Posted June 29, 2010

By Jacob Alexander

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Volunteer missionaries hope to change lives for eternity when serving overseas for a week or two. In the process, many find their own lives changed.

A team from Forest Hills Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, including 18 teens and several adults, hosted a Life Champs Day Camp with IMB missionaries in the Nyanga township near Cape Town. The area has a reputation of seeing more children murdered than any other township in South Africa.

Tom Beam, associate pastor of youth and families at Forest Hills, has made many previous trips to South Africa for the purposes of service and ministry. This year, he brought high school juniors and seniors on a mission trip to serve in the camp held at Linge Junior Secondary School in Nyanga.

With all eyes on South Africa for the 2010 World Cup, the team incorporated soccer into the Life Champs program but also coached local youth in basketball as well as teambuilding, music, drama, and arts and crafts.

The camp averaged 170 to 200 youth daily. Each member of the team was responsible for either coaching a certain age group or leading one of the activities, like teambuilding.

In the small group sessions with coaches, Bible stories were shared and memory verses given out. At the end of the week, the Gospel of Christ was presented to the youth and many made decisions to follow Jesus.

Although many of the Forest Hills team have served on mission trips in the United States, this was the first cross-cultural mission trip for most of the teens. With this new experience, Beam saw boldness in his team like never before.

“I’ve seen a willingness to talk about Christ I have never seen with this group of kids,” Beam said. “Every one of them is talking about [Christ], sharing their own personal story and how to relate all of the [camp] activities to Christ.”

IMB missionary Bonnie Doughtie, evangelism team strategy leader in Cape Town, has worked with Forest Hills for several years and credits the partnership with furthering the work her team is already doing in Cape Town.

“They’ve been in the schools this week helping us where we are doing life orientation programs,” Doughtie said. “… It’s been a huge impact, and now our work is to disciple [the children] and point them in the direction they need to go.”

The team has also made two visits to Barcelona Church, which operates an orphanage housing 19 children, many of whom are HIV-positive. Forest Hills also has a partnership with the orphanage, so church members in the United States can serve the orphans from afar. Through the partnership, the church helps provide clothes, food and medical aid for the children.

“Our church has been involved with Barcelona for about three years,” Beam said. “We sponsor the children just like you would with any other sponsorship that we have in the States.”

On June 27, the team made their last visit to the church and spent the afternoon with the orphans, playing soccer and other games and simply loving on the kids, being an example of Christ’s love for us.

Doughtie told the team when they arrived to be prepared to leave a part of their heart in South Africa — that they will never be the same again.

“I think some of the youth are mission-minded,” Doughtie said. “I think this has opened doors and opened their hearts to that possibility.”

Beam has seen the Forest Hills teens change during this work. He has observed their boldness in sharing their faith, and experienced the group as a family who has prayed together more during the trip than ever before.

“This trip will be the best thing ever for this youth group up to this point,” Beam said. “It will really show them it is fun to talk about Christ and it is the best thing in the world to see a child come to know Him, to be in God’s kingdom.”

Jacob Alexander is a writer for IMB’s Global Communication Team. He enjoys sharing God’s stories from all over Africa and is becoming more of a soccer fan from being in South Africa during the 2010 World Cup.