim Tucker – The Message Trust (00:31):
Cape Town. That’s right. Beautiful Cape Town.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:32):
And you came up to join in on all the fun and excitement and I’ve been exposed to the message trust through Ben Jack and he leads one of your outreaches. But kind of tell us a little bit about the message trust, what you guys are all about and what you do.
Tim Tucker – The Message Trust (00:47):
Yeah, I mean the message has been formed over 30 years ago in the UK by an evangelist, Andy Hawthorne, and primarily seeking to find ways to reach young people with the gospel, particularly urban youth, marginalized urban youth. Our history was the creative arts, a band that became quite famous, the worldwide message tribe around the world, and just find innovative ways to reach young people with the gospel in language that they can understand. God’s really blessed that over the past 30 years and now beginning to be a global movement of organizations seeking to reach young people in difficult circumstances with the gospel. And we do that through a combination of bold proclamation together with action-based mission and ministry. So what does
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:36):
That look like for Africa? You started in Manchester, which has very unique challenges and now Africa has a different set of challenges, but yet people are the same everywhere and young people are looking for purpose.
Tim Tucker – The Message Trust (01:52):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ve been in South Africa originally British came from Manchester, but moved to South Africa in 1998. Fell in love with the well, the continents, the cities and the people and just wanting to see how can we develop a platform to engage young people effectively so that they can become Christ-centered, transformational leaders. That’s really my passion, but it all starts with effective gospel proclamation and attending to people’s hearts and Cape Town in South Africa where we started the first international hub of the message in 2014 is an interesting and fascinating city because we came from obviously Manchester, which is very post-Christian, but minority poor, to a context that is still quite religious in terms of South Africa, but a majority poor environment with all kinds of socioeconomic challenges. So we really had to learn to take the DNA and ethos of the message and contextualize it within Cape Town in a way that will effectively reach the young people in some of the most broken communities there. And that’s been the journey we’ve been on really the last 10
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:00):
Years. So give me a picture of what that actually looks like on the ground. What are some testimonies of what God has done?
Tim Tucker – The Message Trust (03:06):
Yeah, I mean we’ve had a big emphasis on working with young people, caught up in crime and gangs. We actually started a small business called Gangstar Enterprises because the biggest challenge for young person we reach in prison or coming out of the gang environment is how do they put bread on the table so they don’t fall back into that lifestyle? So yes, we proclaim the gospel in prisons and in schools, but then we need to create opportunities to flourish in faith and in life. So gang star is to play on the word gang gangster obviously gang is the past, star is the future. And we’ve had numerous, particularly young men come through that process. We train them to become baristas in coffee and alongside that, disciple them to be able to grow in their faith, become integrated in church. Young man by the name of Ele, we met him in prison.
(03:56):
We journeyed with him for about 10 years. He is now leading a global movement amongst ex-offenders with another organization, but just seeing the transformation in his life and God can use him then to invest in others. So we have that kind of rehabilitative and reintegration program with guys out of prison. But then we also do a lot of prevention in schools in mission in some of the toughest communities because we go in, we’re able to preach the gospel effectively in schools. We partner with local churches, but then we start up what we call community hubs, which is discipleship processes. Again, we use sports and music and other things to draw in the young people and to be relevant to them. But then we discipleship doing educational support and really helping them in the whole of life. And again, everything like that is done in partnership with local churches and it creates this gospel centered intervention that can redirect lives that were headed in one direction, which have been destruction and all kinds of antisocial and criminal activities and directs them into becoming incredible leaders within the kingdom.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:02):
And so God’s given you tremendous fruit in Cape Town, but Africa is a big place. What is on your heart for the future, for the rest of Africa?
Tim Tucker – The Message Trust (05:12):
Yeah, so I mean three years ago I handed over the leadership to a South African man called Sean. He’s doing a phenomenal job and we’ve just began to lift our eyes and say one of the visions we had was to expand into other African cities. As you’ll know, Africa is the youngest continent on the planet. So it’s very relevant for a youth ministry to be involved. There’s urbanization, there’s massive urban challenges amongst young people. So the first thing we want to do is really equip the church to be able to understand how they can better engage young people in urban communities with the gospel and how they do that in a way that is effectively in discipleship and equipping for life. So we’ve been now identifying key cities that we can work in through invitation by local churches. We’ve just launched in Kampala, in Uganda, we’re in the process of Addis Ababa. We’re here in Zimbabwe to see how can we follow up from the great work of GNE in this festival to then have long-term programs and initiatives here we’re looking at French speaking Africa, but God is really beginning to kind of put wind in the sails of this movement. But the beautiful thing is we’re coming off the back of GE and advance evangelism that has already been going on across the continent and we’re saying how can we then almost piggyback off that to establish these long-term initiatives that can really raise up these gospel central
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:34):
Leaders. Yeah, advance is one of the outreaches of the message trust led by my friend Ben Jack. I’ve been with him in a bunch of different countries and it’s really a unique way to mentor evangelists and help evangelists to build community. And so I’ve used it in some of my mentoring of some young evangelists and a great curriculum, but advances put their material in a bunch of different languages and now it’s starting to spread in a lot of different
Tim Tucker – The Message Trust (07:05):
Countries. Over a hundred countries around the world now have some form of advanced groups, tens of thousands of people now being through the training. And for us it’s been vitally important because we are a ministry that is involved in social or what I would call gospel center transformation. We’ve got to be able to keep the main thing, the main thing. And that is that it’s only the gospel that changes the heart and we, in fact, we want to prove that amongst the hardest to reach young people in this continent, a life transformed by the gospel can really become an incredible trophy of grace that then themselves have this ripple effect of impact. So advance means the evangelism means that we are keeping the pure gospel, we’re focused on proclamation, we are equipping the church. And in some ways that’s a gateway for us. It enables us to really build effective relationships with churches to serve more broadly than just through our kind of citywide hubs. And to be on this ongoing journey of equipping the church here in Africa. And we’ve got other great partners. We are also doing discipleship training. We’ve written resources around servant leadership and it’s the combination of equipping the churches here. I think that will ensure that the sustained gospel impacts for the long term.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:26):
So tell me a little bit about your testimony. How did you come to know Christ and then how did you get started doing what you’re doing now?
Tim Tucker – The Message Trust (08:35):
Yeah, I mean I’m one of those trophies of grace from a Christian home. My parents, my dad was a first generation believer. He became a Christian university. My mom was German, they met and she comes from believing family. So from a young age had that experie I
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:52):
Would say to a very young age too. And so I tell people God saved me from drug abuse, from alcohol, from before we even did it, before we even did it. He saved me from
Tim Tucker – The Message Trust (09:03):
That. Yeah, absolutely. So I’m so grateful. But I had a very mean as a six, 7-year-old, very conscious presence of Jesus in my life. I remember making a public confession. I pregnant, I was seven, was absolutely sure I needed to be baptized. I wanted to repent of my sins. There was no sense that I’m just a good kid and I had a burden for my unbelieving friends at school post-Christian England. None of my kids, none of my friends at school, primary school went to church. I then went to a Christian high school and all those kids left the church during the time of my high school. So that was the environment. It was actually weird to be a Christian in the UK in those days. And so when I left school at 16 and did an engineering apprenticeship and at the age of 17 was wobbling, but I’m the kind of person that I’m either all in or I’m all out.
(09:52):
And God began to speak into my heart. There’s one time I said that I became a Christian when I was seven or communion for the first time. And at the age of 17 in this wobbly place, I remember feeling on pure in church and having to pass on the communion. And a few weeks later there was a message and God really convicted me. And he either said, you’re all in or you’re all out. And by God’s grace at that point decided I’m all in. I talk about that my adult commitment, that I was counting the cost at that age because I knew that to follow Jesus wasn’t a walk in the park by then. And then interestingly, the call to missions also came from a young age. From the age I heard a MAF Mission Aviation Fellowship missionary when I was, was eight years old, speak at our church and at that point felt a call to missions and also to Africa.
(10:49):
There’s a longer story there. Again, I had leaving school and doing an engineering apprenticeship. For me, part of that was, oh, I need something to fall back on to support me in the missionary world. The Lord kind of led me in the end. He had a completely different pathway for millions missions and coming to South Africa and doing youth work and all that story. But you just see how God weaves these things together and at the end of the day, he’s all looking for is a heart that’s willing to be obedient to him. And that’s the only qualification we need to serve him, isn’t it?
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:20):
That’s awesome. Well, if someone’s listening and they want to find out more about the message trust or maybe even support some of the work that you’re doing here in Africa, what’s a good website where they can find out about
Tim Tucker – The Message Trust (11:32):
You? Yeah, our landing page is message global.org and there’s a lot of flags on there. So you can see the Uganda or the South Africa one Ethiopia about to go on there, as well as some of the other ones around the world as well to see what’s happening. So message global.org is a great place, great place to start.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:49):
Well, thank you so much for being on the Advantage
Tim Tucker – The Message Trust (11:51):
Podcast. That was amazing. Chat to you. Thanks so much.
