Biographie de Ashley Cloete
Ashley Cloete was born and raised in Cape Town, but lived in Germany and Holland for many years. He served as a teacher while studying extramurally at the University College of the Western Cape in the suburb Bellville. At this time he also served on the executive of the national youth union of the Moravian Church. A bursary facilitated by the church sent him to Germany in January 1969, where he met his wife Rosemarie while studying Greek and Biblical Hebrew.
After completing theological studies at the Moravian Seminaries in Cape Town and Bad Boll (Western Germany), he served as a pastor in West Berlin and Utrecht (Netherlands), with residence in nearby Zeist. Because of apartheid-related legislation, his marriage led to exile from South Africa. During this period he contended via correspondence with the government of that time to enable a return to the country with his family of seven.
A sampleof this correspondence is included in What God Joined Together. After returning to South Africa in January 1992, the family became involved with prayer and evangelism movements. The blessings and positive impacts in Germany and Holland during exile, inspired the vision of such work in his home country of South Africa. Since 2003 the family has been focusing on compassionate outreach to refugees and other foreigners.
This ultimately led to the founding of the organization Friends from Abroad, a low-key umbrella organsiation in which mission agencies and a few churches have been networking since 2006. Already as a teenager, during the apartheid era in South Africa , Ashley had been impressed with need for a visual local expression of the unity of followers of Jesus according to the prayer of Jesus that his followers may be one (John 17:21-23).
This vision became part and parcel of the inspiration to start an evangelistic agency Stichting Goed Nieuws Karavaan in the Dutch town of Zeist in 1983 with believers from different denominations. (He felt that it was the rightful responsibility of committed Christians to face the challenge of racial reconciliation in South Africa.)Later, together with Messianic Jewish and Muslim-background followers of Jesus a low profile organisation Isaac Ishmael Ministries was established in 2010.
The need for successors as leaders of Friends from Abroad gave rise to the start of a new organisation in 2021, the Born Again Believers Network. Ashley and his wife have been blessed with five children and fourtee...
