Amanzimtoti
With it being the Amashova and a marathon happening in Toti we had a smaller crowd. Tim preached well about ‘Do not Judge’ and brought some clarity on that subject. It was a wonderful morning.
City Centre
City Centre is a cosmopolitan church. By a show of hands, the following nations / languages / groups were well represented at church this morning: Congolese folk, Zulu-speaking, people from Liberia, Afrikaners, English speaking and others.
Lunda started the day by preaching in Zulu at Umbilo from the Beatitudes, Mt 5, about meekness. Thereafter he preached passionately at City Centre in English about mourning, the type of mourning that brings salvation, crying out from your heart to the Lord and being humble.
Cato-Ridge
Being the day of Amashova we had an evening service. Unfortunately not as many attended as we had hoped but we had a great time of praise and worship with most of the music team involved. We were very blessed to have Peter Rasmussen give an excellent preach on Worship using the tables to demonstrate the Outer court, Holy place and Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle. The life of God within us must be manifest on the outside .. We can transform the world by reflecting the Life of God in our lives. We praised a bit more after the preach and people really got involved, waving flags and entering into heartfelt praise. After the meeting we enjoyed fellowship with donuts and coffee. Congratulations Pete on your first Amashova.
CFANI – Leicester UK
As CFANI we are excited to be part of this group and to report that ministry has been going well from this end. We had our annual Open Heavens conference at the end of September and welcomed 20 visitors to our Sunday service over that conference period. We also enjoyed great times of refreshing at this event.
God moved…
Individuals were touched, lives were changed during the conference…
We prayed trusting God for open heavens and open heavens we received. God is doing a wonderful thing here at CFANI
As a church we are excited about what God is doing..Forward and beyond from here on.
Embo
Last week we celebrated our one year anniversary.
First from Wednesday to Thursday in association with CITYHOPE and a group of opticians from the UK (through Cathy Porter’s network) we ran medical outreach. We had hundreds of people turn up in the two days with eye problems and though so many of them were helped, we had to turn some away because the crowd was more than the medical team could handle. But what joy there was to see the people who received new glasses or treatments rejoicing. So many lives were touched. We are grateful for the team that Fiona Marshall put together – about 35 volunteers joined from CityHilll Hillcrest and a few from Hillside Church.
On Friday we had a worship night with some Gospel artists invited. It was a night of rejoicing and several responded to the call of salvation.
Saturday we had a flea market. We had planned it to run till the afternoon but within a period of two hours a crowd of people swamped our ‘store’ and bought up almost all we had on offer. All proceeds of this sale go towards our building fund.
Sunday was our grand finale. Our tent was packed to overflowing. And our team for the celebration was ‘zone Church, Many Nations ‘. Chim kicked off the new series on 1 Thessalonians with chapter one – A Model Church for all Nations. About several people responded to the call to salvation.
Then we had an extended time of family fun with braii, poetry, dance, drama and songs up into the afternoon. God has done so much for us in this one year.
Frontier Church
It is a very exciting to see how God is unfolding His story week after week! Truth be told we are so relieved that He is building His church and that we can rest in that! We are in awe at His works amongst us.
Mike taught on Baptism and we have had people coming forward to say they would like to be baptised. So next weekend we will have our first baptism service.
Our childrens ministry is such a joy to us! We see them living out their faith in fun, creative and practical ways. Little people on mission. It is a celebration when a ‘Little Explorer’ becomes a ‘Pioneer’ or a ‘Pioneer’ becomes a ‘Trailblazer.’
“What a friend we have in Jesus!” We continue to look to Him for clarity and step by step He is guiding us.
Hillcrest
What was remarkable about Sunday morning’s service in Hillcrest is that almost an entire year ago, it had been planned that we would launch our new series on the first book of Thessalonians.
Quite by coincidence, just this week, Ockie van Heerden and Graham Reardon had sent through the latest video clip of their CityHope Disaster Relief expedition to Greece, and it had been filmed in none other than the Old City streets of Thessalonica!
So, with very moving visuals of the very synagogue where Paul would have preached centuries ago to the Thessalonians, the introduction was laid, and when the request was made at the end of the preach, we had two very bold and confident hands raised in response to the call for salvation.
Due to the Amashova Cycle race this weekend, we had anticipated the numbers to be down, but we still had a really good turnout, and exciting feedback was also given about the very successful Optometry Clinic recently held in Embo, where many received glasses for the very first time!
Waterfall
We had a great Sunday. Kirsty and the team led us in an amazing time of worship, and James preached a simple, yet challenging message entitled, “Lord, not my will, but yours”. We had a great response to the message and a number of people came forward for prayer and ministry after the service.