friendly but challenging encouragement from mal

we get the feeling that mal enjoyed the wonderful
scenery that surrounds us here in the
western cape!

as you will have read in june's newsletter we have welcomed barbara wood back onto our team and she will be followed in quick succession by josh (a young man from the aylesbury area), emma (a returning volunteer) and shana (who arrives slightly later in august) and we will cover those arrivals in a future post.

today however we want to express our heart felt thanks to mal calladine who visited us from england for a short but very exciting and challenging week last week.

myself and maz have known mal since his days leading the emerging generation stuff at the new wine conferences at the bath and west showground and we have kept in touch to be inspired, confronted and encouraged, even during his time in america, he is certainly a key part in our spiritual journey and is someone who has walked the path that led us to come serve in south africa.

we always make a point of touching base with mal when we have our annual home visits to england and have often chatted around him making time to come visit and impart wisdom to our small team at the village of hope and this was realised as he spent a crazy busy week with us last week. we did enjoy some 'down time' in cape town and franschhoek at the start and end of his stay but mal's main focus was to spent some time watching us as a team.

this 'team watching' meant that he played with the children in the children's unit, came out for some sports outreach, visited community members and engaged with our thembacare staff at our wednesday afternoon service, he also spent time with our local pastors, niel and frank, which was very helpful. he then took time with us both as individuals and as team where he led some workshops around the five fold ministry and some 'up, in and out' stuff that we had enjoyed so much many years ago. we were certainly blessed to receive his teaching, insight and God given wisdom as a team and it seemed right as we look to the next stage of the development of the village of hope.

we want to thank him for making the looooong trip down for such a short time and are looking forward to seeing how our team will move forward with some of the things he left us with after the school break, where both rob and emily along with mel are enjoying some much needed rest, and we are excited to see how the new volunteers will engage with refocused team!