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To God be the Glory

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It is good to be back in Kansas City. Our team was an exceptional team of fifteen people from Grace Point. Debbie and I really enjoyed sharing the beauty and culture with our family from Grace Point.

The schedule was demanding, and the team was exhausted, but they approached every day with zeal and optimism. Even as we struggled with sickness and cold early mornings, there was no complaining.

I got regular text messages from our ministry partners asking for the team to return and pray for more people because the Lord was moving so powerfully wherever they went.

There was so much that God did, and still doing in the lives of the people we encountered. Lives were eternally changed, simply because we brought the Gospel message, prayed, and invited the Holy Spirit to do his work.

We served a wonderful ministry called Living Hope in Fishoek, South Africa, near Cape Town. Founded by John and Avril Thomas almost 24 years ago, they serve thousands of people annually. The entire Living Hope team are heroes and some of the most selfless people you could meet.

During our time in Fishoek, we served in many different capacities; we served with after school programs, helped with the sustainable farming, sorted donations, rebuilt and stained a deck, prayer walked, taught and served at a drug and alcohol recovery center, led staff devotions daily, served and prayed for people in their in-patient medical facility and served with their disabled and home health care teams. We prayed for people, served food, shared the Gospel, washed feet, and taught the Bible; it was such a powerful experience for our whole team.

One of the questions often asked about short term missions is, what is the fruit? Can we quantify the “return on investment”?

A lot of money was raised, and many people sacrificed in order to go to South Africa, how can we know if it was worthwhile?

Short team missions is a double edged sword; lives are impacted as we pray and share the Gospel, ministries are encouraged, churches are built up, people are healed and souls are won for the kingdom of Heaven.

But missions is also a tremendous discipleship tool for those who go. They grow in their faith as they rely on the Lord. Being stretched to speak in front of people and lead when they never thought they could. Seeing the faith of others around the world who have little or nothing in the way of material goods, yet they joyfully praise God. Seeing people with absolute faith that God will come through and heal or provide daily bread. This mission team are changed people and they will continue to grow as God leads them to serve and share what they have learned.

I love to invite people into a relationship with Jesus, and I had the opportunity to do that on several occasions.

During the after-school ministry, Bob Strawn had just taught the children the parable of the Good Samaritan. As we closed, we impressed on the children that without Jesus Christ they would not be able to love their neighbor. Many of the children have been abused by their neighbors, how could they love them?

As we spoke about the power of the Holy Spirit to enable them to love like Jesus does, we invited them to make Jesus lord of their lives, about twenty of the children responded to the Gospel that day.

A few days later, at the recovery center, we were asked to come and pray with Samuel. Samuel was writhing in pain as he was going through heroin withdrawal. Tim Bardy and I prayed with him to be set free from pain and he prayed to make Jesus Christ lord of his life. A temporal and an eternal miracle. Two days later we saw Samuel again and he was a visibly different person as the Lord had begun to transform his life.

A number of our team spoke at the recovery center, and I was scheduled to close with a Gospel invitation. I took them to Romans 6:1-6 and specifically verse 6, “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.”

The clients could all identify with being a slave to sin, and six of them responded to the Gospel invitation. It was a great day, we were seeing a harvest of souls.

Throughout the trip, the Lord would wake me up early, each morning I would look at my watch and it was 4:38am. This happened day after day, each day the exact time I looked at my watch was 4:38am.

As we spoke about it, I wondered if it was maybe a scripture reference that the Lord was calling me to meditate on. I began looking and immediately came across John 4:38, Jesus speaking to his disciples said, “For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” The Lord impressed on me that we are simply experiencing the harvesting of the fruit of other peoples’ faithful labors.

There are seasons of sowing, nurturing, and reaping. God moves his servants around and we must always be aware of the season that we are in. The people at Living Hope have sown for years with incredible sacrifice, then God sent a small team from Kansas City to reap the harvest that they had been praying for. What a joy to be used by the Lord to partner with these incredible people thousands of miles away from home.

Kansas City is our mission field, it is the primary area of our sowing and nurturing. There are thousands of people in our community that do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Are we faithfully sowing and praying to the Lord of the harvest?

Thank you to all who sacrificially gave and blessed the people of South Africa.

kuThixo makube luzuko (Xhosa)

Aan God die eer (Afrikaans)

To God be the glory.

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Khayelitsha, South Africa – Report Back

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Last December, I was invited to join a ministry called Team Xtreme International, on an outreach to South Africa. I prayed about it and felt the Lord leading me to go. Little did I know how significant it would be.

We were primarily proclaiming the Gospel in a city of 2.4 million people called Khayelitsha, which is on the outskirts of Cape Town. It is an area that has suffered from unimaginably high unemployment rates and crime. The name Khayelitsha means, “New Home” in Xhosa and was established about 40 years ago during the height of Apartheid.

Many people warned us not to go into Khayelitsha and even locals told us to leave because they were afraid for our safety. But the Lord had His angels protecting us every day.

We spent most mornings touring schools and ministering during their assemblies. We also did after school programs and evening ministry from a truck bed stage.

The school assemblies were the most effective ministry. As we shared the Gospel, 90% of children responded. We were able to spend time praying with students and pointing them to freedom in Christ. It is hard to put into words the amount of pain that these children experience, including sexual abuse, violence, absent parents and rampant drug use.

For me this outreach was probably the most impactful of my life. I wrestled with feelings of shame and guilt from the years of apartheid and feeling that I did not have a right to speak in my own country.

The words of Jesus about a prophet not being welcomed in his own hometown rang in my ears (Matthew 13:57). But the Lord redeemed that and set me free as a wife of one of the pastors we served with, welcomed me, and released me of the burden of guilt. She reminded me that it has been thirty years and that I should stop carrying an unnecessary burden. After that I felt tremendous freedom to declare the hope of the Gospel to the people of Khayelitsha.

In the course of the 18 days of ministry and working with other organizations, over 23,000 people heard the Gospel and almost 18,000 responded to the message. In addition to the proclamation, partner churches were connected, and many discipleship groups are already under way. God moved powerfully and we saw many miraculous healings and powerful conversion encounters.

One school was even shut down for the day after the time of ministry because all the students were so impacted that they couldn’t get back to their work.

But what about us? These are amazing stories, but we need the power of the Gospel in our schools and streets in America.

In Matthew 10, Jesus called his twelve disciples and then sends them out on a mission trip. He throws them into the deep end and warns them that they will experience persecution as they go out and proclaim the kingdom.

Jesus sent his disciples out as his witnesses, witnesses of himself. They were the forerunners in missions, going and telling others about Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven.

We know from the Great Commission in Matthew 28, that Jesus sent all his followers to go and be his witnesses, ambassadors.

The disciples were ordinary men, tradesmen, humble and broken, but Jesus gave them authority and sent them out.

The Bible doesn’t tell us how long they went for, it was probably a short-term campaign. In Luke 9 verse 10 we read that they returned and reported back to Jesus all that had happened.

Now it is true, that the message they carried and the message that we have today is different. Jesus hadn’t gone to the cross or risen from the dead. The victory and the power of the cross hadn’t been accomplished yet.

We have a different and far more glorious message; our message is far more powerful.

In one of the school assemblies I noticed the kids not paying attention, so I said to them, “what I am about to tell you is the most important thing you will ever hear in your life.”  That got their attention.  Do you believe that? It will be reflected in how much we are willing to be obedient to the Great Commission.

If you read Matthew 10 carefully it is clear that Jesus is speaking to his disciples, but he is also speaking to all future ambassadors for the Gospel. He is speaking to us and to future generations of believers.

In fact, the language Jesus is using seems to parallel what he says later, on the mount of olives in Matthew 24 about the coming persecution before his return. In our current age, the emphasis on “fear not” in verse 26 onwards is particularly helpful.

We are surrounded by people telling us what we can and cannot say in the public square.

The principle of one of the schools we visited had put Bible verses all around the school on the pillars and notice boards – I asked her, if she would get into trouble with the administrators, she said, “probably, but our school needs Jesus”.

Yesterday in our men’s breakfast, we heard several examples of some of our men who boldly stood up for the truth of God’s word in spite of threats. And God was powerful to deliver.

You see, we are all missionaries; some get on a plane, others go to the office or workshop. A missionary is someone sent by the Spirit of God to a particular place, to be an ambassador for Christ. Where you are is your mission field.

Jesus ends his challenge to his disciples in Matthew 10:32-33,  “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven.”

Being a Christian is not like being a secret agent in the CIA, it is public, we are called to be bold witnesses (see Romans 10:14).

How are you doing in being an ambassador for Christ?