South Africa | “Can My Garage Be a Missional Space?”

Vuyo wasn’t a natural leader, but as she grew passionate about Jesus, she developed his heart for her neighborhood.

A passion for Jesus and a heart for her neighborhood began to take root.

When Vuyo joined the InnerCHANGE South Africa team as an apprentice in 2021, she didn’t strike them as a visionary. She was unfocused, uncertain, and uninterested in figuring things out. But the apprenticeship is designed for people just like Vuyo, ordinary people who can become agents of transformation in their own neighborhoods.

Vuyo‘s heart began to change as she learned and served alongside others and as she saw real transformation taking place in people’s lives. A passion for Jesus and a heart for her neighborhood began to take root.

Missional spaces are places where people in a community gather and encounter the gospel.

That year the InnerCHANGE team attended Novo’s training on the five components of a gospel movement and really latched onto the idea of missional spaces. These are ordinary places, like homes or streets, where people can encounter the love and message of Jesus in real, everyday ways. When the team shared the vision of gospel movements and missional spaces with the apprentices, Vuyo asked a powerful question:

“Could my home be a missional space?”

She began a kid’s club right from her garage, sharing Jesus with her community—and now it’s multiplied into a whole network of kids clubs!

Vuyo spoke to her parents and turned their garage into a kids’ club, gathering children from the neighborhood and sharing Jesus with them through games, stories, and love. She recruited a local team that included her younger brother, her best friend, and nearby neighbors, and she discipled them as they served together.

By the following summer, one of those leaders had launched a kids’ club in her own neighborhood, and Vuyo mentored her through it. Now, in 2025, that one garage gathering has become a missional network: a second kids’ club in a nearby area, a teens’ hang-out space, and a netball team as a sports evangelism effort.

What started with a troubled apprentice has become a missional network, a gospel movement fueled by ordinary people, in ordinary places, living with extraordinary purpose. And it all began with discipleship and a simple, powerful question: “Can my home be a missional space?”