Before and After

Well, last summer, while in Johannesburg I said to my team, not knowing that I’d be coming back, how awesome it would be to actually see the church that we worked on inhabited and being used on Sunday mornings. Little did I know that it would be less than a year that that would happen. One of the first days I arrived here we went to the work site/plant church, named Mercy Bible Church. Vuyo, the pastor, ministers to “Extension 9” the government housing projects next to the church, and to the local squatter camps. Being a plant church, Vuyo spends a lot of time in prayer and evangelism. There are many trials and difficulties of starting a church from scratch and I’m only beginning to see the list of them.
We dug the foundation to the church building last summer, and throughout the last year the walls and roof have been erected, and they are doing the final steps of electrical on the building. Seeing the finished product of the Grace Church short term mission team was so awesome. The church is now being used every Sunday and hopefully the church will grow and in the years to come we will need to go back and move the church and build a bigger building.
The plan was to finish the church building and then start building on the AIDS hospice. Basically a place where people can go and not have to die in the camps. They can die in beds, and have a “proper” death. When I left last summer it was just a slab of cement with wires coming out of it for the electrical outlets, and now the walls are up and the Grace Church team this summer will be putting the roof on the building. It is exciting to see how God is using the teams to grow His church.

Here is the before and after pics of the church building.