For years, Lloyd Thabatha’s children have known one thing about their dad’s work: he leaves, he goes to Lesotho or Zambia or Mozambique, and he comes home with stories. This July, for the first time, they went with him.
Lloyd serves as MV’s South Africa director, and one of the ministries he supports is Pastor Siphiwe’s work with shepherd boys in the mountains of Lesotho. In the small, landlocked country, young boys, some no older than early teens, are sent into the mountains to herd sheep, goats, and cattle for six months at a time (sometimes longer, depending on the arrangement between their families and the farmers who hire them), and many of them can’t read or write and have never been to school. There are no houses out there and barely any roads, just mountains, tents, and a pastor who has made it his mission to reach them where they are.
“He started by preaching to them,” Lloyd said of Pastor Siphiwe, “then he realized they can’t read the Bible and they can’t write. So he started teaching them to read and write.”
When the boys eventually return to their villages, something remarkable started to happen: many integrate into existing churches, and some go further and start new ones, carrying the testimony of what happened to them in the mountains back into communities that are increasingly asking Pastor Siphiwe and Lloyd to come preach there too.
That’s exactly why Lloyd traveled to the village of Mokhotlong this July, not just to encourage the shepherds but to preach in a community that three of those shepherd-boys-turned-believers now call home. By his own account, he went “purely to support Pastor Siphiwe and encourage him.”
The crusade happened in the dead of winter, with temperatures dropping below -5°C (23° F) most evenings, and none of it kept people away. Night after night the tent filled with villagers wrapped in blankets against the cold, and Lloyd found their hunger for the Lord genuinely inspiring. By the end of the week, more than 50 people had given their lives to Christ. Lloyd watched grown men weep as they surrendered their lives to the Lord, watched a woman who had been partially blind from swollen eyes testify that her sight had been restored after prayer, and watched a boy who had walked with a stick because of a deformed leg go running around the tent the very next day.
Word of what happened in Mokhotlong didn’t stay there long. Four pastors from neighboring areas heard about the crusade through the same word-of-mouth network that carries testimonies out of the mountains, and they came to see for themselves, then asked Lloyd and Pastor Siphiwe to bring the same kind of outreach to their own communities. It’s a ministry built on relationship rather than infrastructure, and Lloyd is already looking at additional villages to visit next year.
For Lloyd, though, the most memorable part of the trip was watching his own children encounter God and missions in a new way. The eight-hour drive to Lesotho was full of questions Lloyd didn’t have great answers for: Where would they sleep? What would they eat? Who would they play with, if there weren’t even any houses?
His kids were excited and anxious in about equal measure heading into their first mission trip, made a little harder by the fact that their mother couldn’t come along because of work. But somewhere along that drive, as they talked and got closer to the border, the anxiety gave way to something closer to wonder, since it was the first time either of them had ever seen mountains like those in Lesotho—they’re the highest in Southern Africa. By the time they arrived, in full darkness with no lights anywhere around them, it just added to the sense that they’d landed somewhere completely new.
Then came church, and with it, the moment that stuck with Lloyd the most. His daughter had watched a boy come into the tent limping on a stick. The next day she watched him walk on his own.
“My daughter was just surprised,” Lloyd said. “She kept on saying, ‘Daddy, I saw him when he came with that stick. I can’t believe God really healed him.'”
His son, meeting real shepherds for the first time in his life, had a realization of his own: “I thought shepherds were in the Bible, in the olden days.” Now he knows they’re not just a Sunday school image, but a mission field his own father drives eight hours to reach.
“They can see why I always go on missions,” Lloyd said. “They witnessed what God is doing. They saw that people are being transformed by the message that comes from the heart of God… now they know exactly what is happening there.”
Lloyd is already thinking about how to bring his kids along more often, working future trips around their school schedule and leaning toward destinations he can reach by road from their home in South Africa. Discover more about Lloyd’s work as MV South Africa director and taking the Gospel from anywhere to everywhere online here.