What would you do if you learned you had leprosy? Pastor John Lathrop interviews pastor and missionary Dan Izzett about his ministry and advocacy for those afflicted with the ancient, debilitating disease.

John Lathrop: Please tell us where you come from and how you began your walk with Jesus.

Dan Izzett: When I was born my parents were attending the Presbyterian Church. My father realized that he needed to be baptized in water and receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, but he discovered that he could not do this in the Presbyterian Church. So as a family we moved to a Pentecostal church, The Apostolic Faith Mission in Zimbabwe, a movement that was a result of John G. Lake’s ministry in South Africa.

I was born again at the age of five and a half years old and still remember the service the pastor preached when I went forward to the front of the church.

Soon after that I remember one Sunday my parents taking communion and seeing the emotion, joy and rapture they were enjoying during communion, I longed for it! I asked my father if I could join with them the next time and he said that he’d have to ask the pastor. After speaking to the pastor, he was told that the ruling of the church was that I’d need to be baptized first. Therefore, I wanted to get baptized right away. But I was told that I could not be because I was not 12 years old yet. This disappointed me deeply and made me feel that Christianity was only for older people.

My father passed away when I was eight years old and by the age of 14 I’d drifted into a bad relationship with God. An uncle of mine, not many years older than myself, encouraged me to do Hatha Yoga, Yoga for the physical body. But this was a demonic trap to get me into the occult. The end result was that for 11 years I lived in a desert of confused religious ideas.

In 1974 I returned to serving my heavenly Father and my wife got saved! We’d been married since 1970 and then in 1975 we were blessed with our first son. We now have two sons who are married and have blessed us with two wonderful daughters-in-law. That was an answer to at least 25 years of prayer. We are now grandparents to five very special grandchildren.

Lathrop: You have been involved in ministry in Africa for a number of years. Please tell our readers a little bit about that.

Izzett: Here is a brief overview of my involvement in ministry at various levels:

• Youth leader in my local church in 1975
• Served on the church board, first as a member, then as a deacon, then as an elder and finally as the treasurer.
• Full time church discipleship – internship 1981. Taught in 5 Bible Colleges in Harare. Local church bible studies and home groups.
• 1987 worked with CfAN, the ministry of Reinhard Bonnke, as a crusade director, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.
• Planted a church in 1986 and pastored there until retiring in April 2012.
• Through the years I have also done numerous pastors’ seminars with Barnabas Ministries, led by Dr. David Wyns in Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Kenya and Botswana.

Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Politics of Apocalypse: The History and Influence of Christian Zionism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), xv+221pages, ISBN 9781851684533.

Recent years have witnessed a notable scholarly interest in the instrumental role played by some Christians in helping to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which ultimately led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. From an Evangelical standpoint, Stephen Sizer in particular has expressed criticism of early Christian Zionism, while more recently Paul Wilkinson has challenged Sizer’s approach by focusing on and portraying dispensationalists during this period in a far more positive light. For some pro-Israel Evangelicals, efforts by several senior nineteenth century British politicians to create the conditions necessary to secure a Jewish homeland are perceived as an historical ‘Cyrus moment’ whereby God utilised a secular power to restore his people to their covenantal and ancestral homeland.

Dan Cohen-Sherbok’s book likewise explores how Christian Zionists helped establish a Jewish homeland, drawing strongly upon Sizer’s research (which he acknowledges at the outset). Yet whereas Sizer’s polemical (and unnecessarily pejorative) approach is aimed at an Evangelical audience divided over its response to modern Israel, for the most part Cohn-Sherbok offers his readers a more dispassionate and objective appraisal. As such, the historical narrative which unfolds during the first three-quarters of his book is permitted to speak for itself, without constant recourse to criticism of the main actors, thus making it all the more readable and compelling. This is possibly because he sets out to demonstrate how Zionist thinking was central both to emerging and also mainstream, historic British nineteenth-century Christianity, unlike Sizer who arguably portrays early Christian Zionists as a minority on the fringes of orthodoxy.

Nonetheless, there are structural issues concerning how some of the book’s material is presented. For example, the bulk of Cohn-Sherbok’s narrative gives almost equal time to Jewish religious and secular Zionism, rather than focusing on Christian Zionism alone. Clearly, both Zionist camps overlapped to a degree, drawing upon and mutually exploiting each other’s agenda to further their own. Nonetheless, Cohn-Sherbok’s title and stated aim is somewhat misleading as the book does not focus wholly upon Christian Zionism. Moreover, the compelling narrative which unfolds during the first 150 pages or so of Cohn-Sherbok’s book shifts abruptly in the last quarter of the book, suddenly exploring Christian Zionist influences upon Washington’s foreign policy. Particularly noteworthy is how Cohn-Sherbok quotes lengthily from pre-tribulationist Tim LeHaye’s Left Behind books, a dispensationalist Christian fiction series set in an end-times seven year tribulation period which commences after the Church has been raptured, or caught up to heaven. It is quite one thing to discuss how LeHaye’s books were bestsellers that sold millions of copies in the U.S., but it is quite another to extrapolate from this the thesis that Evangelical dispensationalism therefore lies at the heart of U.S. politics and foreign policy. Indeed, British Christianity indirectly helped create the State of Israel, while its North American counterpart contributed (and continues to do so) towards sustaining it. But contrary to popular European opinion, North American Evangelicalism is far from homogenous, and while it is true that many Christians in the U.S. lend strong support to modern Israel, this is not necessarily borne out of a dispensationalist influence upon U.S. politics. Consider, for example, how post-Holocaust theology has contributed to expressions of support for Israel from across Christendom ever since the State of Israel was founded in 1948.