stories from the field #1: White River, RSA

So here's Pastor Supresa's church in White River, South Africa. A lovely little church pastored by a man who has planted probably a couple hundred other churches, he's been to heaven a couple hundred times, he knows about 15 languages (God divinely downloaded a dozen or so of them). In short, this man is a living epistle, an anointed sevant of Christ, a powerful witness to the Almighty. And this is his church.


And this is me. A drummer from PEI who had been saved all but 2.5 yrs when I stumbled into his church on my 4th day on the mission field.

We landed at the church sunday morning and Pastor Supresa came up to Jack (my team leader) and said,"O.K. Which one of your team is speaking today?"

Jack responded, " I think Josh is speaking today." (We had been praying in the truck on the way there who it was to speak and I had argued with God that it was definitely NOT me). Supresa looks at me and says,"O.K. The worship has started, you speak after the music is over."

So I had like 40 or so minutes to prepare my first ever sermon. When the time came, (if I wasn't nervous enough) a man got up and anounced,"And now the Man of God will give the Word for the day."

WHAT?!!! Are u joking!!, I thought. But I got up (stepped out) and preached on "hearing God's voice." It was a TERRIBLE sermon but 80% of the church responded to the invitation to come up for prayer based on what I had taught. Humbling?........um, yeah. Then I was praying for one young girl and God spoke to me. "Nehemiah 8:12", He said. I thought it was the Joy Of The Lord scripture, but I went afterwards and looked it up and for those of you who don't know, here is Nehemiah 8:12. All the people went away to eat, to drink, to send portions and to celebrate a great festival, because they understood the words which had been made known to them. What made this real funny though was that when God gave me this scripture, we were wrapping up the prayer time to eat, and drink, and live it up!

God is crazy sometimes.