You Excel Beyond Limits 2026: Women from Six Countries on Faith, Menopause and Friendship

I have done Community Connections Friday in a lot of places, but never from a riverbank with a boat cruise behind me. This week the show went on the road to Emerald Resort & Casino on the Vaal River, where Cornerstone Fellowship International is hosting You Excel, its women's conference, under the theme Beyond Limits. Four days, 8 to 11 October, women from six countries. Normally on a Friday we connect the community. This time we connected countries, and we had listeners tuning in from Germany and the UK while we did it.

I will tell you now, I went in thinking I had a radio show to run. I came out feeling like I had been adopted.

The church that lost Jesus

My first guest was Dr. Grace, who sits on the national board of Cornerstone in Zimbabwe, oversees Christian education for the ministry and pastors at Harare City Assembly. I asked her one simple question about how she came to salvation and got a sermon, which is exactly what I wanted. Cornerstone is built on 1 Corinthians 3:11, no foundation other than Christ, and Dr. Grace does not soften what that means.

She once audited a handful of churches in her city, going back through six months of Sunday sermons. In some of them the name of Jesus never came up. Not once. People were showing up, giving, being managed, being coached on their rent and their job security, and nobody was pointing at the King. She does not think financial advice is evil, she just thinks Sunday belongs to Jesus.

"You can't progress to that intimate knowledge without really pressing to know him."Dr. Grace, on the Greek word for "know"

Then she told me about her bout with COVID in early 2021, a hospital room that filled with light, and a vision of a multitude in the dark asking each other why they had been left out when they used to preach, prophesy and pray for the sick. The answer they got was that He never knew them. Her point, and it stuck with me for the rest of the day, is that the Greek word for know is the intimate kind. You can run a whole ministry without ever getting that close. She called it one of the great tragedies of African Christianity and I suspect it is not only African.

She also reminded me why I keep saying it is an us thing, not a you-and-them thing. We are all building the same kingdom. The Upper Room was not a merger of church brands. They were obeying one instruction.

Why a women's conference has a doctor on the programme

The name You Excel comes straight out of Proverbs 31:29, many daughters have done well but you surpass them all, and Dr. Grace says it is an imperative, not a compliment. Excel at being conformed to Christ. Excel as mothers, business women, educators, community leaders. The Proverbs 31 woman, she reminded me, is not a church-only creature. She runs a household, manages money, reaches the poor and her husband is known at the city gates because of her. At this conference the day starts at 5:30 in the morning with the Word, prayer, a motivational teaching, journaling and exercise, because she rises before everyone else does.

What I did not expect was the menopause session. I walked into the hall to check on the photographers, as I do, and stayed for ten minutes because I was hooked. A speaker from the UK, who had gone through menopause with very little support and ended up on the front cover of a big British magazine because of it, opened the conversation. Then Dr. Chiesa Mundia, a medical doctor and the secretary general of the women's ministry back in Zimbabwe, walked the room through perimenopause, menopause and post-menopause. Apparently some women cannot stand tights at that stage. Some cannot stand jeans. Some forget things mid-sentence. The room was howling with laughter, and underneath it, relief.

Churches avoid this stuff, and I think that is a mistake. Hosea says my people perish for lack of knowledge, and I have heard too many women told to pray harder when their body needed a doctor. Pungi, who pastors in Gaborone, said she is taking that session home to her church. The jokes about it were flying around the boat cruise all afternoon, which tells you the conversation was overdue. I am going to try to get Dr. Mundia on Medical Monday.

Born Different: a mother, a son and a book

Sarita Chitapa is a senior pastor in the UK, has been for 31 years, and directs the work of Every Home across Africa, a mission organisation in more than 170 countries. She was born in Zimbabwe and her family moved to Britain because of her son, Don David. He was slow to speak, preferred to play alone, and for years nobody could tell her why. A psychiatrist finally used the word autism, which she had never heard, and told her to try abroad.

She was a pastor, she believed in miracles, and she did what a lot of us would do. She prayed over him. She told the spirit of dumbness to leave. The social worker in the UK told her, kindly, that the best miracle on offer was the support they could give him. That was a hard thing to swallow. She says it was also the day she realised that maybe we love children for what they can do instead of for the life God put in them.

Don David is 32 now. Her book, Born Different: A Mother's Love for Her Special Needs Child, is on Amazon and Kindle, and she says she is working on getting it into bookstores. If you have a child, a nephew or a church member who does not fit the mould, read it before you say another word about demons.

Two women who met on Zoom and became twins

I had planned to interview Jackie from Angola and Michelle from Namibia separately. Something told me to put them on the mic together. Good thing, because within a minute I understood that these two are family. They met through ministry online during Covid, found out people kept mistaking them for each other, and have been calling each other twin since their first in-person conference in Namibia. Their kids bonded over Zoom. They once ran into each other at a mall without planning it and spent a whole movie's worth of time just talking while the husbands took the kids.

Michelle also told us about the car accident a year ago that took her husband and hurt her children, and what it meant to be dancing on a boat deck to a Shona song about God showing up when everyone else leaves. I stopped her and said what I say every day when I wake up: but God. I have not been able to shake that.

Jackie asked me to come back to Angola. I was there for 24 hours last year on my way to the DRC and I have never been able to explain what happened in my chest at that hotel window. I will be going back for longer. She has promised fish.

Money, contentment and a line I wrote down

Near the end Pungi and Pastor Filda Moyo from Lambton in Johannesburg joined me. Filda's church spent September on kingdom finances, and Cornerstone's global theme this year is Breaking Ceilings, so her most recent message was titled Breaking Ceilings Without Breaking Your Bank. I love that. Money answers all things, Filda said, but contentment anchors what the money does. She did not stop there. She said we sometimes carry the gospel around like merchandise, and that Jesus did not die to be sold.

I will stand by that all week. I am a business owner and I want money working for the kingdom, but the minute it starts working on us instead, we have a problem.

One gospel

Someone asked me at the end why JustGospel is just JustGospel and not named after a church. Honestly, it is because in heaven nobody is going to be sitting under a Cornerstone banner or a JustGospel banner. Every tribe and tongue will be saying the same thing. The names are for down here.

The You Excel conference closes on Sunday 11 October. I will be back at the River Cafe for photography, and the rest of the JustGospel team will pick up the broadcast. If you are in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Botswana or the UK and you want a Cornerstone assembly near you, find them. And if you have not read Born Different, start there.