He had been working at a building site in Matchana, in KwaZulu-Natal. He came home from it the way anyone comes home from a day’s work, and lay down to rest while he waited for his wife to get back from hers.
It was an ordinary evening in an ordinary house. That detail matters more than it looks, because the story has been told the other way often enough that it is worth setting straight. Nothing happened on the building site. He had already left it and gone home.
What he saw was this.
The world. A cross standing in front of it. An eagle rising over it. Above the world, a name: Missions Ablaze. And below it, 4 words.
We feed the poor.
That is the founding of this organisation. Not a business plan, not a funding round. 4 words, in a house in KwaZulu-Natal, 31 years ago.
The land came second
Tinus heard the words “this is your land” twice. The property on Hospital Hill Road in Tongaat, about 40km from Durban, was not for sale to a man with no money for it, and the funds for it did not arrive for another 8 months.
They arrived. Missions Ablaze has operated from that address ever since, and the gate still opens every weekday.
What it started as
8 missionaries. 2 kombies. 300 meals a day.
That is a number worth sitting with, because it is small. There was nothing inevitable about any of what followed, and anybody looking at it in 1995 would have called it a handful of people with a second-hand vehicle and an unreasonable idea.
He did not do it alone
Missions Ablaze was founded by Tinus and by his wife Meisie, together, in 1995. She was a co-founder of it and not a footnote to it, and this organisation exists because 2 people decided it would rather than 1.
Meisie has since passed away. Tinus remarried, and Brenda joined the mission in 2021 and works alongside him today.
What the 4 words turned into
78.9 million meals distributed. 3.6 million lives touched. 31 years of it, without a year off.
Through Covid. Through the 2021 riots that destroyed many of the food sources this work depends on. Through the 2022 floods, when 400mm of rain fell on KwaZulu-Natal. Through the 2024 Tongaat tornado, when the team put out 250 hot meals a day along with household goods for people who had lost everything.
The words have not changed
They are still the tagline. They still sit in capital letters under the name, exactly where they sat in the vision.
We feed the poor.
It is not a slogan somebody wrote in a workshop. It is a description of the job, and after 31 years it is still the shortest true answer to what this organisation does all day.