Merry Christmas
Blessings and joy to you this holiday season!
We had a lovely celebration of Dan’s mother’s life last Saturday. Despite being a busy time of year, there was a full church and family and friends who joined online to watch the service live-streamed. We decorated the church with red poinsettias and sang her favorite songs. We think she would have loved it! We felt so much love and comfort and it was awesome to see so many people. This week, we have had several family members who we haven’t seen in ages come and spend time with us and her graveside service is tomorrow. It’s an interesting season of joy and celebration with all the Christmas festivities, and grieving and adjusting to life without someone you love. Depending on the minute you catch us, we could tell jokes or cry on you! We are blessed to have you all sending us encouraging notes and messages and popping by with food and ice cream for us. Thank you for loving us so well!
Dan’s father, Don, is having surgery on January 3rd to remove cancer from his colon. We would love prayer for him! We are hoping to have many more years of health for him. We are so thankful to be home in the States to be able to help and serve family during this time.
As we are reflecting on our recent season of ministry in the little town of Bethlehem in the Freestate Province of South Africa, we are filled with thankfulness at what the Lord has allowed us to be a part of in the past two years. In the 17+ years of doing ministry in Zambia and South Africa, these past two years while living in the countryside and partnering with a smaller community church have been some of our most fruitful and rewarding.
We were exceedingly blessed to have some wide open doors for student ministry. Between multiple camps, speaking at several youth groups, high schools, and the local orphanage, we have shared God’s love with over 1,500 young people. We both facilitated weekly devotional hours for classes at Caritas College and Dan also taught a weekly Life Orientation class to the high schoolers. We also launched youth ministry at New Horizon College (a public school!) and did weekly discipleship to the 100+ 8th-12th grade students living in the school dormitories by showing the Alpha Course. We made ourselves available to listen and mentor and about 20 hurting students and some teachers and staff came regularly. There were so many who were deeply hurting from trauma in their past, family members being murdered, and demonic influences that were tormenting them. Several of those we talked to came after failed suicide attempts. Holy Spirit gave us wisdom to help and sometimes we called our friend Pastor Lilema to give us spiritual insight into aspects of African culture that we hadn’t seen before. An administrator at the school asked if he could make it mandatory for all teachers to come and speak with us because he observed such a positive change in a teacher following her meeting with Dan.
Janell led 4 gals to Christ and the Alpha course ministry team led 8 students at NHC to salvation in September!
We led a connect group and did weekly discipleship with 12 families. Around 30 people would come each week and we always had a meal together at our home on Thursday evenings.
Dan showed a movie about God’s redemptive heart for the sexually broken and 90 people came! A weekly Freedom Ministry course called ALIGN followed for a year and there were more than 10 faithful attenders who Dan discipled every Monday evening. One man began attending after Dan convinced him not to commit suicide and he said, “I am sure I wouldn’t still be here if it wasn’t for you.”
Last November, we introduced the Thanksgiving holiday to our African church and they loved it! We deep fried a bunch of turkeys and served a traditional meal to 180 friends from church and Bambalela ministry.
Our spacious farmhouse allowed us to offer hospitality to many people. We often had friends from Johannesburg or Zambia come and stay with us for a weekend or a week or two. Sometimes to rest, sometimes for ministry, sometimes for detoxing. J One time we counted and between the different events that week, we had 62 people in our home for a meal. We served on the worship team and our leader introduced monthly social nights outside of practice to get to know each other. In our spacious farmhouse we hosted multiple events including nights where we were worshipping for 2 hours straight and also game nights, costume parties, and a murder mystery pizza party.
We helped launch equipping courses at our church and we had a leadership team of 4 couples who are gifted teachers who presented 4 courses each quarter. We took turns teaching on forgiveness, marriage, healing/wholeness, restoration, and more.
Dan has so many practical skills and loves to serve the local church. He did a lot diverse things to help like pruning 50 trees, fixing the sewer system, rebuilding the sound desk, making a new projector screen, painting, changing out the lights in the auditorium, running production for a drama evangelistic presentation, helping with electricity, fixing the internet, pulling wires by shooting arrows through the ceiling cavity, updating the online giving, rebuilding the tractor engine, and more. He also coordinated painting one of the homes at the orphanage – a 3 weekend project with a lot of little “helpers”.
Magezi donors helped us sponsor 30 orphans to attend camp last year and our church did monthly events to encourage and disciple many living at the children’s home. Our connect group did the end of year program in 2022 and we made tons of sock puppets with the kids and then the puppets told the Christmas story.
We are often asked by Africans to help or support different projects and we love to give! Through your generosity to our ministry, we have been able to pass along finances to a lot of different people and projects. We’ve helped a young lady go to Bible college, we’ve helped missionaries with plane tickets, we’ve helped buy food for a village in Zambia during a drought and with seeds for planting, we’ve helped with car repairs, helped to build a house for a youth pastor’s family, replaced stolen items, we gave a generator to our church, gave to multiple church building projects, bought a motor bike, gave away multiple fridges and freezers, and dozens and dozens of grocery gift cards. Janell loves to coordinate meals and has blessed a lot of people with food during their difficult seasons.
Please add your prayers for favor and breakthrough in our visa application process so we can we return home to South Africa sometime in 2024. Our agent and legal team went to court again on December 5th and the judge rejected Home Affairs’ appeal which means the verdict reverts back to what the first judge ruled which is that Dan should receive his permanent residency permit. We are still waiting to receive it – hopefully early in the new year! Once Dan gets his certificate, the kids and I still will need to apply for “accompaniment visas” and that could take 1-3 months to receive.
To all our supporting and praying friends, thank you for your love, prayers, encouragement, and support for the last 17 years. Your partnership makes it possible for us to be God’s hands and feet and to show His heart to Africans. Every victory and testimony shared here are yours to celebrate too!
While we are waiting for our visas to be given, we need to increase our ministry finances. Covid and the years following have been hard for many and we have lost 40 supporting families from our giving team since the pandemic for various reasons. We are at 80% supported currently and need to raise some one-time expenses to cover our visa process and transition back to Africa as well as recruit more monthly donors.
Will you considering donating to our ministry this year? A one-time gift of any amount would be amazing or becoming a monthly donor – we would be so, so grateful.
Our website: www.magezi.org/give has several giving options you can utilize. Please let us know if there are any questions we can answer for you. Dan’s phone number is 206-724-7383 or you can email: janell@magezi.org. Thank you!
Dan and Janell Hartley
Magezi Ministries, Bethlehem, South Africa
Thank you for supporting us!
