Transformation in Cape Town

I am really writing on behalf of our whole ministry staff at the church in Cape Town where I serve with my senior pastor (and father-in-law), Pastor Freddie Pruis. But allow me to digress a bit. I was ministering in the Cape Town, South Africa suburb of Brackenfell in 2005 when my life was dramatically impacted and radically changed as a result of the Overseas Transformation Mission tour that Harvest Evangelism conducted to Argentina. There I saw the church of the city totally saturated and mobilised with a mindset to “pastor” a whole city, and they were doing it! They had made the city their “congregation” to minister to and serve. I came home on fire. I started a community outreach team, focusing on city reaching. The team ministered at the local crèches, primary and high schools where a transformation process was started in each school with hundreds of kids being impacted. A weekly business breakfast grew out of the process and business people of the area were envisioned and equipped to be marketplace ministers. A pastors' fraternal developed from within this process and I had the privilege of ministering at each of these congregations, as well as individually to these ministers in order to establish unity in the different denominations. In 2007, with my wife Mandi, I moved to Durbanville (Cape Town) to serve with her father, Pastor Freddie Pruis, in a local congregation. We took our transformational lifestyle with us. The following year, her father went on the same trip to Argentina that I had gone on. On the way, he read Prayer Evangelism, by Ed Silvoso, which prepared his heart for the same impartation that was to come. From then on, everything changed in our congregation. We formed our people into prayer groups and began sending them on frequent prayer walks throughout the city, not just to pray for the city, but a la the principles of “prayer evangelism” in Luke 10, to pray with the people in the city for their felt needs. One week we prayer walk (we call it “going fishing”), and the following week we come together to take stock of the results and to “mend the nets.” The Luke 10 approach became the center of our church's outreach. It changed us from being a church-minded congregation to now being completely focused on ministering to our communities. Pastor Freddie focused our sermons for the past year on marketplace ministry and established (equipped, anointed and released) several members of our church into businesses, as well as government institutions as Marketplace Ministers. They are now pastoring their businesses and mobilizing prayer groups where people are making commitments to Christ and several miracles are performed by the power of God. In the process, we have begun to discover “points of inception” into the city that God has for us. We are monitoring the schools, government and businesses on a personal level as well as via the newspaper headlines. Out of this exercise a Soup Kitchen in our community has been initiated by one of our businessmen. We have placed a permanent Life Coach in a local high school and her focus is to mobilise several prayer groups within this school to establish a process of transformation. On a weekly basis one of our businessmen visits the local government hospital, specifically to pray with patients awaiting amputation. God is performing miraculous wonders in this ward and several people have made commitments to Christ because of this revelation of the almighty God. Currently the miracles are pouring in from our assembly and our regional pastors. Our whole ministry mindset has literally been turned inside out, to see that our job is not to build the church, but to equip our people to take the keys of the kingdom to where the gates of darkness were established to bring transformation to our community. Our congregation is growing, but even more importantly, our city is changing and our people, along with those from other fellowships, are right in the middle of the process. We are so excited and know that this is the start of a big move of God. Jackie Beukes Durbanville, South Africa