Moriel Missions Southern Africa – July 2003 Newsletter

Royle Family News

Welcome in Jesus’ name to this edition of Moriel Missions Southern Africa. The ministry has had another wonderful month of challenge and blessing, so much has happened and it is a privilege to share the news with you.

First of all we thank God for His provision. Through you He has undertaken every situation. Secondly we thank you our supporters for responding to His call and supporting the ministry through prayer and gifts.

Dave has had a busy few months leading a team to our Limpopo mission (read about this later) and also a trip to Kwazulu mission. The Missions College was officially launched and also he has been putting the touches to his new book due to be published next month.

August will be another busy time with David itinerating in Australia. Find out more about all these issues later.

Lyn has been kept very busy with the children and assisting Kate with the Ebyown project. She hopes to have a break in early October as she is planning a visit to the UK, her first in over three years. Lyn is looking forward to seeing the family again and plans to indulge herself in good old Fish and Chips. Please pray for the family at this time; Dave will be in charge of the kids, O dear!

Anthony has the opportunity to go to the States in the New Year; friends have offered to put him up while he finds employment. His writing continues to go well with another article being published in the next couple of months.

Christopher continues to plod along with his Chemistry Diploma, he is finding that the physics part is more demanding than he thought it would be, please pray for him.

Aaron continues to be the youngest member of the senior squad of Springs Football club. He received man of the match three weeks ago; you should have seen him strutting around like a young Rooster, Lyn and I were really proud of him.

Johannes is in good health at the moment although his ear infections have begun to repeat themselves more often despite a variation in antibiotics. His development has come along with him gaining weight also he can now write his name and count to 10.

S’phewi has had quite a few ups and downs as well, although more serious than Jo. First of all he contracted shingles, which as you know can be very painful. He had some respiratory problems and fungal infections. Thank the Lord for Sister Jenny Enslin who runs the government clinic.

Paulina went back to school for the first time in several weeks. First of all she had chicken pox, then Dave went away leaving the family with no transport, we took everyone away on mission to Limpopo and then it was school holidays. Paulina is doing well but still underweight. She has also been measured for callipers which we hope will be fitted in the next month or two. There is a delay at the government hospital due to lack of materials to build them.

Our next child is due any minute; we have now had our visit from the child welfare department and so a new girl will be added to the Royle household. We will mail everyone as soon as the child arrives

Missions College

On July the 15th we opened the college officially with a series of teaching on Pastoral theology. (For the tapes please contact the office) A good crowd attended and our friend Fred Blomkaamp who heads up Moriel Teaching Ministries in South Africa performed the dedication prayer and speech.

The College is offering a 5 module course in Theology and missions by distance learning, you can find all our details at the end of this letter or log onto our website at www.morielmissions.org.za

Visitors

This month we had the pleasure of having Jacob Prasch visit Southern Africa. It was a short whirlwind visit with the main emphasis being a stop in Zimbabwe where we have many brethren suffering under the reign of Mugabe.

Dave and Jacob managed to talk about business and Aletheia got together with Elijah ministries on Sunday the 20th for an extended teaching service. If anyone wants the tapes from these meeting email Fred Blomkamp on [email protected]

Dr Calvin Smith visits us on the 20th of September. Calvin is an old friend and acts as an advisor to the College. His itinerary is as follows.

• Sunday 21st September 9.30am morning of teaching (2 sessions) plus fellowship lunch
• Monday 22nd Training sessions for the College Board plus recording sessions for the college.
• Tuesday 23rd recording in the morning plus College lecture at 7.30pm, subject to be announced.
• Wednesday and Thursday, meeting with Vryhied College Kwazulu
• Friday 26th, evening training session
• Sunday 9.30 service.

Calvin is a first class teacher we advise people to come along and take the opportunity for some great teaching.

Gauteng Mission

Bernard Mathe aided by his wife Mabel are making real inroads into the local squatter camps and communities. We are seeing fruit already with a steady flow of visitors to church.

Aletheia seems to take two steps forward and one step backward at the moment. We have the encouragement of having people join the fellowship and then the disappointment of some leave. Aletheia is a tough fellowship to be in, it’s a lovely group but not for the fainthearted or people who want to be passengers. This is due to our mission emphasis, for example half the church went on mission one weekend. Then we have South Africa old problem, racial issues. We are a mixed community with a 50-50 black white congregation. You can guess it’s usually the white people who leave. Apartheid still has an ugly legacy.

Kwazulu Mission

As I type I have received a phone call from Salvador that he has run into a cow with the 4×4 causing the vehicle some damage. The Cow lives to see another day.

Sophie’s pregnancy is going fine and they will be regular visitors to our home so the baby can have regular ultrasounds etc.

The main excitement is the two-week mission we are planning for early September. We hope to have a mixture of gospel meetings and primary health clinics operating that week. The plan is to have visitors from the UK with medical expertise and also Bernard Mathe to preach as evangelist. The little church we have at the moment at one of the Kraals will move to the mission station if people get saved and numbers added.

Limpopo Mission goes well giving us plenty of encouragement. I circulated a report last month and have placed it here

I have said it several times but I will repeat myself. Rural Southern Africa is wide open for mission. Our latest mission to the village of Thakgalane went superbly well and bore some amazing fruit.

The Team

• My wife Lyn for her children’s work expertise.
• Kate Kent for her children’s work and nursing skills.
• Salvador Heyworth for his youth and evangelism skills.
• Mabel Mathe, children and worship leading
• Bernard Mathe, my associate and interpreter.
• Four assorted children in various degrees’ of health and temperament just to make it a bit more interesting. And of course yours truly.

Anyway up at 4.00am and on the road to Limpopo at 5.00am we made good time arriving in Thakgalane at 11.20am. On arrival we found unseasonable rain that meant the dirt and clay roads were very slippery. This made it fun driving especial with our new edition to the team, our new trailer. It also meant that the flimsy tin and wooden structure would not really be the ideal place for the services and so the community offered us their tent normally hired out for funerals. It was a great idea and the tent provided warm dry shelter for the whole weekend.

Now to get an understanding of Northern Sotho culture you have to see the men at work. This we did on delivery of the tent, the local guys all contributed to hoisting up the polls and canvas, they really are a community minded people asking nothing back in return. We saw many examples of this during our stay.

Anyway the conditions were as we remembered them, very basic but clean. The village has been without water for a while and so we looked forward to washing and cooking with rainwater that our hosts had collected. Obviously no real toilet facilities. The Loo was a ‘long drop’ basically a whole in the ground on the side of the hill, but the view into the valley was fantastic’ talk about a Loo with a view! I will post a special picture when I get them developed to see if anyone else’s Loo can beat this one.

Seriously though the people there are going through extreme hardships. With no employment and the impact of the AIDS pandemic a whole generation of young people are disappearing and the young ones are growing up infected with the virus. Malnutrition is evident among the young with their hair turning ginger in colour and gums and eyes anaemic looking. Funerals are all too common and most families attend funerals every weekend. We were also made aware of the number of orphans in the village. Good neighbours are trying to look after them but also we see some that have been physically and sexually abused by their own people.

The program we offered was quite simple, we had a morning teaching service for established Christians. An afternoon children’s club for local kids and an evening gospel outreach for the unsaved.

It was great to see the tent packed out every night and how the local community responded to the children’s work and teaching services. While we were there we also identified a believer to take on a permanent Sunday school for the fledgling church. Please pray for Flora, that the Lord will guide her and give her wisdom in the weeks ahead.

It is quite something to preach the gospel while African drums are beating through the night from the shabeens and the traditional African worship places. Also the Zionist Christian Church (A cult that is neither Zionist or Christian, started by the same people who founded the Apostolic Faith Mission the largest Pentecostal denomination in South Africa from the Azusa street breakout) had many night time vigils praying to their long dead ancestors. We even had some drunks from a shabeen come in on the last night but God was with us all the way, protecting us and strengthening us through His Holy Spirit.

The outcome of the weekend is that the church was strengthened, lives touched by the power of the gospel and another valuable insight to this unique area. The question is what do we do from here?’.

In response to that question we had the privilege of meeting the Royal family. We went to see them concerning our plans for the future and to see if they would grant us some tribal land. We explained that we wanted to plant a fully fledged mission station (hopefully for a good missionary team) We also shared our desire to have a Bible school at the station, that the station should be self supporting in food and also that an Ebyown Children’s Village would be developed at a future date.

The Royal family were very keen on the ideas and have told us that we can go and identify a suitable property. If the property is free then they will agree to let us have it for development.

Now comes the difficult part, MISSIONARIES! Or rather the short supply of them. Please pray that the Lord will stir someone’s heart to come to this lovely place to a people who are hungry for the word of God. It was amazing to see the young people crying out for more teaching when we came to the end of each session. They shouted “NO, stay, teach us more”.

Maybe as you read you are that person God has prepared to come and be a fellow worker with us? If it is you then please email me and we will talk together. The fields are truly white unto Harvest.

To end this feedback, the funniest thing to happen concerned my wife Lyn. Forever looking after Jo, Peewee and Paulina. This confused the children who believed they were her natural children. One said, “Aunty Lyn is not a white woman, she is a very pale black women”.

Ebyown Childrens Village

Praise the Lord we are only 8000 pounds sterling away from our start up budget of R450,000. The Lord has moved the hearts of quite a few people and we have received several substantial gifts for which we thank the Lord.

Having such encouragement and being so close to the target we have come to a decision and a leap of faith, although with God this is possible. We have decided to take Kate Kent on as a full time Missionary. The reason being with Dave away so much and Lyn only able to give a few hours a week we need someone at this stage to start bringing the pieces together for a New year start. As soon as we made the decision the Lord released another 2000 pounds as though giving us confirmation.

I will be viewing several properties this week, please pray along with us that the right one within the budget comes along. Please continue to pray for the rest of the finances, we are so, so close.

Australia Visit

The following add can be found on the Australia Home page.

MORIEL MINISTRIES AUSTRALIA
Presents Pastor Dave Royle
Director of Moriel Missions South Africa

Principal of Moriel Missions College

With 10.1 million HIV infected people in South Africa, many of them children, Moriel is honoured to have Dave Royle, a microbiologist who pastored a Moriel congregation in England directing our missions program in South Africa.

We at Moriel regard it as privilege to have Dave leading our mission team in Africa. Caring for dying children and teaching them about Jesus is not an easy task. Supervising the planting of churches, and training Black Africans for the ministry is no easy challenge. But it is a challenge that Dave Royle, his family and his team are meeting by God’s grace.

Adelaide Sa

Melbourne Vic

David is also speaking on several Radio stations and will be taking a lecture at a Bible College, venues and times to be announced.

Kenya

Please also pray for the nation of Kenya. Kenya has a conservatively estimated 500,000 orphans in rural villages. The Aids pandemic is destroying this nation. David on the request of Moriel will be visiting Kenya in October to assess the situation and to see if Moriel can help our brethren out there. Please pray.

From Staff to Sword

Is the title of Dave’s new book that comes out next month. After reading Pastor Bill Randles has wrote this forward.

There is no doubt we live in the perilous times Paul the apostle warned about when he wrote Timothy that “…Men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection….lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God…”(II Timothy 3:1-5). The shocking aspect of this passage is that the people Paul so described are not the un-churched but the so called churched! “Having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof….”. What a day we live in ! It has been given to us to live in a time when the distinction between the professing evangelical and charismatic church and the world has been badly blurred, when the shepherds of God’s flock are daily being seduced into defection from the ” The faith ,Once and for all delivered unto us”, and the powerful and influential churches are the ones most daring in that defection! Never has there been such a need for the volume I now commend to you, FROM STAFF TO SWORD, by my friend David Royle. Pastor’s especially would greatly benefit from this fresh look at Jude’s timely and yet sadly overlooked epistle. I was struck as I read it how applicable the epistle is to the pastoral challenges of our day. The time of the apostles was uncannily like the time we live in now. The Roman world was also a highly mobile, religiously pluralistic, pagan society, much like our own post Christian western world. The church was challenged from without by rival false faith systems and even more ominously from within by serious distortions of the Christian gospel, such as Gnosticism, Antinomianism, Montanism, and the host of other mutations of the gospel. We now also face our own Gnostics, who would spiritualise the faith out of all recognition , promoting their own dreams, visions and fantasies as being modern “words of the Lord”. I think of people like Rick Joyner, who has sold hundreds of pages of his prophecies , his fantastic journey up “the holy mountain” his conversations with the Angel “Wisdom” , and his revelation that paradise is within all of us, this is same kind of thing Jude was warning about! Truly there is nothing new under the sun!

In FROM STAFF TO SWORD our brother David Royle calls all of us, but especially the pastors to take up the sword of God’s word and defend the “once and for all delivered faith”. In doing so, we are defending God’s flock, the ones Christ came to die for, and to “Keep us from stumbling and make us stand blameless before Him with great joy”. I wish this precious volume would make it’s way into the hands of every pastor out there, labouring for God’s flock in the face of the onslaught of error and apostasy. May it strengthen you to take your stand for Truth, as Jude says, “On some having compassion making a difference, others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garment spotted by the flesh”. Thank you David for this labour of love and help. God says in Psalm 94 “Who will rise up for me against the evildoers?”

May an army of God’s servants rise up and answer this challenge.

If you want a copy of the book email Marg Godwin at [email protected]

How You Can Help

For ministry support please contact your local Moriel Ministries office nearest you. Moriel USA has an online store where donations can be made as well.

Our South Africa details

Pastor David Royle
Po Box 10807
Strubenvale 1570
Springs
Gauteng
South Africa
Tel/Fax: 011 362 1026
Email: [email protected]

Thanks once again for you love and support, we will be in touch again as soon as we have more news.

Dave, Lyn, Anthony, Christopher, Aaron, S’phewi, Johannes and Paulina.

Finally

Thank you for your ongoing help, in particular Jacob, Fred, Allison, David, Marge, our parents and families and all the people behind the scenes who have laboured for the Lord on our behalf and haven given us so much encouragement.

Please continue to partner with us as the mission in Africa expands, we are desperate for more missionaries and prayer partners.

Please would you pray for the following:

• Dave, Lyn, Anthony, Chris, Aaron, Johannes, S’phewi, Paulina and the next addition to the tribe.
• Pastor Bernard Mathe and his wife Mabel
• Kate and the Ebyown Children’s Village
• Gauteng Mission
• Kwazulu Mission
• Limpopo Mission
• Australia Visit
• Kenya and Zimbabwe
• Finances to keep going

God Bless, if you want any more information please contact our website which is currently being uploaded. www.morielmissions.org.za