Global Community Advancement - GCA

Meet Francois and Leani du Toit – founding members of Global Community Advancement (GCA). Francois was born on the West Coast and Leani grew up in Pretoria. They now base themselves in the Bo-Karoo in a small Free State town called Philippolis with two cats, two dogs and a windpomp in their garden.

They are qualified Member Care Givers and want to serve the entire Body of Christ by teaching these basic people-care skills to those responsible for missionaries.

Combined, they have sixty-seven years of ministry experience serving part-time while working in the corporate world:
Leani as a professional project architect and published writer abroad for six and a half years in Namibia and the USA, and Francois as a trainer in people development and business consultant in South and East Africa.

Thirty-one of these years were spent participating in cross-cultural missions themselves. As singles they have served with several mission-minded organisations and churches such as Campus Crusade for Christ, Trans World Radio, The Christian Motorcyclists Association and Alpha South Africa to name a few.

They met in 2009 while both were doing a two year post-graduate course in pastoral counselling. During this initial meeting, they discovered their shared passion for justice, hospitality and efficiency for the sake of the Kingdom of Christ.

• 3 weeks later they decided to join forces and get married – 3 months later they did.

• In 2011 the concept of CGA was born when they had ministered to Algerian immigrants in France and encouraged pastors in Scotland through partnerships in Europe with Alongside Ministries International and Alpha France.

Locally this vision grew as they served the various national leaders of Alpha Burundi, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

• In 2012 at the Love Africa Conference in Kabwe, Zambia they finally took the leap of faith to both become full-time, unsalaried missionaries and served for two years in the operational leadership of Operation Mobilisation South Africa in their Pretoria head office.

• By October 2014, they were both diagnosed with burn-out and were forced to slow down and rethink their understanding of being a healthy missionary.

They spent the next twenty months in burn-out recovery, sharing their home with two Congolese refugee boys and researching what effective Member/Missionary Care are supposed to look like.

They offer debriefing, general missional intelligence training and purpose-designed training for anybody responsible for operational missionaries - particularly those serving cross-culturally.

They want to pass on their experience from their own journey through burn-out.