Manenberg

Manenberg is an area on the Cape Flats that is regularly in the news for Gang violence. The St James Educational Trust does a great job of assisting some of the schools there. Through the St James Educational Trust we have been privileged to offer a kids club to children at Red River Primary School. When we started the group was very big and so we split the group between Grant and Andrew. Over time, as expected, the numbers dropped off and now we have a lovely group of regulars. Morne Lee has been serving with us this year as part of his gap year and we gave him the opportunity this term to teach at this club. He has been telling the well-known stories of the bible such as Noah and the Ark, David and Goliath, Jonah etc. and helping the children to see how these stories relate to Jesus. It’s been a joy to see how well Morne has been able to hold the attention of the children and clearly explain the relevance of these Old Testament stories to Christians.

CLC

Christ Life Crazy is the project that Grant set up to reach children through art, dance, creative writing and drama. The group is going well and at the moment they have been learning about what the bible says about Family.

Trinity Children’s Centre

We have just held a planning meeting for 2013 and beyond. Our greatest concerns are finding a space for the school to grow into. We have struggled to find land anywhere in Beacon Valley and it’s surrounds and so feel that we should stay where we are and continue to buy neighbouring properties. This feels risky as we need to buy one house a year over the next 4 years and there is no guarantee that the neighbours will be willing to sell. Please pray that God intervenes here for us.

ISquared is an IT outsourcing consultancy that makes a generous monthly contribution to the school and so we took the children to meet the staff. The children got to play on the Computers and we explained what the company does.

Springbok

Andrew’s brother, David lives about 7 hours drive from Cape Town in the Northern Cape in a town called Springbok. David started a bible study towards the beginning of this year and

one of the people who joined the bible study was Tiaan Adendorff and his wife Geraldine. Tiaan was, at that stage, the pastor of the Afrikaans Protestant Church (APK) in Springbok. The APK has a clause in their constitution that says you have to be a white Afrikaner to be a member of the church. Tiaan became increasingly uncomfortable with this clause and, realising that his own church council wasn’t going to budge on this point, he resigned.

And so it makes sense to us that Tiaan becomes the pastor of a church plant in Springbok. We are testing the viability of such a project over the next 6 months. We have already raised some money towards Tiaan’s stipend but a need another R2000 per month for those 6 months to ensure that he can survive. Please pray that we can find the money for them but more importantly, please pray that between David, Tiaan, their wives and the one or two other people on the team, they will be able to break through the scepticism of the nominally religious community in Springbok. The white folk in Sprinbok are nominal protestants and the coloured community is predominantly Roman Catholic.

At the end of the six months we will review and decide whether a church plant is viable. Our prayer is the Holy Spirit will guide Tiaan and the team to those who will be receptive to the Gospel.

Thirst for life tent meeting

In Mitchells Plain, tent meetings are a regular occurrence where there is very loud music, the promise of “miracles” and the false prosperity message. These tent meetings make a lot of money for the organisers as they fleece the poor night after night.

We are hoping to set up a tent and invite the community of Beacon Valley to come and hear the true gospel. We will teach against the false doctrines that are so prevalent at the other tent meetings. We will not have a collection. We won’t repeat songs over and over and over again in an attempt to hypnotise the guests, although we are hoping to use music as something of an attraction. Ultimately we are praying that through testimonies and good preaching people will come to faith. Please pray for Clint, Adam, Len and the rest of the team who are putting this together.