Charity on two wheels

Almost ten thousand kilometres there and back for one divine service. Once a year, Elke and Joachim Schmidt from Germany book a flight to South Africa to attend a divine service. But this is not just any divine service. The participants sit in church in black leather outfits, and at the end of the service everyone is given all sorts of toys by the children of the congregation.

This is the annual biker service in the congregation Dunrobin-Bellville. For eight years now, New Apostolic bikers from the area around Cape Town have been meeting at a fast food restaurant in the early hours of the morning from where they ride to the church, two abreast and in configuration.

Heading for the Toy Run

The divine service is not any different from any other service. The only difference is the get-together afterwards. The bikers observe a minute’s silence and pay tribute to their comrades who have died. And then the children of the congregation present toys by the box. After all, this biking event is not an end in itself.

Toy Run is the name of the charity event behind it, which has been taking place in Cape Town for 34 years. Thousands of bikers rally together to give joy to needy children in South Africa. Toys that have been centrally collected are strapped to the bikes, or dumped into a sidecar, and are then paraded through the city. The toys are given to homes and orphanages, hospitals, or other non-profit institutions that distribute them to needy children.

With the approval of the Church

New Apostolic bikers join the parade through the city. And our church in Dunrobin is the starting point on one of the preceding weekends. There are about 170 participants. Church members make up about half. The other half are partners, friends, and guests. Sometimes the whole thing takes on bigger dimensions, for example, when Apostle Marc A. Diedricks celebrated the service and dispensed a wedding blessing on a biker couple. This was attended by about 700 people. NACTV deemed it newsworthy and presented a longer feature.

Following the 2014 Toy Run, the NACMA, the New Apostolic Church Motorcycle Association, developed—not a biker club, but a group of people who share the same interests. With the approval of the Church, as the two initiators Andre Bell and Trevor Davids confirmed to NACTV. When Chief Apostle Wilhelm Leber issued the motto for 2013, calling it a year of profession, the bikers asked if they could do this their way. They were given the go-ahead by the Church administrative offices and have since then been sporting the Church emblem on their leather outfits.

Professing one’s faith knows no borders

Two of the bikers are Elke and Joachim Schmidt from Karlsruhe in Germany. He has been to Cape Town four times this year. The cross-border contact first came into being in 2014 at the International Church Convention in Munich (Germany). Since then the South African bikers have been looking for additional biker friends in the Church—and have struck gold in Indonesia and Canada.

Meanwhile, the NACMA people have been coming together regularly once a month for a divine service. They pick congregations in a 300-kilometre radius of Cape Town and always have a financial donation for the local Sunday School on board.

Donations are something that Joachim Schmidt also always brings along. “It is nice that you can actually make a difference with your hobby,” he says. “And it shows that bikers are not necessarily bad people,” Andre Bell says with a smile. “And they confess their faith,” Trevor David adds.