A PLACE OF CHALLENGE AND CHANGE
South Africa is an awesome place to be involved in ministry! God has graciously opened the hearts of many here to the Gospel due to the cultural, political, and economic tumult of the past 15 years. Believers are being discipled, young church leaders are being trained, and churches are reaching out cross-culturally. But there is so much more that we can do, and intend to do, here. Maybe you can help.
This nation was deeply divided in her past, and those rifts still create tensions. Empire-building Europeans (English and Dutch-Afrikaans) colonized this region in the 1600s, imported labor from Asia, and ran into increasing conflicts with African nations moving southward. Europeans eventually set up a nation where the two cultures lived in close, but separate and unequal, settings and preserved this arrangement by denying blacks and other people of color the right to vote. The late 1980s saw the end of these apartheid laws, and in 1994, the first free elections swept people of color into government and began the big learning curve that comes with empowerment.
Our population of 47 million (2008 figures) consists of people of widely differing backgrounds and cultures, almost a quarter of which are here illegally. There are 11 official languages in South Africa. Most of our people are multi-lingual. Due to mission work in the past, there is a knowledge of God here, but not an accurate understanding of the Gospel.
THE GOSPEL TO THE RICH AND THE POOR
The BMW-South Africa team is located in the greater Johannesburg-Pretoria metropolitan area in the smallest province, which contains the largest population. We have been involved in seven church-planting projects here since the 1980s. There is a huge variation in the ministry settings in this area. You can work in a comfortable first-world church around the corner from a beautiful mall, and then drive 10 minutes down the road and work in a church in a third-world squatter camp of 50,000 people living in tumble-down shacks without electricity or running water.
The nearby city of Sandton is the economic hub for the entire continent of Africa; this country has 80% of Africa’s wealth from harvesting our gold, diamond, and platinum deposits. This urban wealth produces jobs sought after by millions of illegal immigrants from surrounding African nations. Still, most of our 47 million people make less than $170 a month, and we are yet considered a third-world “developing” nation. We also lead the world in the number of people infected with HIV-AIDS, and we have 2,000 new AIDS orphans per week, now totalling over 2 million.
OUR SHIFTING EMPHASIS
As our churches, and those planted by other faith-based missions, become independent, we have been shifting from a primary leadership role in church-planting to a "facilitating" or “partnering” role where we assist South African churches to reproduce themselves in daughter church plants. MountainView Bible Church (4 years old) is a daughter church of Sandton Bible Church (20 years old).
To help facilitate the creation of new churches and leaders, BMW-SA teamed up with South African pastors to create the Church Ministries Institute (CMI), a part-time, church-based leadership development school through which students can earn a fully-accredited Bachelor of Theology degree. Sandton Bible Church has also recently begun the Berean Bible Institute of South Africa (BBISA), which is a full-time version of CMI.
BMW-SA is also increasingly feeling that mission work in the Johannesburg-Pretoria metropolitan area should be drawing to a close in the next decade. There are sufficient churches and Bible schools being run by South Africans in the different ethnic communities here to keep the Church growing. So in 2007, BMW-SA again began to look at outlying African villages.
THE THANDANANI PROJECT
Thandanani is a Zulu word meaning “love one another,” and we have chosen it as the name of our new outreach into areas of dire poverty, people dying of AIDS, and the orphans they leave behind. It is estimated that South Africa will have 5 million AIDS orphans by 2015. Some mission experts have said that “the greatest challenge to the Body of Christ in the next decade will be reaching the orphans of sub-Saharan Africa with the gospel of Jesus Christ.” 
Our goal is to strengthen African churches to multiply and to enable them to function as orphan care centers. Due to mission work in the past century, people in these outlying areas have a knowledge of God, but it is very basic and often mixed with spiritism and ancestor worship. We are working with churches that are non-Charismatic and those that do not worship ancestors. We are training the adults in Bible knowledge, teaching skills, evangelism, and youth ministry.
PERSONNEL NEEDS
For Johannesburg-Pretoria
For the Thandanani Project
If you are interested in more information about ministry in Johannesburg, or about ministry with the Thandanani Project, contact BMW's Area Director for Africa, David Brown, located in Johannesburg.
Check out the websites for Sandton Bible Church, a BMW church north of Johannesburg, and MountainView Bible Church, a BMW church-plant south of Johannesburg.
