This week we launch an inspiring new series about Anchor of Hope, an amazing Christian non profit that positively impacts lives and communities in Bloemfontein and surrounds. We begin at the beginning.
Anchor of Hope is highly effective at what it does – restore dignity and purpose to lives and communities in and around Bloemfontein. It feeds, clothes, educates, counsels and shelters people; creates jobs; and rehabilitates the environment. It has seven divisions, owns buildings, has 60 full time employees, and is launching a multi-million-rand environmental project. I will share more about Anchor of Hope’s amazing work in later episodes. For now, I have briefly listed its impressive credentials — simply to set the scene for the story of how God birthed this impactful enterprise from unlikely beginnings.
Boeta Swart was molested at the age of seven or eight, something which wounded him deeply, and later caused him to seek comfort from alcohol, drugs, promiscuity and business. He hoped that marriage and fatherhood would bring healing but alcohol said otherwise. But his life took a 180 degrees turn one day when his wife, Charmaine, told him that his youngest daughter, then aged two, was praying desperately to God to help her dad. He decided there and then to stop drinking and to change his life completely with God’s help.
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Boeta said he thought that after giving his life to Jesus, the appropriate next step was to become a preacher. They sold everything and moved to the United States to attend Bible school. He believed he would turn his back on business, which he then believed was evil, and start a new life of preaching and leading people back to God.
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“God used our move to America to take us away from our comfort zone and to repair us as a family,” he said.
Boeta said both he and Charmaine had brought brokenness into their marriage. He only heard after they were wed that she had had an abortion when she was a student.
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“The American church where I was studying to become a pastor had started a course for ladies who had gone through an abortion. So that’s how great God is; He had an appointment for both of us. She was trained how to handle girls that had unplanned pregnancies and went through all that she had gone through. She got healing through that course and I got healing when God restored us as a family,” he said.
Eight months into their planned three-year stint in the US they had to go to SA to attend two unexpected family weddings. That was not their only surprise. “One night God said to me: ‘But you’re not going back to America.’”
When he told Charmaine that God had said they must stay in SA where they now had no possessions, she said she would only believe him if He confirmed it through the Bible. Boeta recalled searching the Scriptures and finding a passage that convinced her. He told her they would move to Bloemfontein, which was where they had got married.
Waiting for God’s plan
Asked by Charmaine what they would do, he confided he did not know but they would wait for God to reveal His plan for them. They decided to visit his parents in Odendaalsrus, where he met an old friend who was a policeman and involved in a SAPS community feeding project.
He suggested to Boeta that perhaps he should start a soup kitchen. His friend liked the idea and suggested he should start his feeding project in Bloemfontein. He offered to speak to senior police officers in Bloemfontein to help Boeta get started. Boeta thanked him and said he would think and pray about it.
“God gave us words to say we would start with the soup kitchen in Bloemfontein. And while we were in Odendaalsrus, it was so amazing – my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. So God had also brought us back from America so that I could spend time with her before she died. She died about nine or 10 months after we arrived back in South Africa,” said Boeta.
Getting a place to rent in Bloemfontein was a challenge as they didn’t have any references. Initially they stayed with Boeta’s sister in law. But their breakthrough came when they found a place they could rent without any references and without having to pay a deposit.
Ready to launch
With a base of their own they were ready in 2008 to launch and register their ministry which was built around feeding people, providing clothing and preaching the Word of God.
Right from the start God gave them the name “Anchor of Hope”.
“I think we prayed for about four months for our logo. God gave us all of the colours and emblems – red is the blood of Jesus, blue is the King, and then there’s the dove and water,” he said
“I started in my mother-in-law’s garage with a deep freeze that somebody sponsored to us,” he said.
He sourced food from Woolworths, which at the time gave their close-to-date food to small charitable organisations. Every morning Boeta and Charmaine and a few helpers made food – porridge and cabbage — for 650 children at a township high school.
Boeta rode out to the school each day in a small car loaned to him by his mother in law. At night, with a little trailer lent to him by his father in law in tow, he drove into townships where he screened the Jesus Film, preached and handed out sweets. On Saturdays he played soccer with street children and handed out clothes to them.
For the first two years Charmaine’s role was chiefly to support Boeta’s ministry. But then she got an opportunity to volunteer in a newly-established unwanted pregnancy ministry run by a Christian welfare non profit called Engo. This paved the way for her current role of heading up Anchor of Hope’s own pregnancy crisis centre.
By this time, Boeta, who had completed his theology diploma, was also sharing his testimony and preaching at schools and local churches. He had a little worship band that would accompany him on outreaches.
The Word
“I think my whole vision at that stage was that the only way to impact the Kingdom was to be a pastor, you know, to preach the Word, to have a Bible in my hand and reach the lost out there.
“I think God used that to teach me more about His Word, as I had to dig deep into the Word,” said Boeta.
At that stage he had no inkling of the big plans that God had for transforming Anchor of Hope into the extensive and impactful non profit it is today.
“There was no vision for expanding Anchor of Hope in the direction we are expanding today. Really, my vision was to get people saved, number one. And number two to have one of the biggest churches in Bloemfontein.”
It was not until he had a change of mindset – especially regarding the matter of business which he had dismissed as evil – that he discovered what God had called him to do through Anchor of Hope. That change of mindset is the topic of the next episode of the Anchor of Hope story to be published later.
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