Often because South Africa seems quite similar to Australia on the surface " glittering shopping malls, freeways, detached houses, gum trees and barbecues " you forget how different it is.

Just recently one of the homeless guys I work with told me that he'd just tendered his resignation after a month of work. I'd been quite involved in the whole process " from the tie and shirt for the interview to fixing the bike they'd given him to get to and from work " and it had been a rare opportunity for him, so I was gobsmacked. And a bit frustrated. And pretty annoyed.

"Why on earth did you do that?" I asked incredulously.

"Ah," he said, "I was under a lot of pressure " I hate being under pressure."

I could sympathise with that: living on the streets, managing to stay clean enough for work and riding a bicycle for forty minutes on blisteringly cold Jo'burg mornings was not an easy way to live life.

But he's not the only one in Jozi under pressure, so I tried to reason with him.

"But you've just about got your first pay packet," I suggested.  "You'll be able to rent a room close to work, or catch a taxi. You'll be able to support your child and his mother, you'll be able to get back on your feet. It's definitely hard now, but you've got to push through!"

But he just shook his head. "No, I can't do it."

So, I continued to talk. "Are the conditions bad? Come on, man, this is crazy! What are you thinking?"

"No, Andrew." he said. "You don't understand."

And he was right. I didn't.

He told me his story: that as a five or six year old he'd been bewitched by a sangoma ("witch doctor"), had been haunted through his teens, and that over the last few weeks his ancestors had filled his dreams telling him how unimpressed they were with him.

The only way forward, he insisted, was to spend his first paypacket on a goat or a cow to sacrifice.  Only then would the ancestors clear the road for him and make his life less difficult.

"You're white," he repeated. "You don't understand."

Every Sunday, 56 per cent of South Africans are in church, but according to the health department, 70 per cent of South Africans consult traditional healers on a regular basis. However, the numbers match up. A lot of professing Christians end up at the sangoma when praying at church doesn't seem to work.

I'm in no doubt that African people in general are far more in touch with the seriously real spiritual world than most westerners " well, than me at least. Dreams and visions are commonplace. In fact, that spiritual world of the ancestors and sangomas often seems a lot more real than Jesus.

At one of our camps earlier in the year, one of the students recounted a dream she'd had where her dead grandmother had rebuked her for following Jesus. 

"It just seems so much more real than God in a book," she said.

So ministry becomes complicated. Coming from Australia where most people " even Christians " have to be pushed pretty hard to believe that anything remotely spiritual is going on, it's easy to be a bit wary of some people's claims that malicious spirits are behind everything that goes wrong in their lives " and at times, the old "I was bewitched' line is a well-used excuse for everything from a traffic infringement to domestic violence.

So I'll have to do what I'm always forced to end up doing: keep reading the scriptures, listening to people, and get ready to know a God who works in all sorts of ways beyond my imagining.