May 8, 2026 Show with Keith Underhill on “Planted by the Providence of God: 22 Biblical Foundations for Church Planting & Missionary Work”

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this eighth day of May, 2026, and I'm so thrilled to have on the program for the very first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Keith Underhill, a church planter in Kenya, East Africa, for 40 years, from 1975 to 2015.

And today we're going to be addressing a book by Keith, Planted by the Providence of God, which is 22 Biblical Foundations for Church Planting and Missionary Work. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Keith Underhill.

Thank you. It's a privilege to be with you and share my story.

In fact, I have heard nothing but the most wonderful and the most fondest things about you from not only my very first pastor, when I became a born-again believer in the 1980s, Mike Gaydosh, when I was saved and baptized at Calvary Baptist Church of Amityville, Long Island, which later became Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island in Merrick.

And one of my subsequent pastors to Mike Gaydosh, Mark Romaldi, who before he became one of the pastors at Grace Reformed Baptist Church, did travel to Kenya with the initial aspirations to become a missionary there, but God had different plans, obviously, he became my pastor.

But it's such a joy to finally make your acquaintance and have you on the program. First of all, as we always do on this program when we have a first-time guest, we have our guests give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include the religious atmosphere in which they were raised, if any, and what kind of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to Himself and.

Saved them. And we would love to hear your story. Thank you. I should say that I'm speaking from Liverpool in the United Kingdom. If Cumberland Valley has its people, then Liverpool is a great place for soccer and for pop music.

And, of course, in the past, it used to be one of the.

Great ports of the world. Now, do you call it soccer over there?

Well, we do. I use the word soccer instead of football because you wouldn't understand that.

Well, I actually did.

We do call it soccer or football.

Okay.

Yes, so that's where I come from. My parents were not Christians. They didn't go to church, and so I was brought up in that atmosphere where education was everything. Then around the age of 10, a neighbor boy kept bothering me, come to Sunday school.

It would have been in the afternoon. Well, I used to enjoy my stamp collections and listening to Top of the Pops at three o 'clock, I think, in the afternoon. But I finally gave in. Now, my character is that if I start a thing, I keep going.

So although I don't think I understood anything of what was going on, I kept on going. I became, believe it or not, a Sunday school teacher, a youth club leader. I got myself baptized by sprinkling at the age of 14, but I didn't know anything really about the Lord Jesus and the salvation that I needed.

As with all of us, we can look back and we can see God's providence at work. That's one of the book is called Planted by the Providence of God. One traces God's activity through the whole of one's life.

From the fact that my parents were somewhat international, I traveled as a teenager, but I went to university. Again, it wasn't my first choice, a place perhaps you can't pronounce called Aberystwyth.

I went there to study geography. My roommate, imagine, was a mature 18-year-old believer. He asked me when I got into the room, because we were two in the room, are you a Christian? Well, of course I said yes.

So his next question floored me. When do you have your quiet time? Well, I had to be a bit deceptive, didn't I? Of course, occasionally I'd prayed and read my Bible, but I said, oh, in the morning. So from that day on at 6 .30 in the morning, up we got together and had our quiet times.

I don't know exactly when I was converted, but I know in those three months, God was dealing with me. I heard the truth through my friend Brian. I joined the Christian Union, where we heard wonderful teaching Saturday by Saturday.

At that time, I wasn't in a good church, but those influences gradually brought me to an assurance of salvation, that the Lord had had saved me, he changed me, and that I wanted to live for him. Praise God for that.

Now, did you.

Join that fine Baptist church in Aberystwyth, Wales, where my friend Geoffrey Thomas was.

Pastoring for decades? I did, but I actually was in Aberystwyth a year before himself. When he came, a number of us immediately migrated to Alfred Place English Baptist Church under his ministry, and he began with Genesis 1 -1 and Matthew 1 -1, and we thought it was absolutely wonderful.

We just thank God for the building up we had as young people. In fact, that became.

The church that eventually sent us to Kenya in 1975. Wow. And I'm assuming, since that church had such an instrumental part in your Christian journey, that you discovered the doctrines of sovereign grace very early on in your Christian journey.

Really right from the beginning,.

Because even the Christian Union there, we would say it was reformed. All the preachers who came, mostly Welsh preachers with their unique style of teaching, but experimental religion, almost all of them would have been reformed men.

So we were really privileged.

Amen. Now, when did you realize and how did you realize that the Lord had placed a burden on your heart to travel to Kenya of all places?

Kenya of all places. It's very hard to work through everything that went on. I was a geography student, so I was interested in the world for a start. I traveled as a young person. My parents had exposed me to the world.

When I got to college, there were lots of overseas students there. In fact, in the hall of residence where I stayed, there were a number of Africans. Now, I don't know whether I sat with them because I was interested in Africa or I got interested in Africa because I sat with them, but that's what happened.

And that was one thing. I studied geography there at college and was able to study Kenya. Again, I don't know quite why I did it, but I did it. We had missionary prayer groups for each continent, and we were expected in the Christian Union to join one of them.

Well, I joined the Africa one. When you pray and you hear of a need, if you're praying sincerely, you have to pray, Lord, I'm here. If you want me to fulfill that need, I'm willing. It's very interesting in Matthew 9, Jesus tells his disciples to pray that the Lord of the harvest will send out laborers into his harvest field.

But the next chapter, and I wish the chapter division wasn't there, the beginning of the next chapter, what happens? Jesus sends them out into the harvest field. I can't help but think there's a connection there.

There was one experience I had. I don't put too much stock by it, but it happened. There was a missionary bookstore at the Christian Union meetings on a Saturday, and I remember going and picking up a book, flicking through it, and the word Sudan stared me in the face, the country in Africa, Sudan.

I picked up another book, and the same thing happened. I was at the end of 1964, and really I felt that was the Lord directing me. I would love to have gone to Sudan because I heard that it was 90 unreached with the gospel, but in 1965, it was closed to the gospel.

Those are all the initial providences that God brought to me to direct me in that way. Let me just say one more thing. If you had told me as a younger teenager, you're going to become a public speaker, I would not have believed you.

I was still a fairly shy person. Certainly, to stand up before people to speak was something I'd hardly ever done. This was the Lord's doing. I was actually at the beginning when I was converted in the Methodist church, seeing that many of the students were not converted.

As a young Christian, I picked up Hendrickson's Commentary on John and began Bible studies. So a few people converted through that. That was all God's confirmation of.

The direction in which I wanted to go. Tell us about your initial reaction when you first arrived in Kenya. What was it that you faced? What was the.

Religious atmosphere of the place? I went in 1968. I finished my degree. I did teacher training. I was advised for a testing of my call to go as a teacher. So in 1968, I went as a young 22-year-old into the depths of Kenya, quite a relatively remote place called Meru, to a new secondary school.

What was my reaction? I was absolutely overjoyed. What a privilege to be amongst people who are friendly. For example, a few weeks after I arrived, six men who had their background in the East African revival had heard a believer had come to the school.

They came to visit me. There we sat in a semicircle, pictures in the book, and we shared our testimony, just like I've done today. You know then immediately where you stand with a person. These were people over the next two and a half years I had the deepest fellowship with.

What a privilege to go to a place and find people you're one with in the Lord and to see everything then in your experience in the country through their eyes. So that was my overall reaction. For me to leave after the two and a half years of teaching was a real wrench because I loved it and loved the people.

And I believe they loved me too.

And the theological flavor, if you will, of Kenya, were there any Reformed Baptists there? Were there any Reformed Baptist churches there? Or were you basically starting and participating in new territory when you were planning to begin planting churches there?

Yeah. Well, it was 1975 after my training in America, Westminster Seminary, and getting married. We started in Kenya in 1975. There was a fledgling supposed Reformed Baptist church in a town called Thika just north of Kenya.

You mentioned Geoffrey Thomas. He and Leonard Goucher had actually studied at Westminster together for a year. In fact, Geoff was the best man at Leonard's wedding. So there's another providence. Ten years before, there's been that Kenya connection.

So that's the only Reformed Baptist that we knew. There were a few Reformed Presbyterians, but by and large, the Reformed faith was absent. In terms of the makeup of Kenya, it's mainly Christian in name.

80 would claim the Christian faith as opposed to Islam or traditional religion. That 80%, I divide it, it's very rough, but just for the sake of convenience, in just three groups, there are the Catholics, who are by far the strongest single grouping.

Then there are the Protestants, including Pentecostals, Charismatics, and so on. Then there's the one that we're not familiar with. It's called the African Independent Churches. A multitude, some of them very large churches, that rebelled against the missionary leadership of churches and wanted their own leadership.

One would say quite rightly, but they wanted more than that. They wanted a very African form, and that would include polygamy maybe, for example. So that's the makeup of the country. I would say that the phrase that's used, Christianity in Africa, is a mile wide and just an inch deep.

There's so much, but it's just cultural. You ask a person, are you a Christian? Yes. Why are you a Christian? Well, I was born.

In a Christian family. Basically, like the Southern United States.

Yes. I think Kenya is very much more like the States than the UK, where I live. So the great need is more than the Reformed faith. We believe the Reformed faith, the biblical faith, the doctrines of grace, people need to be saved.

May I just say one other influence that's been there? I mentioned the East African revival that began in Rwanda in the late 1920s, spread to Uganda, and then into Kenya in the 1940s, 1950s. It really, I don't know about revitalized, but it brought multitudes of people into a saving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.

As they confessed their sin, I'm using their language now, they were broken before the cross and put their trust in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. We had a very interesting, for me at least, session at the recent Banner of Truth conference here in Britain, just in April, where there was actually a paper on the East African revival.

That will give you a big clue of a profound influence in the Anglican Church of England, Presbyterian and Methodist churches, because when missionaries came, you can imagine in the early part of the 20th century, most of them would have been liberal, wouldn't they?

Because at least if they're from Britain, that was the prevailing influence. So that's what we had to face. I found true believers among the revival brethren, as they called themselves, not to be confused with Plymouth brethren.

Yeah.

And how quickly did you realize, I want to spend many years in this place? I mean, was there apprehension at first? Was there regret in any shape or form? Or were you quickly given a heart and a love for the Kenyan people?

That happened when I was a teacher. There was no question about, we're only here for five years, 10 years. We were here committed for the foreseeable future, as God willed. As I said, the people were welcoming.

We sought to live among them instead of in a mission compound. And we were accepted. In fact, people today say, Keith, you're more Kenyan than we are.

Well, I know that your book, it contains 22 biblical principles, foundations for church planting and missionary work. I know that the likelihood is there will be many more listeners who have an interest in church planting in the United States than in a foreign country, although there may be listeners who do have an aspiration to be on the mission field and may even be on the mission field now.

But are the lessons learned, since they are biblical, I'm assuming that they would be applicable even to people who are desiring to plant a church or churches, plural, right in the United States where most of my listeners are.

I do have listeners in at least 28 foreign countries because I've heard from my listeners in those countries via email. But the vast majority of my listeners, I believe, are in the United States. And so would these principles be applicable to those folks as well?

The short answer is absolutely yes. I think that when we make the distinction between missions being going outside your country, as opposed to within your country, I think that's a false distinction. I say all the time that, yes, I went basically to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, but there's no difference between Nairobi and Northampton.

We have a Northampton in Britain. You have one in Connecticut or up in New England. There's no difference.

We have a Westhampton and a Southampton and an Easthampton on Long Island.

Well, I don't think we have a Westhampton. I don't know that one. But people are the same, aren't they? Even the sins that are characteristic are the same. After we read the Bible, the Bible doesn't come out of America or out of Britain.

It comes out to the Middle East. And the very same things we read in the Old Testament are the things that we see. And so the solution is the same, isn't it? It's the Lord Jesus Christ and his cross and faith in his name.

And godliness is basically the same. Godliness begins from within the heart, within our thoughts and desires. It's only the expressions that can be different. I'd already mentioned polygamy. That's something that most of you are not involved with, but it's endemic there.

So I would like that distinction to be gotten rid of. In fact, I never wanted to call myself a missionary, always a pastor, really, because that seems to me to be the biblical description. So yes, the basic principles are the same.

I think in the book, I make it very simple. It's preaching, preaching the gospel. That's where it starts. That sounds so elementary. And yet, how many times have I heard that missionaries go on the field but they don't preach or they hardly ever preach?

I heard of one country, Yemen, where there are a hundred missionaries and only 10 of them ever preach. The other 90 don't even consider they should be preaching. They might be doing a wonderful job, but that's not the job of the.

Great Commission. What is their job if they're not preaching? I mean, meeting physical needs?

Yes, and they're showing the love of Christ by their lives, which is great, but it needs explanation, doesn't it? And I think this is one of the problems of missions today. There's little preaching. So that was the first thing, preaching.

And then you make disciples, you teach people, you build them up. And then the third thing is training of leaders. That surely is what we do anywhere in the world.

So when you begin preaching in an area that you hope and pray, you will successfully plant a church. Where do you do this preaching? Is it outdoor evangelism? Is it preaching in an established church?

How do you go about doing this?

The particular example I have in Kenya is the Rendili people up in north-central Kenya, who are one of the most traditional people, who 30 years ago were almost entirely unreached with the gospel. So it's God in his providence again who directs.

Of course, you could go and just preach, but actually you can't because you don't know the Rendili language. And so you can preach the most wonderful ministry in English, but hardly anyone's going to understand you.

So typically, I believe what the Lord does, he brings you into contact with somebody who knows the language, who is converted or is under your influence, and you go up with him. That's what we did in Rendili.

Can I tell a little bit of the story?

Oh, yes, definitely.

The Rendili people, they're about 60 ,000. As I say, they're very, very traditional people, but they are prized as watchmen in Nairobi because they know what it is to fight with wild animals. So they're brave.

Number two, they don't know English or even the other language of the land. And so they come down for five years or so as watchmen, earn a bit of money, and then send money back so they can buy some animals.

But you get to know them. That's God's providence. If I may talk about this, because I think this is the theme that should come out all the time. How do you get into contact with them? Well, one day in 1996, there's a knock on the church office door where I'm working.

It's a Somali. Now, you say, what on earth is a Somali Muslim doing knocking on a church door? Well, he says, I know English. Most of my people are going to go to America and be resettled. And so I would like to teach them English.

Well, I'm usually cautious. I immediately responded and said, I'll give you all the materials you need. That man professed faith in Christ. Immediately did that. The Somali community ganged up against him, went to the police with a false accusation, and he was arrested and put in the police cell.

A false accusation of what? Murder. Wow. Murder. Yeah. So the police had to take it seriously. Two of his Somali friends said, let's go visit and let's see what's happened. Remember, he had professed faith in Christ.

So he directed his two Somali friends to a lady, actually, go and talk with this lady called Sarah. And they did that. Well, the rest is history now. She sent them to Trinity Baptist Church in Nairobi, of which I was a pastor.

And they, in a shortish while, became believers themselves. Now, one of them, Abdi, very common name, Abdi, he was drinking partner with the leader of the Rendili community in the slum area of Nairobi.

Do you see how God has done it? He's built all these bridges. Amen. And so the Rendili people come to church. They're not looking for Christ. They're looking for handouts because they know that churches are very kind.

But over a few years, a number were converted. And then we were able to send them back to Rendili to start a.

Church. Wow. You know, when you mentioned Nairobi, that triggered a memory. And I did receive an email back in 2021 from a listener named Susan Matuku, M-U-T-U-K-U, who was looking for a biblically solid church.

And I remember I referred her to three churches, and one of them was Trinity Baptist Church of Nairobi. And I have met Moronge Igueta. Yes. And I also referred her to Emmanuel Baptist Church of Nairobi.

Yes. And Grace Baptist Church of Nairobi. Okay. And I don't know if she ever visited any of them. But I hope she did. And I hope she found a church home in one of those places. But that just goes to show you, you never know where people are listening to my program.

God's providence is just wonderful. Amen. And the internet is wonderful.

Yes. Even though Satan has a field day using it, God uses it in a much more powerful and meaningful way, obviously. And we have to go to our first commercial break. And if anybody wants to listen, I mean, if anybody wants to send in a question, I should say, please send an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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Welcome back. I just want to remind our listeners to please mark your calendars for an event—or should I say an interview—that I am excited about next Thursday. I am interviewing for the first time an actor by the name of Jonathan Blair, who happens to be the actor featured in the starring role of George Whitefield in the new movie A Great Awakening.

He will be on next Thursday, and I hope that you mark your calendars for that and listen in and submit your questions to Jonathan Blair. I am now back with Keith Underhill, a church planter in Kenya, East Africa, for 40 years, and we are discussing his book, Planted by the Providence of God, which features 22 biblical foundations for church planting and missionary work.

If you have a question, submit it to chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence, and we will get to those of you who have submitted questions already as soon as possible.

I just wanted to get some more of the background of Keith's ministry stated and detailed. So, the getting to know people in the area where you are prayerfully envisioning planting a church, well, first of all, in this specific case, you mentioned the language barrier, but is Kenya a place that is dominated by the English language or is English a minority?

Tell.

Us about the breakup of that. Yes, linguistically, English and Swahili are the official languages. English is the language of education and of government. Swahili is a trade language coming from the coast of Kenya, and with the traders in the old days, they spread it as they moved throughout East Africa, but it's not well known.

It's taught as a foreign language, like we learn Spanish or French in our schools, I think, and then there are about 45 different language groups in Kenya. So, you go 50 miles and another language is the vernacular,.

And it goes like that around the country. Now, how many of those people, percentage-wise, would be bilingual, at least bilingual and understand English?

Every educated person, and now education is compulsory, knows English, Swahili, and their vernacular. Well, increasingly in towns, they don't know the vernacular,.

But many, many are trilingual. And so, you had to obviously get an interpreter for yourself to get to know the people of the area that didn't speak English, correct?

Yes. And so, by God's providence, you need that contact, don't you? You can't rely on a non-Christian there. In fact, the first thing I do in an area, I tell them, how do you translate justification?

And they give me the word, which I don't understand. Then I say, translate it back to me, will you? And so, in Swahili, it's, which literally means to count or to be counted, I should say, to be counted righteous.

So, I say, amen to that. You got it right. So, you need somebody you can rely on, don't you? Maybe I can go back. I gave you the example of Rendili. The 40 years, well, 37 of those years from 1978 were the establishing of the Trinity Baptist Church in Nairobi.

Now, that didn't start from nowhere, didn't start with me preaching somewhere. I'd been a teacher 10 years earlier in Meru. A number of students were converted, and I kept in contact with them. We'd come out as a family initially to that town just north of Nairobi called Thika, had some contacts from there.

So, with those few contacts, we started this church in Nairobi in 1978. Indeed, they said, please, Keith, you come and start this Reformed church, although we didn't tend to use that language for quite a while,.

Because it means nothing to people. And were the people that began assembling there, were they non-Christians, were they nominal Christians, Christians in name only, a mixture? Who was attending this?

Obviously, God was drawing them.

The initial contacts were all believers. In a sense, you don't have to, of course, but it's wonderful when you can have five, six true believers, you begin the church, you look to them to bring their relatives, their workmates, their friends,.

And seek to grow the church that way. And the introduction of the doctrines of sovereign grace, since these were Christians predominantly, were these rebelled against initially, or were they seemingly eager to learn about them and not becoming upset?

I remember when I first heard about Reformed theology, I didn't think I would ever believe it. And even though I was requesting baptism in a church that I discovered was Calvinistic, not that I knew who John Calvin was, but they were explaining the theology known as Calvinism to me, and I told them before I was baptized, I love you guys, I respect you, I want you to be my shepherds, I want this church to be my church family, but I don't think I'm ever going to become a Calvinist.

And I eventually did, by God's grace, when a British gentleman in my congregation, Nigel Stone, who was an older gentleman, approached me and he said in his very deep British voice, I understand you're having difficulty embracing unconditional election, read this.

And he gave me George Whitfield's letter to John Wesley on election. And my first reaction after reading that was, oh no, this is true, but I still hate it. But within a couple of months, I fell madly in love with those teachings.

So what was the reaction to these people who assembled the Trinity Baptist Church in Nairobi?

Well, the few to begin with were already understanding it, but that's not my method particularly to say this is what's called Reformed theology. I think for 10 years, we never used the word Reformed or Calvinistic.

So I believe let's preach the scripture and our method was to do that. I remember I began the church going to the Beatitudes. What's a Christian? There are more, this may not sound very good, but there are more fundamental questions.

Obviously, we know that what we call the Reformed faith is the biblical faith, but when you call it Reformed, it's as if it's one view as opposed to another. But when you expound in the scripture without saying this belongs to this particular camp or that particular camp, people who love the word of God and honor it and submit to it, they imbibe it without those labels.