Posts Tagged With: ministry in a pandemic

There have been several issues of SIM South Africa’s magazine SIMnow that I produced but never posted here. I’m going to post them now to celebrate what God has been doing through the ministry He has continued to entrust to us throughout these many years. This post was actually published Aug. 14, 2023, but I’ve dated it by the magazine issue’s publication for the sake of issue order.

Whereas the Winter 2020 issue (152) was affected by the start of the pandemic, the Summer (December) 2020 issue (153) reflected both deeper impacts but also more familiarity with and adjustment to how to keep things going.

With church visits and postal delivery still so inhibited, the office still had most of its copies of issue 152. Given that and the pandemic’s impact on financial donations to the mission, we all felt the best stewardship was not to print paper copies of a new issue. Still, we wanted to continue encouraging people by sharing stories of what God was doing through SIM South Africa’s people and ministries, so we prepared an online-only issue that was shared by email and website downloads, the only time we’ve done that.

Articles largely focused on work continuing outside South Africa and included:

• a beautiful package of photos and writing by a South African serving in Peru that remains one of my favorite submissions sent to the magazine;
• the “Today for Tomorrow” children’s discipleship and character development program in Botswana, eSwatini, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa and other countries;
• a Northern Irish worker’s experience going to Zambia for a holiday and finding herself ministering there for months because the pandemic travel bans temporarily prevented her from returning to South Africa;
• a scholarship program for Bible college students;
• our first Books feature to focus on a SIM worker’s own book, creating the sub-feature “Why I wrote…”

Photos had to rely more on stock images and old material from my archives, but both changes included blessings. I had a great image of people praying together that was very well suited for the “Pray” house ad, and the “Give” ad gave me a chance to feature Tracy, using a photo of her working at relief efforts after a fire ravaged an informal housing community. Also, the stock image we used for the Devotional feature was absolutely gorgeous.

You can read or download the magazine at SIM South Africa’s website.

This issue being online-only also led to a bit of a chuckle for me, as this is the only issue that hasn’t followed printing’s necessity of having a multiple of four pages. When I printed one reference copy for myself, I had to insert a pair of blank pages so that the booklet layout would work properly.

There have been several issues of SIM South Africa’s magazine SIMnow that I produced but never posted here. I’m going to post them now to celebrate what God has been doing through the ministry He has continued to entrust to us throughout these many years. This post was actually published Aug. 13, 2023, but I’ve dated it by the magazine issue’s publication for the sake of issue order.

Here is the Winter (June) 2020 issue. Like everyone else in the world, our ministry workers had to adjust to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic—including my work of producing this magazine. Many stories we’d planned before the pandemic gained public attention had to be canceled, as most ministries shut down for months due to the tighter restrictions than those in the US. Even the cover had to rely on a heavily cropped cell phone photo a colleague took of our interim director helping distribute emergency supplies in Cape Town, the only ministry allowed to continue there.

Other ministries were able to continue in other places, though, and some colleagues who already served remotely were able to continue their work, too. We were able to help publicize SIM International’s then-new “Faithful Witness” initiative, which helps prepare, fund and send teams to new communities (rather than individuals to established teams). Additional articles included a two-year mentoring program to help develop new leaders, our workers adapting to serving during the pandemic, a networking trip several SIM workers and leaders had taken throughout South Africa’s Northern Cape province, and how radio evangelism had been especially well-suited to continuing ministry during the pandemic.

The Lord was not surprised by COVID or caught unprepared, and we remain grateful that our workers faithfully pursued what He had prepared in advance for them to be able to do.

You can read or download the magazine at SIM South Africa’s website.