Campus Updates I GraceLife Stellenbosch

Campus Updates  I GraceLife Stellenbosch

By Shayne Holesgrove

This has certainly been our best year yet! GraceLife Stellenbosch has become healthier than ever before. As the saying goes, “healthy things grow” – and that’s exactly what has happened. We’ve had more visitors, more people have received Christ and more people have been growing through our discipleship courses than ever before.

 

Over the course of this year we have also slowly established a great leadership team which has been really effective in helping to oversee the ministry, care for the people and help equip them for the work of the ministry.

 

We are truly blessed with quality leaders who are passionate about Jesus and His kingdom. Since we now have people coming from various areas, including Sir Lowry’s Pass Village, Somerset West, Paarl, Durbanville and Cape Town, we have appointed leaders to oversee each area and to ensure that we have a sufficient number of LifeGroups to care for the people. Thank you to our amazing leaders who are doing such a great job in serving Jesus by serving His church!

 

Staff at Stellenbosch

 

Our central team is made up of three full-time staff members (Ettienne, Werner and Janno) and two interns (May and Jonathan) who volunteer their time, energy, passion and resources to run the ministry. Most people are unaware that all of them raise their own financial support (partnership) or work part-time so that they can be a part of the full-time team at GraceLife. This team is golden, and really are effective in getting things done and enabling lives to change! You guys are amazing: thank you!

 

At the beginning of the year, we arrived early one Sunday morning to set up for the church service, only to be surprised by the fact that we had been moved into the school’s newer and much bigger hall because the smaller one we were using had been declared unfit for use. This created a bit of a problem because the new hall can seat about 800 to 1000 people, and at the time we were gathering 20 people in the morning and 50 or so people in the evenings. Our congregation seemed to get lost in the overwhelming space!

 

Our full-time team got together to pray and strategize, and came up with some great ideas on how to make the very large hall more cosy and welcoming. A lot of hard work and a lot of time goes into setting up and packing away every Sunday, and I just want to thank our amazing Dream Team who selflessly come and serve for hours so that others can receive the Word and enjoy fellowship. You guys are amazing!

 

Outreach teams and Children’s Church

One of our most exciting recent developments is that we now have (on a regular basis) a number of people going out on the streets in the different areas to reach out to communities. Our teams get together in a public area, often weekly, and then go out in pairs to share the love of Jesus with anyone and everyone they encounter on the street. Every time these teams go out they see people receive Christ, get healed and experience the love of Jesus. It’s incredible!

 

Our children’s church has really grown tremendously this year, too. Jesmé du Plessis and her team have done a great job in ministering to the children – but the best is yet to come! There are some great new changes that we have been planning for months, and we are very excited about our imminent revamp. Over the next few weeks we will be implementing some of these new plans for us to more effectively minister the love of Christ to the children on Sunday mornings.

 

Every single week we receive testimonies of how people’s lives are changing. Praise Jesus! And we know that we have only just begun.