The Books have been sent, bless God! Vision Colleges’ new office in South Africa, where Nicholas Daniels is our director, will receive them with joy. Nicholas and his team are setting up a distance education university program to offer Bachelor and Master Degree programs in Pentecostal Theology. This is a brand new concept, and the studies will be available worldwide, to every student everywhere in the world, and South Africa has some of the finest education standards in the world.
The story of the books began when I received a rather casual and matter of fact email from Nicholas: “We need between 25,000 to 50,000 books for the library − 25,000 as the minimum for a Bachelors.” It was not an appeal, it was a statement.
My initial thought was “I will send a few books”. I then remembered a colleague who sends books to Myanmar, and I contacted him – “Sure, I have two pallets of books you can have.” I accepted them and wondered how I could get two pallets of books to South Africa. He called me back and advised me that he could get a container for me for $2,700.00 delivered into Cape Town. I accepted this and wondered where the money would come from.
From my email lists (we have several) I made an appeal for books for the Library. Over the last few months books have come to us from every state in Australia. The books have come from private individuals and from schools and colleges wishing to help. A Christian opportunity shop donated 6 boxes of books and sent them. Elderly folks wanting to get rid of old books and young people buying new books from book stores, sent them. From Perth and Adelaide, Brisbane, and Melbourne, enquiries came asking how to get books to us. A Christian courier took up the challenge and transported books free of charge; others offered amazingly low prices to get the books from around the country to our office, or to the Bible Society in Ingleburn, where the books were to be loaded and shipped.
Meanwhile people donated money to transport the books. From pensioners offering $5.00, to other others sending larger amounts, sufficient money came in even when, of course, the quote of $2,700.00 snowballed to well over $3,000.00 with the expenses of packing and preparing the books.
On Australia Day our team, with volunteers at the Bible Society in Ingleburn, loaded a container with in excess of 30,000 books for South Africa, you could not get so much as an extra sheet of paper into the container!
This was an amazing feat. To make this happen so many worked together in so many ways, unrelated to each other apart from the idea of sending books.
A combination of emailed messages, a small notice in “Eternity”, word of mouth contact from one person to another, individuals who sent books or transportied them for others, courier services offering free or very low cost rates to transport books from around Australia to Sydney, colleges, schools, universities, shops, churches who donated books or finance − it all came together for God’s glory to start a Library in Cape Town. This will help to establish world class accredited degrees, available from South Africa to around the globe at affordable rates, and it all started with a thought "I will send a couple of books". My initial “couple of books” turned to be 20 odd boxes plus all that came to us from near and far.
How amazing, and yet so much like God it is that He took a small thought and multiplied it out so that a Distance Education college in South Africa, with one of the world's highest standards of education, will be able to offer legitimate degrees in ministry at truly affordable prices to any students anywhere in the world. – That is GOD.
