A seventeen-member strong missions team from GWC and St Peter’s Church, Fish Hoek, headed by Ross Anderson and comprising mostly GWC students, spent a week in Lesotho over the September break, ministering to five rural churches in this mountain kingdom. The main focus areas of ministry included preaching, evangelism, children’s Bible studies, house visitation, and praying for widows and orphans.
The team was confronted by the extent of both the deep spiritual and material needs of the very rural, isolated communities they served over the week. Ross Anderson and certain of the students preached in these five small churches, some with only a handful of adult congregants and no Bible. In each of the churches children attended the kids clubs, coordinated by Niki Hodson, in some numbers. All expressed a hunger for God’s Word.
Niki prepared a curriculum designed to teach the children more about Jesus as King, Shepherd and Friend. With very few resources at their disposal and keeping the message simple, in keeping with the skill of the translators at their disposal, the children were taught by the students, utilising the skills that they have learned at GWC – in breaking down and creatively packaging theology so that a child can receive it.
Humbled by the tremendous hospitality of the community, and enduring a tough physical and emotional week of ministry, the team grew in solidarity through their support and encouragement of one another, carrying one another’s burdens. “It was a life changing experience to be on the ground, answering the Lord Jesus’ call to spread the gospel to all nations in the face of this community’s great need and hunger to be spiritually fed” says Niki Hodson. “Gospel seeds were sown in Lesotho that with God’s help will bear good fruit.”