URCSA SYNOD Daily Newsletter of the #URCSAGS October

Transcription

1 URCSA SYNOD Daily Newsletter of the #URCSAGS October DAY THREE Prof Allan Boesak Walking with God: URCSA and Belhar 30 Years Later CELEBRATING 30 YEARS OF

2 Opening Bible Study The bible study was led by Proponent Bettie Wanza, she read from Luke 10: 1-12, her message was emphasising that the harvest is great but the labourers are fe. The leaders of the church must take charge. The harvest is great, God needs us and we must pray. Mrs Bettie Wanza is the first deaf proponent in URCSA who completed her theological training at Deaf Christian Ministry Africa. She indicated that deaf people are neglected by the church and the workers who will spread the gospel message in the South African Church Sign Language are few. She emphasised that the church should give pastoral care and support to deaf people and that URCSA should be inclusive to all people in the church service. Worship

3 WALKING WITH GOD: URCSA AND BELHAR 30 YEARS LATER By Prof Allan Aubrey Boesak Moderator, the leadership of the General Synod of the Uniting Reformed Church, Ecumenical Guests, Sisters and Brothers, I greet you all in the name of Jesus Christ. Thank you for your very kind invitation to this celebration of the Belhar Confession, for your warm hospitality, and for the honour and privilege of having me speak here today on this historic occasion. It was an immense honour to be asked to serve on the team that authored the Confession in 1982, to see Belhar stir critical and self-critical discussion as well as fierce debate, become a call to remorse and repentance, conversion and commitment, living faith and vivid, concrete action, and finally a cause of righteous disruption in the life of the church and the country. It was a tremendous privilege and honour to see the church grow, plant its roots in the firm and fertile soil Belhar provided, and find its identity in the effort to be obedient to Christ in the darkest of days. It was a privilege to be in the Moderator s chair when Belhar was finally adopted in 1986, to be President of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches during the years following when Belhar was discovered and embraced by sister churches in the world-wide Reformed family most recently by the Presbyterian Church in the United States at its General Assembly in June this year. I thank my church for affording me that privilege and I thank God for allowing me to see all this. Between the years 1982 when the Belhar Confession was first conceived and written, and 1986, when it was formally adopted by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, the apartheid regime, in response to the growing, determined, internal resistance and the prophetic witness of the church, declared the first of two states of emergency which lasted until 1989, and it was a devastation. There was blanket impunity for all sections of the police and the army on top of the already existing and daunting array of draconian legislation, over 40,000 activists in detention without trial, 40% of those children under 18; countless banning orders and house arrests; the routine hunting down and torture of activists; political assassinations and almost daily killings of protesters in the confrontations in the streets. Our people were slaughtered. The tears of our mothers soaked the killing fields of apartheid from Soweto to Cape Town, from Port Elizabeth to Durban, from Kimberley to Cradock. The church was persecuted. As synod we met while the streets were running with the blood of our children. There was not a single community in our church that was not touched by this disastrous state of affairs in one way or another. At the same time we were in direct, life-changing contestation with the white Dutch Reformed Church and its unstinting support for apartheid, politically, biblically and theologically, its perverse distortion of the Reformed tradition, its denial of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the generational, systemic, and undeserved political, socio-economic, and material benefits it has drawn from the oppression of our people. In this context the church confessed her belief in Jesus Christ as Lord, and accepted the costly grace of discipleship in a new commitment to unity, reconciliation and justice. It was also a call to a new obedience: not just unity, but the foundationality of it; that we were obligated to give ourselves willingly and joyfully to one another. Not just reconciliation, but its inescapability: the truth that for Christians, reconciliation is not an option among other options, where we weigh the risks, consider the probabilities for success or failure, and then, with cautious optimism feel free to choose the path more feasible and manageable; it is an obligation, a calling, a

4 ministry entrusted to us by God in Jesus Christ. Belhar is a call to justice as at the heart of costly discipleship. That God (the God of Jesus of Nazareth, not the false god that blesses slavery, apartheid, genocide, exclusion, and oppression), is a God of Justice, and that God calls the church (that is, those of us who call upon the name of Jesus and seek to follow him as his disciples), to follow God in this. That the church must therefore stand by all people (not just those from whom we can benefit, those who conform to our prejudices and comfort us in our bigotries) in any form of suffering and need, (no excuses, exceptions, or compromises), which means that the church must witness against any form of injustice, so that justice may roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. That the church as the possession of God, (not the possession of the privileged and powerful, the strong and the loud-mouthed, the racially exclusive, the arrogant and the self-satisfied) should stand where God stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged. In our Synod that day, an elder who prayed after our acceptance of Belhar, prayed that we may become a church committed to walk with God. We might not have known exactly what that walk meant or where it would take us, but today we know a little better: Walking with God is learning to read the heart of God, to hear the voice of God in the cries of the victims of our ferocious and destructive sinfulness, and in so do- ing to understand what Yahweh requires. And that cannot be done but in utter humility before God and before the ones we have hurt and damaged through our arrogance, greed, injustice and love of violence. It is walking with God through Egypt, seeing and knowing both the oppressive, heartless might of the Pharaoh and the pain and suffering of God s people. (Ex.3:7) It is standing in the midst of the slaves, counting the blows, bend- ing under the weight, feeling the pain. It is understanding the power of the Pharaoh and the mercilessness of his slave drivers, and it is to come down to rescue, to liberate, to end the violence and the suffer- ing. Walking humbly with God is walking from the brick-making yards through the palace gates to the throne, speaking truth to pow- er, telling the Pharaoh, Let my people go! It is breaking down the wall of re- sistance between the will of the Pharaoh and the longing of the people, between the power of the Pharaoh and the cry for justice. It is acknowledging the difference between making bricks for the Pharaoh and breaking down the walls of hatred, enmity, and exclusion. Walking with God is resisting the Pharaoh, even as we discover, as in these times, that the Pharaoh looks like us. Walking with God is walking with Jesus, restoring life to the bodies of the abused, making the wounded whole, healing the sick, touching the untouchables and nullifying the power of the Untouchables; empowering women to their rightful place, weeping with those who mourn, releasing the life-giving power of God s love, challenging and confronting the powerful on the doing of justice and mercy, in their temples and their palaces, giving notice that the reign of God has come. Walking with God is to stand where God stands, to fight for whom God fights: the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the despised, the threatened, the excluded. It is to have the courage to know that trepidation before the might of the powerful is overturned by the fear of the Lord and the love of Christ. It is to understand, unequivocally and with a clarity that is both humbling and liberating, that justice is what Yahweh requires. Walking with God is knowing that our souls tremble before God so that our knees do not tremble when we face the powerful and the mighty of this world. Walking humbly with God means being humbled by what we see, by what we are doing to others, by our capacity for harm and destruction in what we are wreaking upon the Earth and all of God s creation. Walking with God is learning to let the Holy Spirit have her way, to let us be astounded by what we can do in God s name, for Jesus is Lord. Between 1982 and 1986, Professor Jaap Durand, our beloved colleague and co-author of the Confession, offered some crucial prophetic, insights that inspired, but also came to haunt the church in ways not many of us

5 had foreseen or imagined. In 1984, Durand said this: A confession dare not engage with mere trivialities. It can only be an extension of the church s ancient confession that Jesus is Lord. This is the guarantee of the continued relevance of the confession For this reason I am convinced that the Confession of Belhar will outlive apartheid and the heresy that led to it and will retain its message. The three core issues at stake here, unity, reconciliation and justice, are close to the heart of the gospel. He went on, a true confession rises above the circumstances of its time. And again, [we] do not simply confess with the immediate situation in mind, but with an eye on the future. Yet again: We cannot yet foresee the consequences of the formulation and acceptance of this confession for the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, if it is indeed ready to accept those consequences for itself, But in the end, for the church it cannot be about concerns about the sympathies it gains or loses, or concerns about the fortunate or less fortunate consequences the confession creates for its continued existence. These concerns are unnecessary, because according to Matthew 10 the confessing church always lives in the shadow of the Cross, and not without the assurance that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. But no one can find comfort in this promise if [we] flee from the cross. Jaap Durand s words remained valid as we became the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa. Now, thirty years later, this denomination has to wrestle with the truth of these challenging words. Thirty years later the issue is not so much the challenge of Belhar for the white Dutch Reformed Church, but its challenge for us and it is not a challenge of vague generalities, it is a challenge specifically raised by the issues at the heart of Belhar, which Durand correctly identified as at the core of the Gospel : unity, reconciliation, and justice. The genius of Belhar is not that it encapsulates the Gospel imperatives unity, reconciliation, justice - other Reformed confessions do that as well, and sometimes very powerfully. But no other confession has put them together in this way, and none with such deliberate intent, with such clear understanding, or with such empowering theological commitment. Between the years 1982 to 1986 the struggle against apartheid had intensified as never before, while at the same time the tensions with those in the Christian community who defended and profited from apartheid became not only more pronounced, but utterly unavoidable. The spirit of Belhar gave rise to the Call for the Day of Prayer for the downfall of the apartheid regime in 1985, the Kairos Document of 1985, and the array of Kairos moments discovered from South Africa to South Korea, from Central and South America to the Philippines and to Europe and the United States. We had no idea what we were able to do in the name of Jesus. If only we remained faithful. Between 1982 and 1986 and thereafter it was the Belhar Confession that inspired us to as a church become directly involved in the struggle for freedom and justice in South Africa, something we have never been able to do before. The Jesus we confessed as Lord in worship in the sanctuary is the Jesus we confessed in the streets of protest and confrontation. Rooted in the Confession and the demands of our faith, I called for the formation of the United Democratic Front, a social movement with clearly stated political goals which became the largest, broadest, non-racial, and nonviolent movement in the history of the struggle in South Africa. I made that call not as a politician, but as a Reformed pastor who, inspired by the Confession of Belhar, had heard John Calvin: We have been redeemed by Christ at so great a price as our redemption cost him, so that we should not enslave ourselves to the wicked desires of men (sic) much less be subject to their impiety therefore, we must obey God rather than human beings.

6 In the years after 1982 the white Dutch Reformed Church had unleashed a fierce assault on the DR Mission Church its pastors, its institutions, its congregations and its leaders. That church used the full arsenal of the power at its disposal: its economic power gained through the generational process of wealth creation by whites through colonization and apartheid, concomitant with generational processes of impoverishment in the black communities; the ideological power it wielded through the presence of its so-called missionaries in our church and their theology; through the church and secular media and the enormous pressure that represented; through the power of oppression, intimidation, and ruthless violence of the apartheid state, which was its own creation. So by 1986, humanly speaking, we saw no sense in, and no desire for unity with the white church or with white people in general. But we had Belhar, and Belhar had understood Calvin: Now since [Christ] has only one body, of which he makes us all partakers, it is necessary that all of us should also be made one body by such participation We shall benefit very much from the sacrament if this thought is impressed and engraved upon our minds: that none of the brothers and sisters can be injured, despised, rejected, abused, or in any kind offended by us, without at the same time injuring, despising, and abusing Christ by the wrongs we do that we cannot love Christ without loving him in the brothers and sisters; that we ought to take the same care of our brothers and sister s bodies as we take care of our own, for they are members of our body; and that, as no part of our body is touched by any feeling of pain which is not spread among all the rest, so we ought not to allow a brother or sister to be affected by any evil, without being touched by with compassion for them So we prayed God s Holy Spirit to help us resist the urgings of hatred and enmity which only She can do, so we reached out to white Dutch Reformed Church, and the whole Christian community and we confessed: The unity of the church of Jesus Christ is therefore both a gift and a command; that through the working of God s Spirit it is a power which binds together but at the same time a reality which must be pursued and sought, one which the people of God must continually be built up to attain... That we are obligated to one another to give ourselves willingly and joyfully to benefit and bless one another. It is for that reason that the way Belhar has been, and is being used as a tool of political expediency to block unity is such a shameful situation. And it is time to end it. By 1986, humanly speaking, we saw no sense in, and had no desire for, reconciliation. But we had Belhar, and Belhar had understood Paul: For the love of Christ urges us on from now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view [we know God] who in Christ was reconciling the world unto God self, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation entrusting the message of reconciliation to us So against our self-righteous defensiveness, we confessed: That by the life-giving Word and Spirit God has conquered the powers of sin and death and therefore also of alienation and hatred, bitterness and enmity; that by the life-giving Word and Spirit God will enable the Church to live in a new obedience which can open up new possibilities of life also in society and the world As a black church, and on behalf of South Africa s oppressed people, we were desperately crying out for justice. We cried out for justice for us, blacks, suffering under apartheid s racist oppression, demanding the dignity God has imaged in us, claiming the equity that comes with justice. But Belhar understood from Isaiah not only that God is a God who loves justice, but that God is a God of indivisible justice. So against our self-absorbed instinct for self-absorbed victimhood, we confessed: We believe that God has revealed Godself as the One who wishes to bring about justice and true peace on earth; that in a world full of injustice and enmity God is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged, and that God calls the church to follow God in this that the church must therefore stand by people in any

7 form of suffering and need, which implies, among other things, that the church must witness against any form of injustice, so that justice may roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream; that the church as the possession of God, should stand where God stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged; that in following Christ the church must witness against all the powerful and privileged who selfishly seek their own interests and thus control and harm others. Therefore, we reject any ideology which would legitimate forms of injustice and any doctrine which is unwilling to resist such an ideology in the name of the Gospel. In those days, God has presented us with a moment that would define us as a church. So in his prophetic intervention in 1984, Jaap Durand drove the point home in yet another question: Is the Dutch Reformed Mission Church prepared to fully face the consequences of its confession, not only in its relationship with the (white) Dutch Reformed Church, but also within itself? That is the question that faces URCSA still today in the questions of unity, reconciliation and justice. In the years of struggle against the evil and heresy of apartheid we would come to understand that question, as the church itself became a site of struggle between those for and against apartheid. The tensions within our denomination stretched to breaking point. But we did not go under. We did not go under because in Belhar we discovered a vital truth about God, about Jesus of Nazareth, about God s Holy Spirit and about us. The discovery of a moment of truth in history is not the result of our intelligence and extraordinary cleverness. It is revelation, the gift of the Holy Spirit. We are not the truth: the truth has found, recovered and reclaimed us. We are not the light: the light illumines and leads us. But in 2008 we were challenged in a new, and fundamental way. Through Belhar we confess that God is a God of justice, and that the church is called to follow God as the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged; that the church is called where God stands, namely with the oppressed and the wronged and against any form of injustice. That means not only racial injustice; it includes social injustice, economic injustice, gender injustice, environmental injustice, injustice done against God s LGBTQI children. This is where Christ is to be found, and this is where the Church should follow him. In the face of Scripture and the Belhar Confession, despite Scripture and the Belhar Confession, we failed to embrace the LGBTQI community as members of the community of Christ. In this we have failed them, and the Gospel, miserably. And until we right this wrong, we shall stand guilty before God. In 2008 I was called a heretic for making this call. I took that stand as one inspired by Belhar and driven by the love of justice for all of God s children, created in God s image, called by God s love, enveloped in God s mercy, blessed by God s Spirit. If I am a heretic still or again today, let it be so. If God calls us to do justice for black people because of the colour of our skin; if we must do justice to the poor because of the greed of the rich; if we must do justice to women, because of the scourge of patriarchy; if we must do justice to those with disabilities because of the lack of compassion of those who are mobile; if we must do justice to the landless because of the arrogance of the powerful; then we must do justice to those in the LGBTQI community because of the endless love of Christ and their dignity and humanity as children of God. And we do that because of who God is and who we become when we love God. Here I stand. I can do no other. For I still believe what we have written down: that God ( again, the God of Jesus of Nazareth, not the false god that blesses slavery, apartheid, genocide and oppression), is a God of Justice, and that God calls the church (that is, those of us who call upon the name of Jesus and seek to follow him as his disciples), to follow God in this that the church must therefore stand by people in any form of suffering and need, (no excuses, exceptions, or compromises) which means that the church must witness against any form of injustice, so that justice may roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream; (And lest we forget what I consider to be some of the most crucial words in the Belhar Confession:) that the church as the possession of God, (not the possession of the privileged and powerful, the strong and the loud-mouthed, the arrogant and the self-satisfied); This is who we are and this is how we speak and act: As the possession of God, not the possession of a racist, or homophobic, or patriarchal bigotry; As the possession of God, not the possession of imperialist greed and hunger for power; As the possession of God, not the possession of baptized phariseeism; As the possession of God, not the possession of fear-filled, blinded people who do not know Jesus, the Light of the world; As the possession of God: the church who knows that no hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword; that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, can separate us from the love of

8 God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. As this church, Belhar says, we should stand where God stands, so that justice can roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream for ALL of us. We are the possession of God, and the prophet Isaiah has seen that long ago: I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations; To open the eyes that are blind, To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. I am the LORD that is my name, my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols. See the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; and before they spring forth, I will tell you of them. Because you are precious in my sight. We are the possession of God, and as the possession of God, we walk with God.

9 Greetings The Evengelical Church In Lesotho also conveyed its greetings to the synod through Rev Nelson Khethang Posholi Greeting from the church of Dippe in Germany to the synod by Rev.D. Trelds and Rev. Stefanie Rieke-Kochscih Evangelical Reformed Church Of Germany conveyed their greetings to the synod through Rev. H Johr (Moderator), and Rev V Hoff The Moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) Rev. Nelis Janse Van Rensburg conveying DRC's greetings to the synod Greetings from the Protestant church of Netherlands by Rev. E. Overeem Greetings from the United Protestant Church in Belgium (UPCB) by Rev. ML Loos Greetings from the Moderator of the Maranatha Reformed Church Of Christ (MRCC) to the synod

10 Token of appreciation The Executive of the General Synod gave a token of appreciation to the Ecumenical partners both locally and international who graced our synod. Elections Rev. DP Carelse is the newly elected Actuarias of the General Synod Prof. Rev. Landman is the newly elected Additional Member of the General Synod Rev. LP Fokase is the newly elected General Synod Additional member Closing Bible Study The evening bible study was led by the Namibian Synod and scripture was from Mark 3: The message was that we all need one another to make our church work. We need to work together for the church and make an impact as a family through our Lord Jesus Christ.