Friday morning 02:00 four of us left Midrand for Shalom farm in Greytown to join more than 400,000 men for one of the world’s biggest camping events. The road was long, but it was absolutely worth it; having four guys in one car and soon the conversation will turn into current convictions of faith and this was quite inspiring seeing that actually our hearts has been changing since the days that we gave our hearts to Jesus Christ.

Arrival

Friday morning 08:30 we arrived at the camp-site just on the other side of Greytown, we joined the Zimbabwe camp and soon we had a whole tent filled with guys having an amazing time making food and sleeping (it was quite tiresome after such a long drive. I wouldn’t say that the site of the camp was pretty, but it was amazing.

All through Friday I will just see cars and busses driving in hooked onto trailers and caravans. But as the evening came – and just after dinner and a wonderful afternoon nap – we went down to the “event arena”, it took us about 15 minutes to walk from our camp to the arena because of all the campsites in between. The arena was this huge stage with more than 200,000 bales of hay all packed in a half-circle (many times we were sitting 2-3 people on a bale) with these immense 3-4 story speaker/video towers so that those who are far from the stage can see and hear the action.

An hour before the meeting was to officially start more than halve of all the seating was already taken and everyone there was already standing and singing praises to God. As we were looking for a place to sit more and more men started to arrive at  the arena, and while we were walking I felt this overpowering sense of peace and love, and I knew that Holy Spirit was there, after all this event was there for only one reason… to glorify Jesus.

In one accord!

At around 7 o’clock praise and worship kicked off in full and it was one of the most amazing sights I have ever seen, about 400,000 men all raising their hands and singing God’s praises, at times I will just be quiet and listen and there will be this rumble of voices singing “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty” and “We exalt thee”.

Eventually Oom Angus came onto the stage, and started speaking and all the while when he was talking right in the distance you can see the cars still streaming in. I put a guess at an average of about 20 cars still pouring in every minute since we were at the “arena” the beginning of that evening and the amount hasn’t started dwindled when we went back to the camp-sites at 22:00.

One trademark of these events that was quite remarkable was that every time Oom Angus said “Amen!” the entire crowd will say “Amen!!!”. If ever you watched the movie 300 and Leonidas yells: “Spartans, what is your occupation” and all the men answer in one accord “Ha-Hoe! Ha-Hoe! Ha-Hoe!” imagine more than a thousand times that and all men shouting in one accord “Amen!”  This sound reverberated and echoed from the distant hills. if ever anybody thought that the church is full of wimps, their knees would have been shaking at that sound.

Usually at big events like this there would only be a small percentage of people going all out, the majority will usually hang back and watch and not participate at all, but here was such a hunger for God that everybody, whether at the back or at the front, whether at the side or in the middle, participated in one of the biggest worship events to hit South Africa. Every person sang out, everyone lifted their hands, regardless of nation, regardless of tongue, regardless of denomination, when it is about Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord (Philippians 2:9-11)