Signs of Pain and Hope

The cross outside Calvary Methodist Church

It’s been a very full couple of days here in Johannesburg. We’ve seen lots of the city from our rental van (still with a broken gas gauge and a rattling muffler), and we’ve been able to visits several sites where God is clearly working and several sites where remarkably evil deeds have taken place.

We started yesterday morning with a wonderful worship service at Calvary Methodist Church, between Jo’burg and Pretoria, where Alan Storey preached an inspired message about the call for all of us to be truth-tellers, an especially important task in a fragile new democracy with a history such as this. The church that Alan serves is remarkable in itself, as it’s a dynamic multi-cultural integrated congregation doing serious discipleship, reconciliation, and spiritual formation work. We were privileged to eat lunch with Alan to further discuss his work at Calvary.

Then we spent the afternoon at the Apartheid Museum, which was moving, indeed. Steven and I had known much of the historical detail presented at the museum thanks to Dr. Storey’s classes, but it was still very moving to see and hear accounts of the roots of apartheid, the horrors of its reign, and the sometimes-violent resistance against it. I was reminded of my visit in 2004 to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, and I wished the Apartheid Museum had the kind of outdoor art garden that was offered in Jerusalem to help visitors process so much emotion. We left with feelings of hope, despite the awful history on which we were dwelling, as the very existence and popularity of the museum means that its visitors will not forget their past.

Last night we had the wonderful privilege of visiting over dinner with Tom and Barbara Manthatha. Tom is a black South African who has worked for his entire life against systems of injustice, and was imprisoned on 16 different occasions as a result, including a stint on Robben Island. He also served on the reparations committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and now serves as a human rights commissioner in Johannesburg. Barbara served for many years with the South Africa Council of Churches – both of them had amazing stories to tell about the history of this struggle and the power of their faith in the midst of awful situations.

This morning we journeyed to Soweto, the township to which black South Africans were moved in the forced segregation of the early apartheid regime. Families were forced to share tiny poorly-built homes with no electricity or services, and their numbers grew rapidly. Today it is one of the largest cities in South Africa, with estimates at 4 to 6 million residents, and while still a very poor city, one with many signs of hope and renewal.


We started the morning at the Hector Pietersen Museum, memorializing the murder of many black schoolchildren during a peaceful march in 1976, an event which largely spearheaded the resistance movements which followed. After the museum and a nice “local” lunch at Wandi’s, we were able to visit with students in their first year of candidacy for ordination, stationed at various churches in the area. These students serve as pastors with no formal training, but they have classes and meetings two days per week at the Soweto Campus of John Wesley College. We really enjoyed meeting these students and learning about the joys and challenges of this first year of ministry, as well as the many differences between their experiences and the experiences of American seminary students.

With ministry students at John Wesley College's Soweto Campus

In the afternoon, we visited the Ikageng-Iteraleng Children’s Ministry in Soweto, where one woman has begun an NGO that now serves 2000 children who have lost (or are losing) parents and other family members to HIV/AIDS in and around Soweto. Some of these children, as young as 10 years old, are the heads of their households, taking care of younger siblings after losing both parents, including cooking, cleaning the house, and caring for siblings who may also have HIV/AIDS, while navigating the troubled waters of education and adolescence. The needs of these children and the ministry of this community are incredibly moving. The community refuses to label these children as orphans, so they remain in their own homes by themselves rather than going into a system of foster care or adopted families. The ministry is able to provide them with basic needs, such as school uniforms and monthly food parcels, as well as peer support groups and genuine love and care. This is a ministry which we will definitely take home with us – the plight of these children will be with us for a long time.

This evening we were able to spend significant time after dinner reflecting on our day as a group – it is a wonderful privilege to have other faithful Christians with which to process all we are seeing and experiencing here. Our experience is greatly enriched by these conversations!

We’re headed to bed early tonight so we will be ready to check out of our Johannesburg hotel in the morning. We’ll visit the Old Fort Prison and the new Constitutional Court before catching an afternoon flight to Cape Town. There is much more to come!