Power of Vision

"It takes a village to raise a child" - this is an old African proverb. One organization is taking that literally - the LIV Village project. I had the opportunity recently to meet with its founder, Tich Smith, who shared the vision with me. The big idea is this - South Africa has millions of orphans and impoverished people, yet many turn a blind eye or expect the government to solve the problem. Applying James 1:27 here, Tich tells me that taking care of and restoring dignity to these people is the job of the church not secular government. His goal is to create a sustainable socio-economic platform  (IE not dependent on aid or foreign income) that gives dignity to people, teaches skills, educates children...and oh yes, feeds over 2000 orphans PER DAY! It is no longer a dream, but a reality! I'm excited about doing what we can as a family to help them further this great vision - check out their website for more info. follow them on FB and Twitter and see what God is doing through the power of a vision based on applying the Bible

A Historic Day

November 6th 2011 will go down as a historic day in the life of the Phoenix Fellowship Church. It was our first Sunday morning service that was held in our new building! It was one of those days where everything just 'clicked' - from the set up, to the worship, to the message to the refreshments afterwards. In our evaluation of the service, Pastor Selvan and I looked for things we could improve and change - and we had to think a long time about it! Eventually we came up with a few that we will try and implement in the next few weeks. The highlight had to be the new families from the community that came out to see what we were all about. It is always exciting to see new people come in, especially those who are unchurched and ready to hear the Word of God spoken into their lives! We will continue to meet there for at least the rest of November and hopefully by then we will have received our final 'all clear' to occupy the building. We have been on a fundraising campaign -"the final push" for most of this year trying to raise R 100 000 to get into this occupational position. By God's grace we have reached that target! Now, we will focus on getting the interior of the building to a point where it is completely usable. Right now, there is little more than a shell inside the building and the area is not conducive for the types of ministry we envisage. It will be a piece by piece thing and so the important thing right now is for us to establish ourselves in this community and make an impact with the Gospel here. November 6th is indeed a historic day for us, we are trusting that we will have many more in the days ahead!

Great end to a Great week

When VBS (HBC) time comes around - you know one thing is for sure: you are going to get dirty and tired! This week was no exception, and like usual it was worth it. We started the week with several concerns: the roof was not yet on the building, the weather was not great and we were not sure how the ongoing work on the site would distract from the time with the kids. However, the week went better than any of us expected. we had around 65 kids on day 1, which was not bad considering the weather. But this number grew and grew throughout the week to around 100 by Friday. This is pretty amazing considering nearly ALL the kids walk to VBS and many of them are from unchurched homes. On Friday night we had our closing program and again we were unsure of how things would work out. We set out 160 chairs to be on the "safe" side thinking that around 120 should be more than enough. Well, 5 minutes into the program it was standing room only! our count shows 215 people that night and 166 of them were new to TPF that means 77% of the people who showed up were not our "church" folks!
These people all heard the gospel clearly presented by Pastor Selvan and on Sunday we had new faces in our church service also at the new building. Now the real work starts - the need is there in the community, we knew that. The community is responsive to the ministry of the church - we now know that. Now we have to really focus on seeing folks be discipled and mobilized for ministry and how we do that will be key. Please pray for our leadership team and we wrestle with this issue in our staff meetings in the days to come. Praise the Lord for a great, tiring, dirty week of VBS!

Final, Final Push Update

Here is a little video update on our building project. We are excited that the roof should be going on this week - weather permitting! This will enable us to start doing some preliminary work in the building until we raise the rest needed to finish it off. We hope, by year's end to have a fully functional building. We thank you for your prayers and support across the globe for this ministry!
- Darryl, Casey and Emma

April Update

April 2011

Dear friends,

we greet you from a sunny and humid Durban! It has been very warm since we have arrived back in January which has been a welcome respite from the cold we experienced the back end of last year!

We wanted to update you on a few things that have been happening over the last few months, so you can continue to praise and pray with us…

1. Theological Education future in Durban…

As many of you are aware, we have been pursuing a sustainable, non-missionary dependent future for our Theological Education in Durban and the greater KZN for some time now. On March 17^th, delegates representing four Colleges around South Africa met to discuss our options moving forward. A lot of the work we have done over the past year has been to help determine who is “in” and who is “out” of a collaborative venture. It has, at times, been a frustrating process but a necessary one as we seek to build a future together instead of separately for the Cause of Christ. At last we have a pretty clear idea of who would like to participate and in the next week we will begin formal negotiations. Our College is committed to this process and we hope to continue our work in training men and women for vocational Christian ministry on an even larger scale soon!

2. The Phoenix Fellowship...

Those of you who use Facebook would have hopefully seen our dedicated page for the fundraising effort (www.facebook.com/thefinalpush). We have been able to raise around $10000 so far through the page which has been amazing, especially considering that most of that has come from within South Africa! We hope to complete the roof by the end of April and be able to ‘move in’ soon thereafter. We still have a long way to go for the interior though (chairs, tiling, painting, appliances, furnishings etc.) but we continue to press ahead with what we have currently. Please visit the Facebook page or go to thephoenixfellowship.com to find out more.

I wrote in a blog entry (www.themeekinsfamily.blogspot.com) recently, that we have also been focusing on the community we will be moving into soon. A staggering 61% of people we have surveyed so far indicate that Drug and Alcohol addiction is a huge problem in the community. It affects the whole family and the community as well. We hope to bring Christ’s message and freedom from addiction by using some powerful tools to help people overcome this scourge. In addition, we would like to create some kind of ‘youth center’ to use as a way of getting to know some of these kids from very troubled backgrounds. Please visit the blog site to find out some more information about the survey and the plans we have…

3. On a personal note…

This past Sunday was Darryl’s birthday and we had some fun celebrating that. Right now we are helping with premarital counseling for a young couple and may have another one starting in June. Please pray for us as we plan to build into the lives of these couples. Emma has become quite a pray-er and she gives us a list of all the sick people we have to pray for at night before bed. We are thankful for all of you who continue to pray for us and support the ministry here in SA as well. Below is a short list of needs we would be grateful for you to take before the Lord.

Serving together,

Darryl, Casey and Emma

Please Pray for...

1. Jenelle Bressette who is an intern from BBC working with us until December.
2. The two couple we will be doing premarital counseling with
3. “The Final Push” campaign for our church building
4. For the “Next Steps” 9 week study Darryl will be teaching from 1 May at our church
5. For our negotiations for Theological Education collaboration over the next few months

Please remember to catch us on Facebook (dcmeekins), Twitter (meekinsfam) and Blogspot (Transformission- The Meekins in SA).

*** Don't forget to check out the pics and video from our Baptism on the beach on Facebook***

Thinking Ahead

 

Over the last few months we have been doing some survey’s of our community. We have asked people simple questions like “what is your biggest need” and “what could a church do to help you?” We have done this so we can be better informed about our strategy for gospel living in this area. We know that they need to know Christ, but in a community where we have superficial, syncretistic  Christians, Muslims and Hindu’s – what is the best way to share Christ with them? Now that we have some data, we can make informed plans about our next steps. We want people to see our church as a place where they can have legitimate needs met and not a place that “just wants their money” (a phrase heard over and over during the survey!).

What might you do with this information?

 

 

 

We are not entirely sure ourselves yet! However, it is plain to see that this community is over-run with addictions and social depression. This effects the next generation in a profound way. They are unable to gain decent employment, get into ‘trouble’ and the cycle continues. We want them to know that God has a better plan than that – one that will change their life now and for eternity! Through gospel centered recovery programs, education and youth ministry – we hope to let the Gospel light shine here.

We have received over $4000 through our Facebook page “the final push” so far. We have also raised a further $4000 internally. We need $80k total to finish the building, so please keep praying that the money needed will come, all in God’s timing!

On the home front…

 

We are staying afloat even though life is pretty busy these days. Over the next few weeks Darryl has several important Theological Education meetings to prepare for. In addition he is teaching two classes, teaching a leadership seminar, and preaching a 5 week series at church. Together we are also starting premarital counselling for a couple this week. In short, we have several opportunities to impact the community with the gospel and train others to do the same, so we are excited but will look forward to a day off pretty soon! 

As always, we are thankful to our many prayer and financial supporters who partner with us here. Your sacrifice makes ministry possible and we thank you for that!

Please feel free to drop us a line and tell us how YOU are doing as well!

January prayer letter

 

Dear friends,

Well, the New Year is upon us and that means that it is time for us to head back to Durban! As this letter is written we are in JFK airport readying ourselves for the long journey home.

This past year has been a challenging and rewarding time of ministry – both in SA and the USA. Some of the ministry highlights have been:

- Our church planning, hosting and supporting an international mission’s conference in May 2010.

- Teaching classes and mentoring students at BBCKZN. In addition, three of our students graduated with their bachelor’s degree in Theology in 2010 – praise the Lord!

- The world cup soccer in SA and being able to experience the unity of the people – long may that continue!

- Being able to report to and visit with our supporting network of 16 churches and many individuals from August 2010 to January 2011.

- We are able to go back to SA at 100% support!

As we head back, we are looking forward to what is in store but we expect it to be a challenging year on several fronts. Our church hopes to complete our new building this year. You can access our church’s website at www.thephoenixfellowship.com to see pictures of the progress. We have several ideas of how to raise the additional funds we need, but more about that in another letter! However, building the building is only the start – it is merely a platform to do ministry. We are excited about the potential this building has in our religiously diverse and impoverished community. We want to use this platform to show people the love of Christ through recovery ministries, education – both theological and supplementary, and poverty alleviation. We ask for your prayers as we, along with our church leaders, discern the best use of this great gift.

This will also be a big year in the life of our College. Several of our students will be moving into their post-graduate studies with us in 2011. We have been hit hard over the past three years with constant constraints from our accrediting University and staff shortage to name but two issues. Our goal right now is to finish what we started with these students and wisely discern the future for our institute. As we frequently said during our ministry presentation, the key is contextually appropriate change – we need to change but we must do so wisely and carefully. We covet your prayers as Darryl leads our college through these difficult waters.

Finally we ask that you would pray for our adjustment back to South Africa. It is hard to explain to a three year old that we are leaving “home” to go “home”! It is hard for us to understand too sometimes! Pray that we would transition quickly – especially as responsibilities at church, BBCKZN and various other committees start up pretty much as soon as we arrive. One thing we won’t miss is the snow however!

As always, we want to keep you in the loop as to what is happening in our lives and ministry and we have several platforms for that. in addition to the social media sites we have on Twitter and Facebook, we also have a channel on Youtube (www.youtube.com/dcmeekins) where we will have church messages, personal videos and Vlog (video blog) entries in an effort to ‘show’ you and not just ‘tell’ you about ministry in SA.

Thanks again for your love, prayers and support – we feel privileged to partner with you,

In Christ,

Darryl, Casey and Emma Meekins