“Lepers, prostitutes, tax-collectors, sinners, poor people, discarded ones, blind people, debtors, outcasts, children, women, men, elderly people, sick people, Gentiles, Samaritans, Jews, demon-possessed people, outsiders, heretics, Pharisees, lawyers, and even rich people and big deals were …
Invited, included, affirmed, loved, touched, liberated, healed, cleansed, given dignity, fed, forgiven, made whole, called, reborn, given hope, received, honoured, freed …”
Now that is what church should look like: not meeting up with people who look and sound just like us, but working out how to practise the ‘ridiculous’ notion of loving people who are very different. The world is full of clubs where like-minded people gather, but church … church should be an exciting laboratory of human relations surprises. It should fly in the face of our addictive prejudices and be the place where we find clues to humankind’s most enduring dilemma – how to get on with each other. The Book of Acts is the story of how the first churches, led by the Spirit of Jesus, put up one barrier after another to try and stay safely in their religious, cultural, national and racial comfort zones, and how the Spirit knocked over their walls one by one. Simon Peter the Jewish chauvinist put it well when he cried out in amazement, “I now see how true it is that God has no favourites …”33
God is still in the business of knocking over walls and invites us to share in the task. At the place where I worship these days, we end the service by clasping each other’s hands and praying this prayer:
May God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships, so that we may live from deep within our hearts.
May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people, so that we may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer with pain, rejection, starvation and war, so that we may reach out our hand to comfort them and turn their pain to joy.
And …
May God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done: to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.
In God’s great grace, we say Amen – so be it.34
That prayer sends us out each week into a great unfinished adventure. It invites us realistically to live against the odds. I have never once regretted taking this path, although on myriad occasions I have had to confess failures in faithfulness. It remains the most exciting thing I can do with my life. I have also been asked what I would do if I was proved wrong – that the whole God thing was a nonsense. My slightly absurd answer would be that I think I would rather be wrong with Jesus than right with the rest of the world.
7
Reluctant Scholar
The first steps in the journey from the navy to the ministry took me to Grahamstown, and the Divinity Department at Rhodes University.
For those with a case against colonialism, Grahamstown makes an excellent target. Certainly, the nineteenth century Xhosa warriors resisting Boer and British settlement thought so; they attacked the town more than once and were repulsed with great difficulty. The sleepy ‘City of Saints’, so named for its many churches, is dominated by the Settlers Monument, a squat architectural reminder of the British interlopers – including both Elizabeth’s and my forbears – who began arriving in 1820. This is the town that many of the settlers, more at ease with trading than farming, built as soon as they could. Grahamstown became the commercial and cultural heart of ‘Settler Country’.
Nestling below the memorial is the campus of Rhodes University with its white stucco buildings and red tile roofs. In the 1950s, it was the smallest of South Africa’s universities. The campus was an intimate, self-contained village of lecture halls, faculty offices, playing fields and residences tucked behind the old Drostdy wall at the upper western edge of Grahamstown. The wall drew a line between town and gown, the High Street being the bridge. Among the shops and businesses stood three monuments to early settler faith, the Anglican Cathedral of St Michael and St George, Trinity Presbyterian Church and Commemoration Methodist Church, built to mark the 20th anniversary of the settlers’ landing. At the eastern end of the town the old main road climbed sharply as it exited toward East London, and cluttered across that hill was the black township of Joza, one of the poorest and most ramshackle in the land. In the 100 years since this seething frontier saw the last of its wars between Cape colony and Xhosa hinterland, little had disturbed the way the conquerors ordered matters of race and class. Black and white, poor and rich, lived in separate, desperately different worlds.
After WWII, the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational denominations struck a deal with Rhodes to train their candidates for ordained ministry. A Divinity Department was established and a dedicated residence – Livingstone House – was built. Between 60 and 70 theology students were to be found on campus each year, with Methodists outnumbering the students from the two smaller churches. As an ecumenical venture, it was ahead of its time and a resounding success, but as a response to South Africa’s original sin it never got to first base. We were all white, with our black counterparts housed 60 miles away in a small town called Alice, where the Federal Theological Seminary rose alongside the blacks-only Fort Hare University. Thus our first steps toward being Christian ministers were taken in a segregated bubble and the sadness is how little it seemed to bother many of us. The thought that women of any race might possibly be called to the ordained ministry was of course even further from possibility. It would remain a female-free zone for some time yet.
My first year at Rhodes was an uneasy one. I had been an enthusiastic volunteer for the Navy, but here I was an unwilling conscript. I counted myself fortunate at first not to be housed with the ‘Tokkelokke’ or ‘Theologs’ in Livingstone House, but rather in an ex-women’s residence named Olive Schreiner, on the edge of the female campus. The ground floor had been turned into lecture rooms and offices and eleven male students who were not straight out of school occupied the rooms upstairs. The absence of urinals in the communal bathroom was a mild nuisance, but there were ample compensations: out of our windows on nice days we had the pleasant distraction of our near neighbours sunning themselves on their lawns.
My mind, however, was mainly elsewhere. Eighty miles away in Port Elizabeth was a Naval Reserve Base, to which I was now officially attached while working my way out of the service. There were boats to play with there, so I hitch-hiked down whenever I could. I was still deeply torn, giving little attention to my studies. My heart simply wasn’t there. I felt myself a poor fit with the ministry and wished I could be as confident in my vocation as my fellows. There is of course something gloriously random and counter-intuitive about the call to ministry, resulting in many unlikely recruits. Those entering the Divinity School with me included a typewriter mechanic, an architect, an engineer, a travelling salesman, an Irish auctioneer and a London policeman. Yet, in spite of their widely differing backgrounds, I was conscious of a further, invisible gulf: they seemed to want to be there and I didn’t. This tension tore at me for a full eighteen months before God seemed to take pity on me. Sometime in my second year I had to conduct worship and preach in a small congregation that suffered the efforts of many student preachers. For some reason I settled on a Scripture passage that seemed to mock my own condition; it was all about knowing and being sure. The Apostle Paul was claiming two certainties: “I know him in whom I have believed,” he said, “and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed to him …”35 The sermon that emerged was titled I am persuaded … and it was in the preaching of it that it began to become true for me. John Wesley was once told to “preach faith until you have it …” and it seemed I was doing the same. I remember coming back to my room, sitting on the side of my bed and saying to myself, “I do belong. I’m meant to be here,” and to God, “You called me, so you’re going to have to put up with me now, for the rest of my life.” Something was settled that night. I was persuaded! Methodists would call it the gift of ‘assurance’.