Transkei Farming God's Way report
It is with great excitement that the work in the Transkei has begun to move so strongly in the past year. In 2005 I trained one of our local pastors Vumile & Patience Ndzululeka in Farming God’s Way & he latched on to it wholeheartedly. He immediately planted his lands in the Qumbu district using the technique & began training his neighbouring farmers to do the same. He had great success with his maize crop & was very proud of his accomplishments & the results achieved on his neighbouring farmers lands as well. Vumile attended the Farming God’s Way Champions conference in September & it was like throwing petrol on an already brightly burning fire. He combusted with excitement & he did training in 6 different areas in the December of 2006 namely Nyanisweni, Qumbu, Mt Frere, Mdumbi, Kwansibe & Nqileni.
Here are some excerpts from the mission in December.
Objectives: 1) Primarily to bring a qualified report concerning the repositioning of Vumile & Patience into a church plant in the Transkei Qumbu district 2) Train Farming God's Way in 3 areas
We were a large crowd of 21 & all arrived from different parts of RSA including Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban & Bloemfontein.
It is interesting & certainly no coincidence that Dave Cape had a significant experience in Qumbu during his walk through the Transkei which is documented in his book “on the road with Jesus”. Here he had the opportunity of addressing a huge crowd from the town with much favour & heartfelt response as well as seeing a paralysed women healed. It has been 20 years since Dave was there & yet God’s time for the full release of His Kingdom promise seems imminent.
The setup in Qumbu is from a church planting perspective well positioned. They already have 35 adult believers & plenty of children, whom we met, that love God & need to be shepherded by Godly people. There are 4 other churches in the village all of which are sects practicing ancestral worship, so this is the only light in the community. Vumile & Patience have a lot of favour & respect in the community but mostly there “congregation” which they call a cell, love them dearly. They had asked the Ethiopian church minister to help oversee the “cell” whilst away but this young guy is battling himself with doctrinal problems & therefore highlights the need for pastoral care.
Lindi Master’s who operates strongly in the Spirit felt that there was a window open that was for a limited time & that she felt God saying they must go for it.
Alongside the church plant there is huge potential for the “kingdom resource base” to be implemented in a rural small scale setting, such as the roll out of Farming God's Way for Vumile & the starting of a pre primary school for Patience. Ron & Lindi really want us to keep them well informed in this regard as they are very excited about the prospects of mobilizing helpers & mission teams.
The option of keeping them there, as self sustaining is not agriculturally viable with the land they currently have as a family but there are some options which I would like to propose. One of which is an abandoned Methodist Mission station which has title deeds & is on about 5 ha of very good quality land. Funding for this would have to obtained from outside sources.
The training of Farming God's Way in Mdumbi was very disorganized & I actually only ended up training the one guy who works at Mdumbi who in turn will take it into the community. Vumile & Hannes Horn went & did trained 25 people at Kwansibe & then Vumile went on to Nqeleni for 2 days for the last stop. He had just completed training at Mt Frere for 4 days when we arrived at Qumbu & is very excited & passionate about his role in the transkei.
Vumile & Patience have subsequently been planted out of Harvest Christian Church & will have the Kingdom expressions of Farming God’s Way & starting a preschool in the 2nd part of the year.
Thanks Grant Dryden |
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Grant Dryden Transkei Report May 2007
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