Family and Ministry News

Family Update

As a family we are super grateful to God for the people He has surrounded us with. First, our families for the love and support they are to us. And our friends, who stood with us, supported us and prayed with and for us. During the time our son, Thokozani, was in hospital until he went to be with Jesus, we experienced incredible prayer support. God has truly blessed us with amazing families and friends. These relationships have brought comfort to us in our darkest hour as a family. Through the people around us, we felt God’s presence and comfort. God has been and still is our good, good father in this grieving process.

We are all enjoying good physical health, although Ndumiso is teething and sometimes in pain. We have been busy with training and discipling the J-Life trainees. I (Bhuti) am overseeing the GC2 BETA training and the day to day running of this programme. Jann help makes sure I don’t miss the details of running the internship. She has also been helping on the campsite with logistics during this very busy season in our year.

GC2 BETA 2016

During these first two months of the year we were working with 3 groups of interns from 12 different countries, which made the community richly diverse. An ideal environment for discipling people with a global focus of “…all nations..” ( Matt 28: 19).

The First Group: Gap Year Program

This year we have partnered with local churches to train their interns. Is this any different from what we used to do? Yes - In the past we offered Coaching teams, which were made up of 3 or 4 young people from different churches who were then sent to a church where they served as interns. We felt that this programme was not producing fruit as it took quite a long time for the young people to adapt and earn the trust needed to minister effectively.  We believe God led us instead to partnering with churches who are already running, or want to run, internships. We then train and equip the intern and send them back to serve at their home churches.  This group of interns will return for more training throughout the year. This year we have 9 trainees from 8 different churches.

The Second Group: Bethel Semester Abroad students

This is the second year that we are hosting a group of 4 students from Bethel College, Indiana, USA. J-Life and Camp Eden acts as home base for them, from which they get to experience a variety of different ministry and cultural settings. They spent most of their time during the first 4 weeks involved in training on site with our other interns. Since then, they were able to visit churches in 3 different communities and experience many strange (for them) and wonderful things. They are currently in Margate with Donovan and Chantel Olding at Norwegian Settlers Church.

The Third Group: African Initiative Programme

This programme is aimed at expanding J-Life across the continent. Participants are people who are pioneering J-Life into their countries (in a country were J-Life does not yet have a presence) or into new regions in an existing J-Life Country, helping the country leader reach the regions that are further from them.

12 participants from 11 different countries spent a total of 5 weeks with us. Of these, 5 were pioneers into new countries, the other 6 will be helping extend J-Life in their countries into new regions.  For the first time here on Camp Eden we had more French speaking than English speaking trainees. God provided an incredible translator, Yoshua, from the Democratic Republic of Congo living in Johannesburg.

J-Life Annual Summit

Each year, the J-Life family across the continent gathers together with some of our partner churches, at summit. During this time we celebrated what God has been doing in our lives by sharing testimonies. J-Life Summit 2016 was about casting #Vision2020. We had a great time listening to God direct each of us where he wants us to serve over the next 5 years. Together we fleshed out what God want us, the J-Life movement, to do towards 2020. We are excited to see how God will accomplish all of this through us.

Equipping Events
We will host two more major equipping events this year. Please be praying for us as we plan and prepare for them. Please do contact us for more info should you have anyone interested.

6 Weeks Internship: 13 June-24 July 2016
                                  5 weeks of ministry training + 1 optional extra week touring in Cape Town

STeM: 30 Sept - 9 October
            4 days of training + 5 days practical outreach in a community