A Good Way to Start our Ministry This Year
January 6, 2025
I have been writing a blog each month for several years now. The last blog of each year always causes me to ponder what has been and what is to come.
Our ministry has had a good year. We were able to host several short-term mission teams and several additional visitors. The feedback we received from each of our visitors was excellent with all of them reporting mountain top experiences with their time on the Africa mission field. I have lost count as to how many individuals have visited our campus on a mission trip, but it should be somewhere around 1300 people over the years since we began hosting teams. Our ministry has benefitted tremendously by all the wonderful folks who have been willing to take a bit of a risk and travel to Africa with us. A large majority of the individuals who have served with us in Africa remain lifelong friends of Beth and mine and of our ministry. There are many things that I enjoy about being a missionary in Africa but one very special one is to see the amazing spiritual growth that happens in our new American friends serving alongside of us. People always think that they are going on a mission trip to serve the children in Africa and indeed that does happen. What they did not expect is just how close they would feel to God on the while they were on the foreign mission field.
Our large feeding program has been a bit of a stressor for me this year as we have grown so large it its more difficult to be sure that we continue to do everything we do with excellence. We are busy feeding somewhere around 50,000 children 5 days/week. Distributing this much food in 11 different hubs scattered throughout much of Southern Africa is difficult enough but we want to be sure to accomplish this with excellence. We want to assure that each child we feed gets an adequate amount of high-quality calories. We now have a goal to measure the height, weight and arm circumference every 6 months in 30% of the children we serve. These children are scattered out in hundreds of rural villages and most cared for by volunteers. Early this year we will be hiring our first full time nutritionist who will visit each of our hubs and many for our feeding sites surrounding these hubs to ensure that our child feeding program continues to operate with excellence. In addition to feeding the children we strive to help them with their education and spiritual growth. For sustainability we are encouraging all our feeding sites to start gardens and small chicken projects. We plan to continue working closely with Meals from the Heartland and Convoy of Hope to provide much of the food our children so desperately need. We will continue to supplement our feeding program with produce from our beautiful Mountain View Farm, meat from big game hunters with our Hunt Against Hunger program and purchasing food from a grain mill in Limpopo. This last year we received a herd of about 60 meat goats to our agricultural project at Mountain View Farm, that will also provide significant meat protein for children at our Del Cramer feeding center and the surrounding area feeding sites. We anticipate growing poultry flock of laying hens to 4000 birds to provide free eggs to many of the children in local area in Limpopo.
We are completing another successful year with our water and sanitation projects with many new wells and toilets having been completed. HyVee just donated $125,000 to fund drilling of 10 additional wells along with a vegetable garden with each well. I pray that we will be able to reach 100 wells drilled by the end of 2025. When Americans purchase bottled water from the One Step program in HyVee grocery stores the profit from that program goes to fund wells like we are drilling in Africa. If you happen to be a HyVee customer, I thank you for your participation in this and please find a store manager and tell them thank you for our African children. We have a construction team that is consistently constructing new Enviro Loo waterless toilets in preschools all across our province. I pray that we will soon surpass 350 toilet stalls that bring dignity and safety to the smaller children across our area of Africa.
In November we enjoyed hosting a team of 14 dignitaries from the new Global Methodist Church denomination. We were blessed to have two bishops of the GMC from Africa and America attend an educational conference on our campus. We are more than excited to have many new GMC congregations partnering with our ministry in serving the children in South Africa.
Dustin is doing a great job constructing a new 450 seat church building for Mountain View Christion Church. We will be dedicating this church in February as I celebrate my 80th birthday. This church project is by far the one that I am most excited about in 23 years of full-time mission work. When the GMC dignitaries were touring this new church building that was still under construction, they told me that this will be one of the nicest GMC buildings in all of Africa.
I am waiting for the Lord to reveal most of what is ahead in the coming year. I am especially looking forward to my best birthday celebration ever as we dedicate the church building for Pastor Johanney’s congregation. I am also praying that we can successfully expand our child sponsorship program by joining with the One Child Christian non-profit to fund our vision to feed even more children.