Turns out the
things that happen here in an average week have become our "new normal,” and so
since these things don’t surprise us as much anymore, we have been lacking the ambition
to write about them! Eeek, we are the "sorryest".
A significant part of “normal” life here is crime. In the last 5 days my sister Char and her new
husband Mawande had their place broken into and their copper piping was stolen
so they had no water when they woke up Sunday morning.
On Tuesday morning when we arrived early for our pastors
training morning, we found one of our windows at Beautiful Gate (the ministry we rent space from) had been smashed
and the office broken into during the night.
On Wednesday morning we found out one of our 4 hair salons
that we have built for our new small business students was broken into and her
hot water tank, chairs and various items were stolen.
Yesterday night a local business in our small suburb we live
in was broken into and robbed.
And as you might have read on our Hope Africa: Mike &
Marie-Eve Facebook page, the Pastor I work with, Bishop Nyanga was robbed at
gun point last month, as he pulled into his driveway in broad day light. This has been a hard time for him and his
family who was also with him during this incident. Please continue to pray for them.
Sometimes when we minister cross-culturally, we hear the best (and funniest) stories. This one happened recently, during a meeting with a local group of pastors at our monthly church leadership gathering.
Mike was sitting with 3 other church leaders just sharing about life and specifically about what they were learning in regards to discipleship. One of the pastors shared how lately he has been struggling in his faith as he has not been able to get a job and so he can't provide for his family (most pastors here are not employed by the church). Responding to him, one of the others (Let's call him Pastor A. for the purpose of this story) shared a bit of his life story.
Pastor Vukile
Pastor A. said he had been following the Lord for over 20 years, and during this time he has had countless trials. He has experienced tremendous family pain, including having his father commit suicide, having family members lying and attacking each other and persecution for his decision to follow Christ. On top of this, there were many times of not having enough to eat and many challenges that come with living in poverty.
However throughout this Pastor A.'s faith remained strong. But about 10 years ago, there was a fight in his church as the woman he wanted to marry was not the one that the church wanted him to marry. He had gone back to his home province and community and had picked a Christian woman there he wanted to marry, but the church wanted him to marry one of their members.
[Marriages here involve a whole lot more than just 2 people!]
Typical Xhosa wedding
Being attacked by people inside the church left Pastor A. disillusioned, and even after years of trials that he had overcome in his faith, this became overwhelming for him to the point of him walking away from the church and his faith.
Songoma (witch doctor)
After spending some time not walking with the Lord, pastor A. was looking for some guidance about what to do next in life. He turned to the local songoma (witch doctor) and asked what kind of a job he should pursue. The songoma looked at him and said, "You have the Holy Spirit, there is nothing I can do for you. You must go back to the Church to find guidance." Slightly annoyed at this advice the former pastor went to get a 2nd opinion from a different songoma. However this 2nd songoma repeated "You have the Spirit of Christ, you need to search the Bible not ask me for guidance." Pastor A. however still wasn't convinced so he went to a 3rd songoma who said to him, "You are a coward, you have already received your answer, go back to the Church!"
So he humbled himself, repented of his ways, turned to the Word, committed himself back to the Lord and went back to the church. The pastor used his story to just encourage the other to trust in God, that even in the hard times the Holy Spirit is ALWAYS faithful and He is with us!
Well folks, we went from “this isn’t gonna work” to “please Lord help us” to “wow God, this actually really worked!!!” in a matter of weeks. Now that’s a lot of "..." So if you are a
little confused I’m going to try to help you [*disclaimer: I am in no way
liable by means of this blog for any harm caused to your brain as you try to
follow what I’m saying].
So in our last blog “this isn’t gonna work”, we discussed how the retreat had gone from 25 people to now 80+ pastors and leaders wanting to attend. We had to find a new location to host our retreat and fundraise money in a very short time. We were blown away by the quick response and generosity of God's people. So thank you!
First of all, praise God for bringing his church together! What a privilege to join with local church
pastors and leaders and spend time worshiping God, hearing from his Word and
meeting Him in prayer. We believe that God used this weekend to grow the partnership of our ministry with the local churches and we look forward to witnessing how God will use this unity in the church (John 17:20-23, the world will believe that Jesus was sent by God when the world sees the unity of the church).
On the day the retreat finally began, we had over 100
pastors that wanted to come and join us.
Sadly we had already booked the biggest venue we could find and had to
limit to 70 because that’s all the beds we had.
Another 10 still came out just to be part of the sessions during the
day (I mean why not? The truth is some of them "might" have stayed and slept ?!? But at this point we really weren't sure. Welcome to Africa :)
The retreat was meant to start at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 30th 2015, but... Meet my friend "Challenge".Because transportation can be very difficult for people here, instead of starting supper at the planned time of 6:30 p.m., we ate
at 10:00 p.m. when everyone was finally there!
But the pastors weren't just hungry for the good retreat food, they were hungry for
the Word as well. So even though it was already really late, they asked us to still proceed with the evening’s sessions and so
we did. (I can't imagine that would work in Canada! These guys are hard core.)
Our theme for the weekend was
“Lead Like Jesus,” and we looked at 3 passages:
Matt
16:21-28, 1 Peter 5:1-6, 2 Cor 4:5-12.
We had them time of quiet reflection in-between each passage to mediate on the Word.
Mike finished the first session at 1:00 a.m, and promptly went to bed. However, he was the only person at the retreat doing this... Most of the
pastors stayed up until 3-4 a.m. visiting and laughing! You would think this was a youth retreat. Anyone?!? Amazing.
Here is also a short video of Mike's speaking to the group:
The next day was filled with times of worship, prayer, scriptures and times to respond to what God was doing. Many came forward with testimonies of being
challenged by the Holy Spirit to not just talk about leading like Jesus, but
start putting these things into action in daily life.
We spent an hour of alone quiet time which is
very counter-cultural in Xhosa culture, giving room for the Holy Spirit to minister
to us.
Finally as the day drew to a
close around 10:30 p.m., most of the pastors decided they wanted to have another
braii (what we call a BBQ in Canada) and so a fire was built up and meat was put on as another late
night began. One thing is for sure, Africans love meat and a lot of it.
African Boerewors, which us Canadians like to call coiled sausage...
On the final morning people were moving a bit slower
(even by African standards), but we felt encouraged
in the Lord and challenged by his Word.
At lunch time, Mike was speaking to a pastor he had not met before and asked
him his thoughts on the retreat. He
responded by telling him that he had been very suspicious of leadership in general and
he had decided he would come the first night to hear what was spoken, but fully
expected to leave the next morning. He
shared that he was surprised by what he heard and felt very challenged about
what it really means to lead like Jesus.
Now what?
The weekend is over and we want to praise God for all that
happened. Thank you so much for everyone
who prayed for the weekend, we needed your prayers! Thank you as well to those who gave towards
the weekend, and continue to pray for these relationships we are making.
Who knew when we first came to South Africa that God would expand our ministry to the "beyond" part of Africa? Well He did!!!
Mike had the chance to go to Zimbabwe at the end of February, to join an Annual Equipping Event hosted by Global Disciples. He had been in discussions with Global Disciples for about 8 months (met with them first while we were in Canada) and this was an opportunity to hear about their work first hand from current program directors.
About 75 Global Disciples program directors (all pastors) came to the event from 10 different countries. (Just in 2014 these 75 men and women planted about 40 churches in their respective countries, and well over 100 churches in the last 5 years!) Around the world, Global Disciples planted 1400 churches last year, with 40,000 new believers in these churches!
I think for most Canadians, when we hear the name
Zimbabwe, we think in our heads “ends of the earth.” Well after spending a week at the “end
of the earth,” Mike has a lot to say about his incredible week.
"The country of Zimbabwe has been struggling
for the past 20 years, with unemployment now at 90% in one of the poorest
countries on earth. But praise God, the church is stepping forward to share the gospel with this nation of desperate a
needed people."
Could the church feed a nation?
"We were hosted in
Zimbabwe at this amazing church that is reaching out in so many ways to the
people of the nation including teaching them how to grow better crops. The church is a part of the Zimbabwe
Evangelical Fellowship and it is their vision to feed the nation, both
spiritually and physically. In order to
accomplish this the church uses a combination of church planting and farm training."
"They run crop demonstrations
at the church where their crops are 10 times the yield of the average Zimbabwe
farmer. They have now trained 10,000
farmers, and these farmers currently average 3 times the yield of the national
average with just some basic training techniques. Currently Zimbabwe only produces 25% of the
food that is needed to feed their nation, but the church believes that they can
feed the entire nation by training their farmers!"
"Each day during the event there was testimony
after testimony of how God was working in these servants to make disciples, to
plant churches, to heal the sick, and to provide for their communities. We spent hours every day in worship and
prayer, and also took 24 hours to fast and pray on Thursday. That evening we spent many hours praying for
the salvation of the nations, praying for God’s church to fulfill the great
commission across the globe. We prayed
against the evil in our world, recognizing that our battle is not against flesh
and blood but against the rules, power, and principalities of this dark
world. We prayed throughout the night in
shifts with me having the 2-3 a.m. shift with a few other pastors. I was amazed how quickly the time of prayer
went, and in the morning we started to pray again at 7:30 a.m. The passion in this group to fulfill the great
commission seeing churches planted in every people group of earth was both
encouraging and contagious."
Our hope and prayer is that in 2015 I will be able to launch
some of these programs with the churches of Cape Town. We are
hoping to start with the church leadership training and sometime after that, hopefully to launch a discipleship and church planting program. We am very excited to see where God will take
all these things.
Coming back to SA and jumping back in has been busy busy! And we were so ready for Christmas break.
Staff Celebration
But before we took some much deserved holidays, we had wonderful times of get together and celebration with out staff.
We drove to a little strawberry farm, played some games, and ate a LOT of meat. Africans love their meat, so they loved this celebration. It was so nice to be all together celebrating Jesus coming to earth. We have grown to love our staff so much, and I'm always amazed of how easy it was for us to become part of this big Hope Africa Collective family. These people are just incredible.
Christmas holidays means a lot of people go away. Including our co-workers and staff.
So Mike and I looked after our friends and co-worker's 2 boys while they packed and got ready to fly to Australia.
We did some tree climbing and possibly wall climbing...
And then I decided we should make pizzas and bake cookies...
And with 4 little boys it was a bit chaos but loads of fun
Church Mobilization Update
While back in Canada, Mike made this connection with a great organization and has been looking into using their material for Church Mobilization. So we were so blessed when Pastor Amos, the local representative here, said he would like to come meet us in South Africa! He traveled all the way from Zambia and was with us for 3 days.
If he was expecting a South African experience, he got a Canadian experience! We fed him French toasts, burgers and pizza. I don't think he minded though.
The kids really liked him too. He has 7 children back in Zambia, so he is used to it.
Raphael using his Dr. things to see if Mr. Amos is sick
We look forward to seeing what God will do with this new relationship, and continue to look for pastors to partner with us in Church mobilization.
