A South African diary 2014

South Africa 2014

I go to Johannesburg every year at around this time for two reasons. The main one is to act as visiting academic for the College where Jill and I taught for 6 years from 1999-2005. The secondary one is to catch up with the Diocese of Christ the King, which runs from the Southern part of Johannesburg through Sharpeville, Vereeniging and Vanderbijl Park to the Vaal River. I am the Diocesan Commissary in England for Bishop Peter Lee, who is a Johnian and Ridleian.

The College offers a distance-learning degree, which Jill and I set up with a South African colleague in the deregulation of tertiary education, along with a Diploma, a Higher Certificate and various lower-level programmes for nearly 3000 students around Southern Africa. They provide ministerial formation and theological training for people from every denomination from Anglican, through Roman Catholic, Baptist and Pentecostal to Africa Independent Churches, many of whom have been running churches for years without any formal background. Politically, it’s one of the most effective ways of empowering marginalized Christian leaders; practically, it’s the largest provider of such training in Southern Africa, maybe in the whole continent. It was also a method of challenging apartheid when mixed-race theological education was banned.

The bridge with my diocesan work is that we were also DDOs, and all of our students, many of whom are now the clergy of the diocese, trained through us. One of the blessings each year is to see again those whom we supported working as leaders in a very deprived part of Gauteng. This year, I returned to a church we took from garage to tent to zozo [shack] to the building in the pictures you see, in the Archdeaconry of Sharpeville. Averaging a congregation of 40 when we were there, it has since our departure doubled in size. One of the young girls of that era is now a practising adult Christian, and it’s the little stories of Christian growth that I see over and over again, which bless me and remind me what Christian ministry is all about for me. Lindiwe is the woman in the picture; the weird garment I’m wearing is a Trinidad chasuble, tie-died and made for me in 1983 by a friend. The garden is a community vegetable garden, part of the Diocesan strategy for tackling HIV/AIDS health care with improved nutrition.

My task at the College is to ask as a quality control person, to train South African external examiners, which I’ve done several times, to ensure that there is no drop in standards in a country where education has deteriorated badly since 1994, despite huge efforts, to propose academic and educational changes [e.g. in the ethos and educational philosophy of biblical courses] and to help the college to keep its spiritual focus central. I sometimes write courses for them still, most recently one on church history, and they want me to write one on ‘church growth’, interesting in the light of yesterday’s college lecture.

Let me end with a story which says it all. Last year Huddleston Thonga graduated with a BTh after three years of trying to pass his dissertation. On the third attempt he got it, and as one of my former ordinands, now vicar of the church we were vicars of, it makes me and Jill [and the bishop] weep with joy to think of how far he has come. He started with a Certificate programme back in the 1990s as a fulltime clerk in some industry or the other. Every course he sweated over, sometimes repeating after failure. While we were there, he completed it and was ordained deacon, but the Diploma seemed beyond him. He persevered, completed it and was ordained priest, eventually converting the Diploma into a degree in a process that took about 15 years. Faithful, a slogger, a godly man and devoted husband, Huddleston is now one of the diocese’s most reliable and committed clergy, and TEE was part of his journey, theology for the Kingdom of God.

So yes, I get in some warm weather, a bit of birding [the picture is of a brown-hooded kingfisher], a couple of runs in the bush, the odd sighting of a buck, but it’s gloriously Kingdom work of the kind that makes me want to keep on keeping on – yes, in grey old autumnal Ridley too! – because you too have these stories, and you forget them at your peril.

© Adrian Chatfield

December 2014