GLOBAL PARTNERS

How your gifts to Lott Carey make God’s love real in South Africa

Lott Carey’s mission partners were there for you when Samuel Lamola, a skilled South African church planter, felt like someone had knocked his legs right out from under him.

Since 1979, Pastor Lamola had been preaching the gospel and planting new churches. His work was in some of the poorest and most rural parts of South Africa. No one paid him. His ministry was entirely self-supported. He earned his living as a tradesman, making the simple, low-cost bricks that rural people often used to construct their homes.

But then, after the end of apartheid, the government began better building houses for people. And as an indirect result of that new blessing, there was no longer a market for Pastor Lamola’s bricks.

Pastor Lamola wanted to keep marching in the light of God, but how could he finance his ministry? How could he fulfill his calling?

Thankfully, Lott Carey’s mission partner, the Baptist Convention of South Africa, was there for you. They stepped in on your behalf, providing a modest but empowering stipend. Thanks to that new stipend, within six years’ time, Pastor Lamola had established another sixteen congregations in the often-forgotten, deeply impoverished rural regions of South Africa.

The stipend that enabled all of this comes to only $143 a month in U.S. dollars. That’s almost nothing by U.S. standards, but it was enough to allow Pastor Lamola to keep marching — step by step all the way.

Likewise, through Lott Carey’s mission partners, you were there recently when a South African woman’s heart was touched by the needs of children who have been made orphans through the still-rampant AIDS pandemic.

After attending a missions conference sponsored by your mission partner, this woman went home to Soshanguve (north or Pretoria), determined to begin caring in the light of God.

The local social welfare office gave her a list of ten orphans — each with desperate needs. She found some living in shacks with no food and no adults to look after them. She brought three into her home but knew she couldn’t do more without additional help.

Because of your Christian compassion, Lott Carey’s mission partners were able to offer critical financial support. And before long, the light of God was shining bright and strong in the lives of many young victims of the AIDS pandemic. In fact, at last report, the ministry begun by this woman was providing full or partial care for fifty-one children.

In many other ways as well, you’re there. Through Lott Carey’s dedicated mission partners, you provide theological training for church leaders, male and female, both clergy and lay. You teach bead work and dressmaking to twenty women living with AIDS, giving them hope for living and opportunities for mutual support.

Nine pastors work on your behalf, planting new churches. As many as five hundred young people at a time to the youth camps that you help finance — and they go out from those camps to minister to the needy in schools and hospitals. And in KwaZulu-Natal and North-West provinces, you have taught communities to develop vegetable gardens that can supply a healthy supply of food for community members who are battling diseases.

Through Lott Carey, you make God’s love real in South Africa — and around the world.