HPC SWAZI

4 12 is our youth group here at HPC. This past Sunday we had great time as they led the service.

It was an incredible service to be in. They had dances, dramas and even a bible trivia game during the service.

The worship team did a great job of leading people into God’s presence and just allowing them to be real with God.

It was amazing to see how God as using our young people, two of our students shared about how 4 12 has helped them and the fact they would love to see more young people coming to 4 12 and be touched as they were.

The service ended with our Interns who shared about living extreme for God through faith, love and prayer.

It was an exceptional Sunday with 4 12 and we look forward to more.

Healing Place Church Swaziland has started to reach out to a CarePoint in Mbabane every other week. Mangwaneni is a community about a mile outside of town. It is situated on the side of the mountain as an informal settlement. The area is full of people who moved to town in order to find work. Some residents have money but the overwhelming majority live in poverty.

412, the HPC Swazi youth group, visits Mangwaneni every other week to reach out to the teens and pre-teens of the area. They meet at the CarePoint to play games, build relationships and speak truth. This is an important outreach because it goes beyond the four walls of the church. See the HPC interns reflections about why they like to go to Mangwaneni and why it’s important…

Paul Chasusa – I love the fact that it’s a bit different to 412. It’s having God praising God in a different way. I think it’s important because a bunch of the youth can’t make it to church because of transport and other issues. This is our chance to take God, HPC and specifically 412 to them.

Karl Zowa – I like that when we go to Mangwaneni, the 412 youth that come with us go all over the community to invite people. There is a unity amongst the youth and all of  us share a purpose. It is cool and it’s important because our mission is to change the situation and lives in Mangwaneni.

Tyrone Dlamini – I like the experience in the Kombi, its crazy…we’re laughing and we’re having fun together outside of a Church Service. It helps the leaders at 412 to grow and expand in their ministry. It is helping to set the foundation for our church to impact the whole community of Mangwaneni.

Tamara Chasusa – I like the fact that we get to hang out with other youth that do not come to 412. It teaches our youth group the importance of going outside of their comfort zones in order to reach out to people. It is important because it teaches the youth to talk to, pray for, and believe God for people that are a bit different than they are.

A beautiful landscape surrounds me as I look up to a multitude of smiling faces. The green of summer is fading to gold as summer begins to relinquish its grip to the inevitable dry air of winter. I sit at the Mbekelweni CarePoint adjacent to the soon to be developed Swaziland Dream Center. A group of brawny mountains frame a quiet lake to form the backdrop to Cup’s Youth Explosion @Mbekelweni.

A group of 40 young people from 4 CarePoints and Healing Place Church converged upon the community of Mbekelweni. Earlier in the day I stood in a classroom surrounded by these 40 young people. We prayed together for our humble seed to take root. We decided to avail ourselves to the purposes of God for that day. Serving one by reaching one…we determined in our hearts to be on mission.

The crowd is silent as a group of young people from Ngwane Park take the stage. The excitement in the crowd is tangible; it is like you can breathe it in. My attention swings back to the stage. One young man from Ngwane Park playing the part of an old man evokes memories of the talent I’ve seen on display during a Broadway show. I keep thinking to myself when did these young people develop into such amazing actors & actresses? The drama ends, the crowd bursts into applause. Immediately a group of ten young people take the stage. My body’s attentiveness to what I’m seeing is abruptly interrupted by both my ears and my body sensing the familiarity of a Joyous Celebration Song. Ten set of eyes suddenly meet the on looking crowd, smiles flash and a flurry of movement ensues. The young people dance in unison as they alternate between styles. All of a sudden Ntombenhle comes to the front of the group. Her foot goes about 5 feet in the air and just as suddenly crashes down to the floor. The crowd goes wild as the dance team takes turns freestylin’ before finishing together.

I stand there at the end of the day astonished. It’s amazing the things God is doing in young people’s lives. Tyrone Dlamini, nineteen years old, just finished sharing his heart and what God sees when he looks at these young people. This is bigger than me…truly I need to understand the phrase I’ve so often heard. Jesus is here and anything can happen…

We at HPC Swaziland just got done with our first ever Go Global African Leadership Conference with nearly 400 pastors in attendance.

The whole experience was absolutely phenomenal. From seeing the smiles on the Pastors faces as they went through registration to seeing them being utterly transformed by the presence of God

The first night, Wednesday night, was incredible. We had an awesome time of worship and a great time of prayer at the end when the pastors responded in numbers to the alter call.

It was simply amazing to see hundreds of Pastors put aside their differences and come together to serve some of the communities on Thursday afternoon as we had our servolution event.

All in all I can say this conference was a complete success and I look forward to seeing all the wonderful things that God is going to do in Southern Africa through the lives of these Pastors.

So, today was day 5 of our Servolution… even though it was raining and cold we managed to brave the weather and make a difference!

We went out to a few petrol stations and offered to wash peoples windscreens!

We got to clean all sorts of windscreens from little cars to the huge trucks and buses, but it wasn’t only the cars that came in all sorts, we also had a whole bunch of different people that we were able to serve and show God’s love.

Some were really happy with us and what we were doing whereas others weren’t too excited with the idea; even so, we were still able to touch people’s lives. HPC Servolution Day 5!!

 Saturday was Day 2 of out servolution. We got all our people together and went out to Mangwaneni – a local community to do some construction and gardening for some of the widows and elderly!

We split up into 3 teams, each team went out to do a different project in the community, and here is what we did:

Team 1:

Went out to one of the houses in the community where they helped a widow with building a part of her house.

She was quite old and could not easily get around.

She had a part of the house that was only half built and we helped her by putting up part of the roof and filling up the ground and getting it ready for the floor to be put it.

She had a little garden also that had clearly not been looked at for a long time and while there, we helped with removing the weeds from the garden and cleaning out any trash that had made it’s way into the garden.

There were piles of sand and crushed stone that was to be used for the floor and we helped her by moving that to a safe place where it would not be washed away by the rain.

The team did a great job of making the place look great and getting the house close to being ready for people to live in! Servolution Team 1!!

 Team 2:

Went out to one of the homesteads in Mangwaneni. We were there to set up the base work, structure and roofing for a new stick and mud house!

This was for an elderly lady in the community; she with her eight children and grandchildren all lived in a one-room stick and mud house!

We started by putting up four corners in the ground that would make the four corners of the house and the support for the walls and roofing.

We had to level the ground and mix up cement with shovels in wheelbarrows that we would use for creating the concrete floor for the house.

When we got there in the morning all we had was a bear piece of land, but by the end of the day we had the flooring done, a roof up and the structure ready for the walls to be put in.

Its amazing that in the 4 or 5 hours that we spent there, a few guys with a some pick axes and hammers, were able to get all that done and show God’s love while doing that!

HPC Servolution Team 2!!

Team 3:

We also got to go to the Mahlalela homestead, but we were there before our tools and plants were there, so the elderly Mr. Mahlalela and his wife wore skeptical looks perhaps wondering if we were going to clear the weeds with our bare hands.

But as soon as all our stuff was there we were on it; the girls in our group-numbering five –initially set out to do the hard work but after an hour they were drained so the two guys had to quit raking leaves and get to grips with a slasher and a fork.

The old man, Mahlalela would from time to time come,  stand a distance, watch and then leave. In three hours we were done but as we were about to leave the old man took some time to pour his heart out: About his humble circumstances, how his disability -right hand and eye are not functioning- meant   he couldn’t do all the things he would like to do like the garden. The hurt that other people who had come with all these great promises about helping them out made them not trust that we would do their garden voluntarily….and of all people “these children” as he called us seeing as we had more teenagers than twenty-something’s.

The sweaty brows and smelly armpits were really worth it at the end because, it felt really good to help and show God’s love to someone who really needed the help.

Servolution Team 3!!

Team 4:

We were tasked with repairing a house for one of the older women in the community.

When we got to the place we first had to tear down some of the old structure so that we would be able to replace all the old and dangerous material with new ones that could last for a long time.

Tearing down the old part was fun but then came the hard part; we then began to re-plaster the walls with a mud mixture – both the inside and the outside. It was great to see our team getting serious and using their bear hands to put the mud up on the walls.

A couple of our guys also had to get up on the roof and replace the rusted roofing with a new layer, that would stop the water from the rain leaking into the house.

From mixing the mud and water to putting it up on the wall, servolution team 4 had a great time expressing God’s love to the people that lived in that house.

Servolution Team 4!!

Today was our fourth day of Servolution and we @ HPC decided to cook and give out free lunches to the local businesses around the church!

We had a bunch of the guys and ladies from church help with preparing a nice beef stew and salad for the people that work in the businesses around us. And at about noon we went and handed them out to the people!

We had a lot of people looking surprised and wondering what we were doing but most of them were happy when we explained and really appreciated the food – it was free food

We had a few interesting incidents such as where one of the men was not happy with us and didn’t really want the food, but we bumped into his wife just outside his office and she took two plates one for her and one for him… also the police allowed us to park in an illegal parking space just outside there office when they found out that we had free lunch for them!

All in all it was great being able to give out the free lunches and – once again – show everybody God’s love.

At HPC Swaziland we decided to take our church service on the road for Servolution! So on Sunday morning we closed our church doors for a while and went to clean and paint the local bus rank.

We had our painters there from as early as 7 am to start priming the walls and getting them ready for the new coat of paint that would give the bus rank a brand new look!

Everyone else gathered at the church a couple of songs to get us pumped for serving and a quick briefing on what we were to do. The church was split in to teams and strategically tackled the bus rank!

The local bus rank was not a pretty site as all the paint was pealing off the walls and it was filled with all sorts of garbage! But we at HPC went out and repainted most of the walls and we moved from one end of the bus rank to the other picking up all the trash we could find – we made sure that even the smallest items of trash on the ground would not evade our serve teams!

It was amazing to see the sea of red shirts flooding the bus rank and doing what they were doing simple because they wanted to show God’s love to the people of the city!

KFC is our kids’ ministry here at HPC Swaziland, it stands for Kids For Christ and on Saturday they really showed that they are kids for Christ!!

While the older people in church had servolution on Saturday the kids decided there own servolution!

So all our kids at HPC Swaziland went to a nearby orphanage to play there part in servolution.

The kids helped to weed out large parts of the orphanage garden and pick up all the trash that was laying around in the yard! After, they spent some time loving and playing with the kids at the orphanage and showing them the love of Jesus.

It’s amazing that as little as the kids are, there hearts are so open that they can show the love of Christ in the biggest and greatest ways possible!

Its Seven days of SerVoLutIOn!!!! Seven days of Servolution is from the 3 – 9 of April but we @ 4 12 got a head start on everyone else… We set up a challenge for our students… in which we wanted to see which school or community could perform the most and biggest serve events during that week, and the team that did would receive a prize at the end of the week during our youth service!

All through last week a bunch of our students went out and did a whole lot of serve events in there schools and communities!! 4 12 showed what Servolution is all about last week as they shared God’s love and changed lives through simple acts of kindness such as washing there teachers cars, cleaning the classroom, putting away there classmates lunch trays!

It was incredible to see the amazing things that these guys were able to do throughout the week!!