Testimonials
Gondola Church Mozambique
DeWald VanDenBerg of HBIA, Hope Builders International Africa, recounts the history of an ICM church in Mozambique.
“Five years ago we built our first church at Gondola, a small village on the Beira corridor. The Gondola mission church was a 22 x 9 meter project that took nearly a year to complete. We knew very little about building in “the bush” and that was made worse because we were working with the local Pastor as our “responsible person” – their concepts of budgets, quantities and times were stumbling blocks that nearly “brought the house down”. This project had me in tears many a day as we completely overspent our budget (it included a R30,000 [$3,000] loss of materials through theft). We had to scramble for funds and you will remember my many anxious calls to you for help. At one stage I had to take a loan on my house to see the project through.
I will never forget Uncle Burt Reed from ICM and his first inspection visit. Our nerves were strained - tighter than a guitar string. We did everything possible to keep him occupied and not to “inspect” too much. But as I would learn, nothing deters him from his inspection. When he passed the project we all experienced a deep feeling of relief and all of a sudden we were so enthused that we could not wait to start the next building project.
The Gondola congregation grew and we planted 7 churches in the prescribed 3 years. As it goes, we had pastor problems, member problems and it was very hard to keep the church and the mission apart (personnel overlap). But people continually got saved and we cautiously moved forward planting and then structuring the churches while we discipled the members on a continuous basis.
Two years ago we started full force with the MBC training program and it was then that things really started to “explode”. The mission church network grew to 11 congregations and we actually stopped planting more churches as we first wanted to train more pastors. In the middle of last year there was no more holding back. Our mission leader, Savimbi told me that he wanted to join the church on a fulltime basis as the people asked him also to lead the church. When he left at the end of October last year there were 24 churches in the network. As the pastors progressed in the training program more and more churches were planted. When I had my meeting with him yesterday 52 churches had already been planted.
As the Gondola congregation grew bigger than the church building we decided to move the mother church nearer to town and utilize the old (first) church for more training activities while retaining the local, manageable group on the Mission Station. Last week we secured permission from Calvary University to start graduate training. As we are going to use the church building more for training (and the congregation is smaller) we will use part of the floor space as a library for the pastors-in- training from the whole region. In this church, to date 108 pastors received training, 210 Children Harvest teachers were trained for the children ministry, and 52 congregations were planted and structured into proper congregations.
In the following months many more churches will be planted. We also identified 32 mission churches to be built. This is only one story of one church that we have built so far. We have built 70+ churches already and there is not one that has not exceeded our growth expectations. Pastor Jimo alone (Assemblies) has added 22 new churches the past 14 months - we finished his building 3 years ago.”
-DeWald VanDenBerg