Every time I think of our Afrikaans FB group that we as the Afrikaans team felt led to create, I can only thank Him for leading the ladies to this group. I would like to encourage all the brides who read this to use their BNN and start their own FB page or group (Sosial Media Ministry) to share hope and encouragement to all the desperate and broken ladies out there.
When I created the group, I accidently made it a private group, but I think He had a plan in this. I must admit I didn’t have much hope for this group when I created it, but at that point I didn’t know what HE had planned. I just started to share the RYM course once a week and some devotionals.
I got some requests from ladies who wanted to join the group which I accepted, it took a while to get to 100 members, but then all of the sudden it just boomed with almost 50 requests daily, we are now on 5900 ladies that joined the group!!! We just keep on praying and trusting that HE will lead the ladies to the group and work in their hearts to start the courses and filling in their MEQs, although we did receive some AFR MEQs from the group.
Recently we felt led to make this group English and Afrikaans, He just reminded us that we have so many English-speaking ladies in South Africa, although 13% of the population speaks Afrikaans (the third most spoken language in SA, with Zulu at 24% and Xhosa at 18%). We all have ENG as second language and we communicate with each other in ENG in the workplace and other settings, but Afrikaans is also many people’s second language.
The group did hit a plateau a while ago, but now that we made the group bilingual, it’s starting to grow again, we also share the daily devotionals from the blog in ENG and AFR and share the link to the other language as well.
Then I also want to thank and praise Him for sending us Janine who loves to post in FB and she is really putting her heart into sharing with the ladies in the group, I know He has BIG plans for South African ladies and whether we reach them in ENG or AFR, it will be for His glory and to spread hope and encouragement to all the hurting ladies in SA.
It reminds me of a verse Yvonne shared regarding the Afrikaans (South African) ministry: “The seventh time the servant reported, ‘A cloud as small as a man’s hand is rising from the sea.’ So Elijah said, ‘Go and tell Ahab, ‘Hitch up your chariot and go down before the rain stops you.’”