I view my story as a story of grace!

I was born to young parents in their very early twenties.
I honour their tenacity and resolve because my grandmother insisted that I be aborted as my parents were not married. A few months later, I arrived… Thanks Mom and Dad!

I have one brother, Ian, born 3 years after me. He is a legend and a real encouragement to me. Life at home was tough, but dotted with great memories. My dad who passed away in 2009, was an alcoholic and sometimes physically abused my mom. This continued subsequent to their divorced. Even though I was only 9 years old, I felt a deep sense of relief when my parents got divorced.

After the divorce my mom, my brother and I moved into a studio/bachelor flat where we lived for 7 years. My brother and I shared one small bedroom, and my mom slept on the couch for all of those 7 years. This was a good time, although it included some tough moments.

My mom was hard working and would work long hours yet her salary would never stretch far enough. For many years we battled along financially. Participating in school sports was tough as we could not afford the necessary equipment and clothing. My dad’s contribution was small, very erratic and could never be relied upon.

I remember my first encounter with Church, I was 10. I went to a large charismatic Church in our town where I committed my life to Jesus. I attended children’s Church for a while and even a Wednesday afternoon bible study for kids. During that journey, however, I was really turned off Church. I attribute it to a poor witness from friends and even parents of friends.

My high school years were unfortunately dominated by my family struggling financially and me being bullied at school. Going to
school became a miserable existence. I remember the moment when I realised that I would not be able to go to university because of the cost. I remember just giving up on trying to give my best in my school work.

After school, I went to a trade college. I achieved a level where I could apply for an apprenticeship to be an electrician. My application was unsuccessful. It was around this time that I received my call up to do national service.

I was called to a unit in an extremely undesirable location. I called the recruiting office and I asked the lady whether instead of doing national service in the army, I could rather serve in the navy. She was shocked and slightly irritated that I had even asked. She replied “call me back in 15 minutes”.

I called back expecting for the news to be worse than my original call up. She said “you have hereby been called up to the South African Navy”. This was amazing for me. It boosted my confidence and motivated my 18 year old self.

If I was to get into the navy, I wanted to get onto a ship. I made sure that any options or choices were made with the aim of getting me onto a ship. Eventually, I was in line to get onto a ship but if I got onto a ship, I wanted to get onto a ship that was going places. I got onto the first ship, and it didn’t go anywhere. The navy then purchased a new ship and I was part of the commissioning crew. We managed to travel to the Seychelles, the Comores and Madagascar.

After completing my national service, I began working. Knowing that I had no decent qualifications, I did what I knew best- I worked hard, very hard. I worked insane hours in a few different jobs. By this time I had met Wendy, and we had moved in together and even bought our first house at the age of 23.

Between 17 and 24 years old it was a crazy time of trying to
enjoy my life. I felt that this period of my life was okay even though it was littered with some wild times of drinking, fighting and becoming antagonistic towards God and Church.

It was when I was 24 that Wendy’s brother and sister invited us to Church. We went along, and as far as Church was concerned in my mind, it was okay. We visited on a few other occasions when we were invited for special events. It was around that time that we had decided we wanted to get married.

The senior pastor of the Church, had officiated Wendy’s sister Jacqui’s wedding. We thought that his jokes and personality would do well for our ceremony. I called the pastor and asked if I could book him for our wedding. He said we would have to go through pre-marital discipleship. I asked if we could rather pay a little extra to exclude that bit. He refused.

He did however, relent and say that if we came to Church four times in a row that he would do our wedding. I accepted those terms. We would go for a Sunday, then again the following Sunday then skip a Sunday and have to start again. This continued for around 9 months until by the time our wedding day came along we were regular attendees at Liberty Church.

It was an Easter weekend of experiences when I knew that I knew, that Jesus was Lord and saviour of my life.

It wasn’t long after that that God spoke to me. A strange encounter; I woke up in the early hours of the morning, feeling refreshed with a sense of clarity. I felt an urgency to serve in the youth ministry. I told my brother-in-law. He said “Well I think God spoke to you” and my response was “Oh, is that what it was?”.

I presented myself to the youth pastor at the time and I asked if I could serve or help out. He liked that. He was excellent in fuelling a passion for youth ministry. I remember the early days of having internet in our home, I would mostly be researching youth
ministry, what it meant and what people in the rest of the world were doing. I had to, because as a teenager, I had never even walked through the doors of any youth ministry.

While serving in the youth ministry, I heard this term thrown around quite a bit, “leadership”. At the time, I was a manager at work, but in the workplace we didn’t use the terms “leader” or “leadership” instead we used the terms “boss”, “manager” or “supervisor”. I now recognise that period to be the beginning of my schooling and passion in leadership.

Wendy and I, along with Courtney, our oldest daughter, were invited on a Liberty leaders’ weekend away. Courtney was still a baby and was just the cutest little thing. With an amazing, beautiful wife, a family, Jesus in my life and now serving an area of society I knew could make an eternal impact on, life was AMAZING!!

Things were about to take a new step. The senior pastor asked me to tell my story in one of the sessions at the leaders’ weekend. They seemed to like it. Afterwards, and during the worship time, the pastor came and prayed for me. I began to speak in tongues, which I was clueless about and thought was weird, spooky and swore I would never do. Well, it happened and I cannot articulate well what that did, but it was a powerful experience. It definitely had outworking in my confidence and my overall life purpose.

About 18 months into serving, my pastor asked if I would be keen to come onto staff full-time as the youth pastor. I had to ask if that came with a salary, because I needed to earn one (another clear indication that I was clueless about how Church worked). He confirmed that it did come with a salary (so that was nice).

On the 1st of April 2001 (yes April fools day) I started on  full time staff at the Church. I went into my first staff meeting, where we spoke about many things, and thereafter, I went into my first one-on-one meeting with my senior. I asked him what he needed me to do. He came back with the legendary response “Just build a world class youth ministry”. So I wrote that down on my notepad with a pen (old school), thinking he was going to give me some bullet points to get busy with… He didn’t.
He then said “Great meeting, see you next week”.

It was an interesting and exhilarating adventure of really relying on God for what I was doing as the leader of the youth ministry. When I took over leading the ministry, we had about 15-20 young people coming along on a Friday. We had no worship team, a few young people and what I believe was a fairly clueless leader (me).

God was faithful, He showed me things and gave me opportunities I never thought possible.

We needed to get a worship team started. Not knowing ANYTHING about how we could do that, I spoke to the Church worship leaders at the time, Roy and Wendy. Their son Darren was still a little dude at 13 and had started coming along to youth on a Friday night. Roy and Wendy decided to come along on a Saturday afternoon and start coaching these young people. What a ride that was. I could waffle on about the tears, the arguments and the occasional bit of shouting, but a team came together and there was amazing fruit from Roy and Wendy’s efforts – BIG TIME.

In 2003 Hannah was born in November I was now the dad of 2 daughters. WOW! She was and still is amazing and seriously cute. Earlier that year in August, I went with my pastors at the time and Lee-Ann Zweigenthal to the Willow Creek Leadership summit in Chicago. It was a key moment for my journey with Jesus and my identity in Christ. My passion for His Church was ignited in a way that astounded me. I even survived the heckling from Lee Ann, and my pastors for my fear of flying and battling to get in touch with the workings of American cars.

In early 2004, in a staff meeting, we were asked to share our dreams for the future. I said out loud for the first time that I wanted one day to plant a Church. I now recognise that it was a very important moment for me.

That year we had our first GAP year, where students that had finished school would spend their year serving alongside me in the youth ministry and doing other stuff. Again I found myself overwhelmed and under-qualified (because I was).

As part of the syllabus, we had decided between my senior pastor and I that these students ought to have an international travel component to their GAP year. We decided to travel to England to a widely known Christian, youth-focussed conference.

After many attempts, emails and unhelpful phone calls, we decided to look for something different to do while in England. That is when my pastor presented me with a flyer, that he found under his chair at the AoG (Assemblies of God) he had attended in Wales, for a conference called “Audacious”. It was to have speakers I wasn’t familiar with, in a place I hadn’t heard of (Stoke-on-Trent). However, it had a cool flyer and was featuring the well-known Christian band “Delirious”. When I called their offices, I got through to a lady that was so incredibly helpful that I was sold that this was the conference we HAD to attend.

THAT time we spent in England turned out to be VERY significant for our future.

AUDACIOUS conference was amazing in so many ways. I met people I am still friends with today and God did something in me that totally ruined me for the ordinary. An amazing moment that took place, was something I did that was definitely not the usual me (I wasn’t normally this cheeky). I went to the leader of the conference and one of the key speakers and said “Please can you sign my book AND have you ever been to South Africa?”,
“No” was his reply. I said “Would you like to?” He replied “Okay random stranger” (Okay, he didn’t say that but may have thought it).

I hadn’t got permission from my pastors yet but thought it would be ‘nice’ to have this chap come along and speak at Liberty.

We left the conference and went to Sevenoaks in Kent to do some stuff with our GAP students. On one day, we decided to declare it a free day and said everyone could go their own way and do what they wanted. I went to London to have some time on my own. While I was walking around the city, I came across a statue commemorating the life of William Tyndale.

Some of the words on the plaque made a massive impact on me:
“The last words of William Tyndale were “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes”. Within a year afterwards, a bible was placed in every parish church by the King’s command.”
It was at that moment that I felt God say that we were to plant a Liberty Church in England. For the rest of the day, wandering around London, I was consumed in thought about what had happened in that moment.

The entire train ride back to Sevenoaks, I was filled with fear. As the train pulled in to Sevenoaks I looked up and saw painted on the side of an old Pub the words ‘”Take Courage” (I have since found out that Courage is an ale, and not necessarily a word or a sign from God, but it helped me (the painted sign, not the ale)).

I spent quite a bit of time in England and on the flight home praying about what God had spoken to me. I got home and Wendy asked me almost immediately after walking in the door “Did God speak to you while in England?”, “YES”. We spoke for a few hours about what had taken place and she had a sense change was coming.

It seemed God had prepared her and she totally agreed about going to England and planting a Liberty Church. I then had to chat to my senior pastors about my invitation to Glyn Barrett (the guy at the conference) to come along and speak at Liberty Church, and God having said we ought to plant a Liberty Church in England. I was hoping that the leaders of my Church would agree. They did.

Glyn (the guy from the conference in England) agreed to visit South Africa and come and speak at Liberty Church. It was excellent as a significant relationship was born between that Church and Audacious Church.

In 2007, as a family, Wendy, Courtney, Hannah and I went over to England for a month to check out the possibility of moving over and planting the Church. It was good. We had our first Christmas in England which we loved. The decision was made and we sensed that the Lord was giving us the go ahead to take the step tp move to England and plant a Church.

On the 27th of November 2008 we said goodbye to my mom and pur pastors and their family took us to the airport, prayed for us, and sent us off to England.

When I started writing this, I didn’t realise it would be soooo long. I will post another time with our chapter in England.

Now THAT is a story!
Chapters still to be recorded:

England
USA

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