Towers of Hope

Three years ago, Towers of Hope consisted of two good souls handing soup out at the church gate. Today its small, yet ever busy staff reaches countless lives through its five ministries.

Towers of Hope is a faith-based nonprofit, operating out of the historic Two Towers Church in Bloemfontein, South Africa. The church’s congregation – once exclusively white – is now made up of people from all walks of life, including prostitutes and people who live on the street – the very people the Towers ministry is aimed at.

Though each of the four full-time staff have a unique story about how God led to them to Towers, the majority of them started off being volunteers.

The organization’s Relief Administrator, Sonica, already had a full-time job when she began volunteering. When she realized that she couldn’t continue with both, she followed her heart and made the decision to take a sizeable pay cut and officially work for Towers.

“When God calls, he calls hard,” she said.

Another member of the team is Lee, who is Manger of Ministry Operations. She was there from the beginning, wielding a tool essential to the ministry of Towers: a pickup truck.

Known as bakkies in South Africa, a truck was needed to pick up donations, like the 30 gallons of soup that a local jail donated three times a week.

“The calling of my life is to serve,” Lee said. “The bakkie was a bonus.”

 

I spend the last week of every month volunteering at Towers. Here I am with Maria, Tower’s cook, and Sonica.

Towers organizes its projects into five core ministries: Serving, Living, Partnering. Embracing, and Empowering. Lee focuses most of her time on the first three while the church’s pastor, De la Harpe, oversees the other two.

Throughout the week and also during the weekend, meals are served through the Tower’s soup kitchen. Though a service that has been around since the beginning, it has grown along with the organization. In January alone, the staff served 1,866 meals.

Besides the soup kitchen, Tower’s ministry of Serving also handles the distribution of food parcels and other donated items. The church is also home to “The Closet” where donations of blankets, towels, clothes, shoes, books, and various household goods are sorted through and given out to those in need.

“We have been blessed with great friends and endless resources of clothes, food, and knowledge from our volunteers,” Lee said.

The other ministries include a garden, inner-city cleanup, bible studies, soccer matches, and outreach to homeless and disadvantaged people. Lee would like to see Towers expand even further, especially in rural areas where more education is needed to prevent the growing numbers of kids who end up living on the street.

But in the end, the biggest ministry of Towers is about having an open heart and a willing ear for those in need.

“It’s just about loving them,” Sonica said.