Arise Woman Conference 2026: A Day In His Presence

The first thing you noticed was the banner. A tall sheet of white fabric hung against the linen drapes at Delta Community Church on Saturday, 17 October, with the words In His Presence in dark script and Psalm 84 written down its length. By the end of the day almost every woman who came through the doors had stood in front of it for a photograph. Most of them were smiling in a way that does not come from a camera.

The Arise Woman Conference 2026 was built on one idea, taken from verse 10 of the psalm: a single day in God's courts is better than a thousand anywhere else. Everything in the programme, from the worship to the testimonies to the teaching, leaned on that line. It is a simple thing to put on a banner. It is harder to build a day around it and mean it, and this one largely did.

Testimonies that set the tone

The morning opened with women taking the microphone to describe what one moment in God's presence had done in their lives. There was no polish to it and nobody seemed to want any. The host said it plainly from the platform: a testimony means God has done it here and can do it again. That framing mattered, because it turned the stories into something the room could stand on instead of just admire.

Kim Ballantine and the Valley of Baka

The weight of the day sat with Kim Ballantine, an industrial and research psychologist and business coach who led the first two teaching sessions. Her text was Psalm 84:6, the passage about people who pass through the Valley of Baka and make it a place of springs. She spoke from experience as well as study, describing long years in which illness took her voice and other things she had built her life around. She did not offer the room a tidy rescue. She offered a way to stand.

Her message was that the valley is real, and it is not where you live. She told the women a hard season is a chapter and not the whole book, and she was blunt about the difference between feeling pain and being ruled by it.

“Standing doesn't mean denying your pain.”

She gave the second session a working framework built on the word STAND: sit in His presence, stand on His Word and stay close to Him; take control of your thoughts and the voices around you; choose gratitude as a discipline; deal honestly with the impact of trauma rather than skipping past it; and dare to dream again beyond your current circumstances. Gratitude got the most air. She described keeping lists of a thousand things to be thankful for during her darkest stretches, and urged the women to do the same, one small gift at a time.

The sessions did not stay in the head. Both ended with ministry, and women came forward in numbers to be prayed for. What happened at the front stays between those women and the people who prayed with them, but the movement in the room was plain to see.

Tea, cake and a handbag competition

It would be dishonest to write about this conference as though it ran on teaching alone. Tea came at eleven, with gluten-free options set aside, and the men's ministry of the church served both tea and lunch to a round of applause that was well earned. There were lucky draws, a book table, and an afternoon game in which the ladies emptied their handbags and scored themselves on what they found. The winning count was in the twenties. Someone produced a child's toothbrush. Someone else apparently carried a screwdriver. The laughter did real work, loosening a room before it was asked to be quiet again.

The closing session: from striving to surrender

After lunch the final session, led by Melinda Roodt, turned from standing in the valley to where you stand from. Roodt drew a line between living out of self-reliance and living out of God's presence, and argued that most women default to the first without noticing. Working through the later verses of Psalm 84, she described God as sun and shield, the giver of grace and glory, who withholds no good thing from those who walk uprightly. Her challenge was to put Jesus first and let the rest follow, because blessing that is chased tends to run away.

She closed with the line that most of the women seemed to carry out with them: one moment in God's presence can change what years of striving could not. The day ended with worship and a blessing, and an invitation for anyone who needed prayer to come forward.

Who made it happen

A conference this size runs on people nobody applauds loudly enough, so here is the applause. Delta Community Church opened its doors and then did the part that rarely makes a programme: the setting up, the hospitality, the flow of a long day that never felt rushed. The church's men's ministry served tea and lunch, and they did it cheerfully for a room full of women who were not shy about thanking them. The worship team carried the room between sessions, and the Arise team held the programme together from the first welcome to the final blessing.

From the platform, the organisers thanked everyone who had sponsored and sown into the conference, whether with finances, time or prayer. That last item deserves its place in the list. A day like this is prayed into existence long before the doors open, and the people who did that praying will never appear in a photograph.

The community showed up in practical ways too. The water on the tables carried a JustGospel label and a laser-cut keyholder tag, and every part of it came from local businesses. GoZone Water in Vanderbijlpark supplied the water. X-treme Grafi-X printed the bottle labels and the keyholder prints. Krugerlaanskool Combined School in Duncanville did the laser cutting, which means a Duncanville school helped put its mark on the day. It is a small detail, and it is the kind of detail that tells you what a community is willing to do when somebody asks.

JustGospel Radio and TV was proud to serve as media partner, broadcasting from the room. Please support the businesses that stood with us.

An evening postscript

As the JustGospel team left Delta at about six that evening and looked back, a long feathered cloud had stretched across the sky above the building, spread wide like wings. We are not going to tell you what it meant. We will say that nobody who saw it spoke for a moment, and then everybody reached for a phone.

Watch the sessions

JustGospel Radio and TV recorded all three sessions. They are on the JustGospelRadio YouTube channel, and you can watch them here.

More from the JustGospel Facebook page

Posts and a reel from around the conference, straight from our page.

Frequently asked questions

When and where was the Arise Woman Conference 2026?

On Saturday, 17 October 2026, at Delta Community Church in Vereeniging, Gauteng.

What was the theme?

In His Presence, based on Psalm 84, especially verse 10.

Who spoke?

Kim Ballantine led the first two sessions on standing in the valley and finding springs. Melinda Roodt closed the day on living from God's presence instead of self-reliance.

Who was the media partner?

JustGospel Radio and TV, a 24/7 gospel radio and television station.