Soulgardeners

on top of a mountain with an amazing view we are all safe in the drakensberg

resting with the family

An open letter to South African friends

Dear South African friends,

We live in South Africa. Though globalization is a reality, we still live in Africa. South Africa is a wonderful country with its own smells, contours and history. We live in one of the most exciting countries in the world. In a sense we live in a miracle – for where has one ever seen a peaceful move to democracy where the majority who were oppressed move into power without wiping out the minority who oppressed them?

This country of ours lives in a constant beat of grace. We have our problems: inequity, AIDS, poverty, crime, greed, racism and other problems are around every corner. But what I love about our country is that it is difficult to hide from the realities. Our country is in a sense a microcosm of what is happening in the whole world.

 In South Africa we can drive from the richest suburbs to the poorest squatter camps in 15-30 minutes. Because our challenges are so unique, we are being formed in a specific way. We are engaged in a context posing different questions that need alternative lived realities.

So let me come to the punch line of this letter.

WE HAVE TO STOP OUR FACINATION AND IDOLIZING OF THE AMERICAN CHURCH.

South African churches are not inferior to American churches (thanks Steve Biko for teaching me this). Americans have their issues and we have ours. If we want to go forward in this country we will have to get over our inferiority complex towards what we deem to be the successful churches in the USA. Furthermore I want to propose that we have something to give to the USA church. A lot of us have made our pilgrimages to the States to go and learn some new model or hear about another miracle strategy. We’ve been in conferences where we were to become ‘better leaders’ or ‘grow spiritually’ or be more ‘purposeful’. Some of it has been really useful. Some of it has been total crap.

In the last decade the epicenter of Christianity has shifted from the Northern to the Southern hemisphere. I wonder if the time has come for a reversal in the Southern to Northern hemisphere pilgrimages. I wonder if the conversation can morph into one where the North listens to the South? Will our American friends come and stay with us to learn? Will they now make the pilgrimage to the South? Can we recover a more personal learning community where we stay together in houses and not hotels, where we share stories not formulas, where we cook food and not egos? Can we become human again?

My South African friends, I realized a few years ago that primarily American and European Christians have influenced my theology (thanks Trevor for pointing this out) – and I’m grateful for that. But I don’t live in America or Europe. I live in a post-colonial South Africa, colonial flavors are still present and we’re building towards something new. I have a lot to learn in this country of ours. The Americans (bless their souls) cannot teach us what it means to be African – only Africans can. I want to make a few humble proposals:

 - That we read South African and African authors.

 - That we dig into the history of our country and continent by reading and talking to people who still have a South African memory.

- That we listen to each other (and become more excited about South African conversations than about some American celebrity).

- That we build friendships over the economic and race divide and learn from each other.

 - That we become human again by sidestepping impersonal means like conferences, programs, models and celebrity Christians.

PS> some of my non-South African friends may be reading this. I love you deeply. I respect you. But I won’t idolize you. Those of you who have become friends are those who have taught me a lot but who have also been open to learn. Thanks for that.

Word of the day: Intention

Listening to words being used at the Renovaré conference has been interesting.  Today I want to focus on a word I’ve heard a lot.  It is the word INTENTIONAL.

We have to be intentional. Be part of intentional communities.  Practice intentionality.  Live with intention.  Have a vision, intention and mean.  Intentionally engage with the disciplines.  Live in an intentional community.  And so it goes on.

But what does it mean?

Intention has to do with the will and the making of a choice.  To be deliberate or to use another word I’ve heard used a lot, to have ‘purpose’. A few evenings ago I met a young couple. They have sold all their belongings - got in their car and are now searching for an intentional community.  So far they’ve visited two.  I wondered how the two communities who they’ve visited felt after they were there and left. 

So in curiosity I asked them to explain to me what they meant by the phrase intentionality.  For them it was to move in with other people who are also intentional.

I find this very interesting, the whole notion of being with people who are also intentional. 

Playing with the word I want to propose (or be intentional J ) with the word and do this with it: in – tension.

Growth happens when there is tension.  Wildernesses are places of tension.  Dark nights of the soul are places of tension.  Relationships are places of tension (real ones).

But we don’t like tension - we take a verse like “where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am” and lift it out of its context.  The context in Matthew 18 wherein this verse is embedded is one of tension and conflict.  Jesus is saying that where there is tension, there He is.  Growth happens when the Spirit blows us to create, confront and be in-tension.  The cross creates tension – Jesus creates tension.

I want to caution against a certain kind of intentionality or intention that has at its heart a negation of tension.  Allow me to explain.

A few weeks ago Claypot’s leadership (or waiters as we call them) went on a retreat.  During the retreat we experienced an in-tension.  Some of the Claypot community has moved into the marginal spaces of our society, others still live in the suburbs.

Some of our members are single, others are married, others married with children, and some are empty nesters.  We discussed the contexts of how to follow Jesus. 

How do we follow Jesus in the suburbs and how do we follow him if we live in the squatter camps or in Cosmo City?  This conversation raised tension.  We are in-tension.  If everyone lives in the suburbs then we wouldn’t be in-tension.  If everyone believes the suburbs to be a place devoid of Jesus and all of us move to the squatters camp then we would be out-of-tension.

I know there would be other tensions but there wouldn’t be interpersonal tension between differing living contexts. 

When in-tension is gone I think we have fallen for a myopic version of the life of Jesus.  Children of Jesus, living for Jesus continually creates spaces of in-tension where God shows up.

Many years ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned us against creating communities that are “wish dreams”.  When we live in a wish dream, we turn people into extensions of our ideals and a kind of cloning takes place.  Just think of all the tensions that we deal with on a daily basis: rich and poor, white and black, oppressed and oppressors, employees and bosses, those making their homes on the margins and the suburbs, internal ego-filled ambitions and faithful obedience … and so the list goes on.

It is this in-tension that creates spaces for creativity.  When we prematurely relieve the tension we fall into the wish-dream and illusionary community Bonhoeffer warned us about. 

During the last few months a group of us are reading David Bosch’s wonderful book, “Transforming mission”.  A phrase that keeps on being repeated is the phrase “creative tension”. 

Because we’re privileged to have Bosch’s wife Annemie in our group we have some relational insight on his love for that phrase.  Apparently David had an immense ability to live within the tension and to bring groups who are in tension together.

Because we live in a culture where we’ve deified comfort this in-tentionality becomes very important. Some contexts have tension built into it by default. 

During the Renovaré international conference it was interesting to listen to the struggles used as examples of tension.  Standing in a long queue, driving through traffic, losing money in the economic downturn – these are some of the issues that have been mentioned and I’m sure there are other real life issues that weren’t mentioned.

In the international community there are other struggles/tensions.  The week before I came to the conference we studied the Bible one evening with gunshots in the background and a few days later during a prayer meeting a car was stolen. 

God moves in-tension.  Jesus knew this!  After His identity was established we read that the Spirit drove Him into a tension.  That’s why we need to be part of an internationally diverse community of nations, economics, passions and languages – it creates IN-TENSIONS.            

our friends from the States arrives for some fun in africa ! Welcome Howells

The Word that forms us

One of my favorite moments at the Renovaré conference occurred when we were working on the Call to Spiritual Formation.

In one of the sections the role of community in spiritual formation was explored.  The word ‘laboratory’ was used in a sentence.  This elicited some intense debate.  In the midst of our discussion someone suggested that we change the metaphor from laboratory to household.

We didn’t change the word to household and I want to offer a few reflections on this:

Because we live in a constantly abstracting culture, one that diminishes personal names and stories into numbers and statistics we have to recover relational rhythms and root out words that depersonalize.  Laboratory, I think, is one of these words.  It is sterile and clinical and impersonal.

Household with its imagery of family reclaims this relational emphasis - it is intensely personal.  This, I think, is why we would rather avoid this word.  We like abstractions. Laboratories sounds so cool and households are so boring.  There are no perfect households and this upsets; for we want perfect churches. This causes us to run from the realities of the actual household(s) we are part of.

I’m finding the household metaphor exciting to live into – and it has to do with the way in which Jesus teaches us to pray.

Jesus' answer to the question “how should we pray?” starts with the phrase “our Father".

As a white Afrikaans South African my “our” is being re-populated, corresponding roughly to the apartheid and post apartheid era.

During apartheid my “our” was defined by my biological family. Later it embraced those in my faith family and some friends – all of the same race and socio-economic class. My “our” was a product of our country’s politics. My relationships were perfectly mirrored by the oppressive system of apartheid.

In post-apartheid South Africa my “our” is changing. It now consists of people that are radically different than me. Some of them are poor; some of them are black, others Indian. Some are Christians, others not. My “our” has expanded. Not in the abstract. Christ followers don’t love in the abstract – they are on a constant quest to discover the stories of the people reduced to statistics.

My “our” consists of people. Flesh and blood people, they have names: Lollie, Tayla, Liam, Sulette, Colin, Deon, Babette, Francois, Dirk, Melodi, Adriaan, Amelie, Martha, Eddie, Archie, Gomolimo, Lazarus, Eugene, Jan, Drennan, Linda, Gawie, David, Sibongile, Eddie, Bruno, Miguel, Nelson, Short, Waro-waro, Schalk, Sakkie, Lindie, Don, Ruth, Jeremy, Matt, Tim, Neels, Marietjie, Adrie-Marie, Gerrit, Christina, Emtia, Suzette, Stanis, Trevor, Stephan, Dries, Lyle, Diana, Mindie, Trevor, Chrissie, Keira, Arnie, Chantal, Moia,  and the list goes on [please don’t feel offended if your name is not in the list, or at the order of the list] … eventually flowing into abstraction (for its not a totally useless category). Claypotters, South Africans and Africans, North Americans and Europeans, Australians and even people from New Zealand, people living on Islands, Russians and South Americans, Asians and people from the Middle-East.

Whenever my “our” extends with another person, they become part of my rhythm – our lives become connected, intertwined in the realest sense of the word. We become brothers and sisters. If one of them celebrates, then I celebrate. Conversely I feel pain with them. But this is not just an emotional bond, a 'fellowship' defined by only emotions. It also has a physical/material/economic implication. This is where it becomes really challenging.

In the same prayer Jesus asks us to pray for “our daily bread”. That same “our” listed above are those we are praying for. But what do we do if some on the list - like me; have bread and steak, and others like Miguel has a small peae of bread for a family of ten? I’ll tell you what it means for me. It simply (but not simplistically) means that I sacrifice some of my trips to the restaurant so that they can have.

Relationships become the vehicle for this miracle of redistribution of loving in the real. It’s not communism, also not socialism – it is voluntary flowing out of kinship. For who can let a brother or sister suffer and still say that there is love?

Yet.

I still live in a country trying to rid itself from apartheid.

The church is still divided.

Our “our” is very homogeneous.

Black and white on this issue is now grey.

Black.

White.

Apart.

Still.

The white church has become like medical schemes.

We regulate the “our” so that we minimize the risk.

Fellowship stays only emotional.

It’s sick.

We are sick.

I am sick.

But …

There is a way out. It’s the way of Jesus. A mustard seed way. What if every white Christian in South Africa started to pray for a broader “our”? What if every one of us developed friendships with someone other than the “usual suspects” that populate our “our”? At the pace of one relationship at a time. Matthew the tax collector in the same band as the disciples whose taxes he stole. It has happened once, it can happen again!

I think it could revolutionize us.

Liberate us.

Black and White, Africans and Americans, Colonizers and the colonized (and whatever enmities we can imagine).

The church is perfectly situated to become an instrument for this.

Will we? Is spiritual formation any good for real life people in real contexts?

Today I sat in on a conversation of a new friend.  She shared a Scripture that she felt was for someone.  I heard it at 1.45 pm it is  now 3.51 am and it has taken me only 14 hours to realize that her words was for me (this is actually not that long for this recovering unteachable soul).  She read some words out of the letter to the Romans … which gives me hope …

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (15:13)

Questions arising from the first two days of Renovaré

Means and ends are important.  Means/ the medium; has an immense impact on the ends / message.  Therefore, cultivating attentiveness to the small is done by the ordinariness of becoming ‘detectives of divinity’ in our daily lives.
After last night’s first session in the auditorium at the Renovaré International Conference I wonder about the means through which 2500 people are introduced to this particular spiritual formation conversation. 
What does it do to the message of spiritual formation when we teach the way of Jesus in a spectacle way?
How do we ‘train the eyes and ears’ when the worship band is singing and the stage lights are enlightening?

I also wonder ...

How can we make the language of ‘spiritual formation’ available for people who are not used to the language of this movement?  How can we make this life plain enough so that a child can understand it, so that an educated person and an illiterate person can become friends and share formation.

Geography, images and spiritual formation (reflections from Renovaré)

Today is the start of the Renovaré international conference.  In the following few posts I will make some observations as someone who is an outsider of sorts. Not as someone who is not sympathetic to the Renovaré cause, but as a South African visiting America, who is a participant in the international spiritual formation conversation.

Earlier today I had two very significant moments.

The first one was when I joined some friends for the worship of carrying boxes into the various locations that will be used for selling books at the convention.  En-route we found ourselves in the basement of the hotel where most of the guests stay.  The space down there is where the kitchens are located. It is also where the cleaning and cooking takes place, where the garbage is disposed of and from where the food and other necessities are taken into the ‘nicer’ parts of the hotel.
I got a few minutes alone in that particular space and reflected on the effect geography has on the ways in which we are formed; how are we formed in an air-conditioned hotel and how are we formed in a stinking basement?

I sometimes fear that the means with which we teach spiritual formation are forming ourselves out of the realities of spiritual formation in the grind of life.

My second experience was when we carried some books into the main auditorium where the ‘platform speakers’ will speak (the platform concept is another observation for another time).  The view exiting the auditorium is one of a life-size American flag with a memorial with soldiers commemorating the Vietnam and Korean war.  How do Americans view these symbols, and the internationals? What effect does this image have on our formation?  

The statues in front of the building show soldiers with their guns, poised for an attack.  They are symbols confronting one with the imaginations we are forming and the stories which influences our view of the world.

These two geographies and the soldier statue lead us into a particular story. They populate our imaginations.

Amahoro further thoughts… (2)

Emmanuel Katongole, Introduction and Chapter 1 …

I’m currently in the United States and just arrived in San Antonio for a Renovare conference. This is my first time in Texas (outside of an airport) and I can tell you that it’s hot here! 

Nevertheless, I’m currently reading a fantastic book entitled “A future for Africa” by Emmanuel Katongole. [It would be great to start a group that interacts on the content of this book - drop me a note if you're interested]

The book consists of essays by Emmanuel.  He is an Ugandan who currently teaches at Duke.  In the book’s introduction he talks about the challenge of developing a social ethic that is descriptive before it becomes prescriptive.  Or to use a computer analogy … before you download funky applications you need to understand the operating system.  You cannot load Mac software onto a PC (though you can load PC software on a Mac, but I digress).

He contends that a lot of ethics in Africa aim at telling Africans what to do, he states that, “by focusing on recommendations, Christian ethics does not fully and critically engage the reality of politics in Africa, especially the fact that politics involves the formation of identities.  A preoccupation with prescriptions does not, therefore, highlight the specific type of identities formed within post-colonial politics.”

The problems in Africa, therefore does not garner quick fixes, because they, “are wired within the imaginative landscape of Africa”p.xi.  These landscapes are wired into our collective memories and are embodied in our daily rhythms.  Because it runs in the background of society, these scripts (or operating systems) are taken for granted and it is precisely this memory that has to be discovered and “unlearned”p.23.

In Chapter 1 cleverly titled , “Remembering Idi Amin: On Violence, Ethics and social memory in Africa” – Katongole explore the importance of memory.  This memory include historical facts but is much more than just the factual.  The task of memory,

“ … is in fact a conversation about the present.  It involves taking a closer look at who we are in the present – our current responses, reactions, and patterns of life – and trying to situate that within a narrative of social/political history” p.19

Here are some of my thoughts on this …

-    It is disconcerting to me how fast white South Africans want to move past the memories of Apartheid.  This kind of amnesia that is prevalent in the talk of the beneficiaries of oppression serves a particular agenda; to keep the status quo. 
-    This task of remembering is very urgent given, “the current modes of social ethic, most of which is involves a calculated forgetfulness of the past and a naïve optimism and invitation to “move on.”p.21.
-    Though Katongole urges us to move beyond factual memories, I think most white South Africans haven’t explored the memories of our country.  Therefore, I would propose that any church should strongly encourage their membership to explore our country’s history.  Visit the Apartheid museum, talk to the previous perpetrators of Apartheid, talk to the victims, read on people who resisted (Tutu, Beyers Naude, Biko), repent, forgive, reconcile [remembering that prescriptive actions like that last sentence should follow descriptive exploration].
-     Personally I’m thinking that at Claypot, membership should be dependent upon a process of remembering.
-    Katongole states that one of the reasons we need to remember is that the oppressed who are liberated can easily become just like the oppressors.  That’s why God continually tells Israel to remember their slavery and by implications their taskmasters.  When we forget we become what we despised.  For white South Africans this can pertain to our accusatory stance towards our parents – if we only show a finger the chances are that we will make the same kind of mistakes.

“ … unless we are, as individuals and as communities, able to examine our present patterns of life and choices, and locate them within a comprehensive narrative of social history, we are neither able to understand who we are in the present nor clearly able to see the alternatives that might be available to us.  Only by confronting the past, which still somehow lives on in the present, are we able to envision or imagine meaningful and viable alternatives for the future.” p.7

 

Amohoro ... further thoughts

Last week’s Amohoro conference got me pondering about a bunch of things so here goes …
I live on the continent of Africa and therefore need to contextualize theology in terms of the continent I’m on.  Africa is a big place.  So, maybe I should say that we have to contextualize theology in South Africa as Africans.

Yet, I’m a white African with all the baggage of being in a long line of oppressors.  But, on top of the before-mentioned identities I am a follower of Jesus.  This doesn’t somehow magically erase the fact that I’m in Africa or a white South African but it does change the hue in which my white South African story should be reinterpreted.

In 2003 Lollie and I came back to SA after saying no to receiving green cards in the US. 

We call our coming back our repentance to South Africa.  For us repentance meant:

-    Learning the South African story firsthand from poor black South Africans.
-    Grappling with what it means to be a beneficiary of oppression – becoming informed about the history of South Africa.
-    Building friendships with black South Africans on what Christ-following means in South Africa.
-    Moving an Afrikaans speaking community into sacrificing language in order to create spaces where we can have interracial relationships.
-    Grappling with our regret for apartheid (we started this website but sadly it didn’t come of the ground – maybe it needs a resurrection of sorts?)

We haven’t gone far on the journey, but we’re on it.

At Amohoro I saw one of the most apparent challenges in South Africa.  It is the challenge of education.  After one of the sessions a black pastor stood up and in his feedback to a black professor’s presentation responded by saying that he really couldn’t follow the presentation’s content.  The challenge in South Africa is for those who have an education to speak plainly and for those who are reluctant to learn to be open to be challenged into a new narrative.  Last year I posted on how Steve Biko can help us with this in South Africa.

After Amohoro I’m more convinced than ever that I have a place in South Africa.  That we need a proudly South African theology.  That our identity as followers of Jesus should flavor what it means to be a South African Afrikaner, Zulu, Xhosa, Venda, and Sotho etc.
I have a lot to learn.

One last thought … why does it take an Amahoro for people to mix with others?  Can we sustain these relationships even when there isn’t a high-profile conference coming to town? I hope so because I have a sense that the contextual theology we’re yearning for is already created in small, insignificant places far away from the limelight.  Conversations that is accessible through the unspectacular dayliness of relationships and eating and the hard work of becoming friends with someone who loves Jesus and is almost the exact opposite of  who you are.

"I take this to be the unique challenge of Christian theology in general and African Christian theology in particular; namely, to be able to write a theology not from the top, but from below, from the ordinary experience of the believer. Critically, the task of theology is to challenge the various metanarratives that claim validity simply because they come from the top, but which fail to take people's life histories seriously. These are the stories that, because they are so committed to a theory, a program or a system, fail and/or refuse to see the real, the concrete, that which resists reduction to, or is intentionally excluded by the system (in biblical terms, the widow and orphan). " Emmanuel Katongole

Other bloggers on Amahoro

• Andries Louw (Christian) of nextchurch on Amahoro Africa Family reunion of change agents
• Andries Louw (Christian) of nextchurch on Amahoro Africa conference The African Reformation
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of my contemplations on cant speak about Amahoro
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of my contemplations on I am an Afrikaner, I owe my being to this continent
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of my contemplations on Adriaan Vlok got his feet washed @ Amahoro
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of Anderkant on ons Afrikaner private godsdiens (aka oom Adriaan part 2)
• Cori (Undefined) of Cori’s Blog on A diverse God
• nic paton (TBD) of soundandsilence on The European Post Colonial
• Roger Saner (Grew up Baptist, went Anglican, now post-church.) of FutureChurch on The drive home from Amahoro
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on Amahoro Gathering 8 June 2009
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on Truth, reconciliation and smelly feet
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on More on Amahoro
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on Amahoro: modernity fights back