CAPE TOWN — “I smoked drugs in this area,” recalls formerly incarcerated Muslim-turned-Baptist Gino Hattingh, of a nearby impoverished neighborhood.
But today, Gino has been leading teams from Send Relief Serve Tour to share the gospel with people suffering from the very same addictions and behavior that landed him in prison for 13 years.
It wasn’t until a prison-cell encounter with the truth of the gospel that Gino’s life changed and he turned away from Islam.
His radical conversion happened on the floor of his prison cell, while he was practicing Salah, ritual prayers that are one of the five pillars of Islam.
“I asked Allah for the truth. And I went to the Bible and I read a passage that said, ‘Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened,’” Gino recounts. “And it was Jesus who spoke to me, and my entire life turned around.” 
Gino — who’s now a seminary student and serves as youth pastor at Lakeview Baptist Church in Cape Town — is now sharing the gospel with Muslims.
During a door-to-door prayer walk with Serve Tour volunteers, Gino boldly spoke of his faith in Jesus Christ to residents of an apartment-turned-drug den of four families living in a cramped, dank space.
But the neighborhood outreach did not just start with this recent Serve Tour.
“Our church serves this area regularly,” Gino explains of the church’s compassion ministry efforts that include a weekly soup kitchen and a safe house ministry to girls who find themselves homeless or abandoned.
At the same time he and others were praying with tenants of the poverty-stricken housing complex, Serve Tour teams across the city were similarly engaged in working alongside local churches to bolster their efforts and encourage their members, something Gino personally experienced.
“To me, this week was very refreshing — to know that there are people across the world who serve the same God as I do, and there are people who have the same love for people as we do at Lakeview,” Gino said.
Twenty-nine volunteers representing seven U.S. churches from New York to California embarked on the weeklong, citywide volunteer missions project in South Africa, the fourth such Serve Tour event globally this year.
The volunteers closely focused their efforts on helping five local Cape Town churches and one church-based charity. Send Relief and International Mission Board (IMB) missionaries partnered in advance with the churches’ pastors to organize the event and identify projects that could accelerate their local congregations’ opportunities to establish gospel inroads with their neighbors and communities.
The projects included renovating a boys’ home and cultivating a garden there, sprucing up a cancer treatment ward, conducting vacation Bible school, transforming a local school room with fresh paint, building a playground, and distributing food to desperate residents of a slum constructed of plyboard and threatened by violence.
“This week was a good reminder that churches and Christians are often the cornerstone of helping rebuild and strengthen communities, because they are there before crises hit and remain long after the headlines fade,” said Laura O’Loughlin, who led the preparation for Serve Tour and serves permanently in the city with Send Relief, along with her husband, Jeff. “And the hope we bring is not just that of a restored home, but of a restored relationship with God through Jesus.”
This Serve Tour newly incorporated a Southern Baptist Disaster Relief (SBDR) component, with volunteers from the Kentucky Baptist Convention who assessed a low-income area of Cape Town that is prone to seasonal flooding. The team worked to find ways to mitigate the damage, as well as address other hardships in a community known for generational poverty, health problems, and gang violence.
“Natural disasters and poverty are problems without borders,” said Coy Webb, Send Relief’s crisis response director, who led the SBDR team. “We simply shared what we’ve learned addressing the same issues in the U.S.”
The team also met with Cape Town city officials to explore how government and faith-based disaster relief teams can collaborate better to help the city of nearly 5 million people.
Partnership on a local level is a feature of Serve Tour events, with intentional linkage meant to foster long-term support for churches’ ongoing ministries.
For members of Uptown Baptist Church from Chicago, Cape Town was the second Serve Tour mission trip they had joined, the first in Athens, Greece, last year.
The opportunity to meet needs of a vulnerable community in Cape Town mirrors what Uptown already practices in Chicago, says Uptown missions pastor Doug Nguyen.
“This is not a one-and-done deal for us,” Doug says of the Serve Tour-sparked partnership with Cape Town’s Woodstock Baptist Church congregation. “We found this church to be very like-minded.”
Uptown’s Serve Tour volunteers worked with Woodstock congregants to meet the needs of homeless, seniors, and youth in the community, “with the purpose of sharing the gospel, but also sharing our lives,” Doug says of their plans to return to Cape Town for longer-term work.
Shaun van Wyk, an elder and longtime member at Woodstock Baptist, said Serve Tour was another step in the church’s 30-year journey of reaching their community.
“The Lord said He will build His house and the gates of Hell will not prevail,” Shaun said of Woodstock’s presence as the latest group of believers to occupy a late-19th-Century church building in the community. “And by faith we are still standing, and we trust as we reach out to the community it will make an impact in Jesus’ name.”
Earlier in 2024, Serve Tour stops included Augusta, Georgia; Dallas, Texas; the West Virginia Coalfields area; as well as Armenia.
Serve Tour missions events remaining in 2024 include Flint, Michigan, and Brownsville, Texas. And in 2025, Serve Tour will include opportunities for churches and individuals to serve the communities of San Diego; Kampala, Uganda; Virginia Beach; Evansville, Indiana; Columbia, South Carolina; Lima, Peru; and Fort Collins, Colorado.
Send Relief is Southern Baptists’ global compassion ministry, a partnership of the International Mission Board (IMB) and North American Mission Board (NAMB).
Published August 1, 2024