Archbishop is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Christian Aid. This address was delivered at a recent meeting in the UK.
Walking Together on the
Road
The Church in Times of
Division
Address to Christian Aid
supporting churches
Friends, sisters and brothers
in Christ, thank you. It is a great joy to be with you, and I feel
privileged to be among you as you gather representing the churches
which have supported this work for eighty years.
That's an incredible
achievement, and I make bold to speak on behalf of all of those in
the Global South who have benefitted from your love and caring for so
many decades: Thank
you! In my own
mother tongue, Re a
leboga! Or in two
of the other languages of the continent from which I come, Asante
sana! Ẹ
ṣé!
You have spent the morning
with two difficult subjects: the search for a just peace in the Holy
Land, and the rise of Christian nationalism. We saw the pernicious
effects of Christian nationalism in South Africa, where the assertion
that Afrikaner identity and destiny were divinely ordained was
fuelled by Afrikaner suffering in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902,
and was later exploited to unify Afrikaners, suppress opposition and
construct the system of apartheid after 1948.
As in South Africa, we see in
Israel and Palestine how faith is pressed into the service of
division: land, identity and God’s name bound together so tightly
that the neighbour disappears. As in South Africa, we are asked:
Where is the Church, and whose side is Christ on?
I want to come at that
question by way of a road. The road to Emmaus.
The road away from
Jerusalem
Two disciples are walking away
from Jerusalem, away from the place where their hopes were crucified.
One of them says the saddest words in the Gospels: “We
had hoped.”
South Africa knows that road.
And I must speak honestly about it, because the Church did not only
walk with those who suffered. Too often, the Church built the road
that caused the suffering. Too often, the church struggle against
apartheid and colonialism was in fact a struggle waged not against
the state, but an internal struggle waged within the churches.
The architects of apartheid
specifically promoted what they called “Christelik-nasionale
onderwys”, or Christian National Education, first developed to
oppose the attempts of the British colonial administration to
suppress the Afrikaans language. And alongside it, the Afrikaans
churches developed a theological justification for apartheid. Their
pulpits blessed separation as the will of God. So when we speak today
of Christian nationalism, South Africans do not hear an abstract
threat. We hear an old voice we have heard before.
And it was not only the Dutch
Reformed churches which underpinned oppression. My own Anglican
tradition, and other English-speaking churches, passed fine
resolutions condemning apartheid in synod, and then went home to
segregated congregations, paid black clergy lower stipends than white
clergy, and lived too easily in segregated comfort. We confessed this
at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and we were right to do
so.
But there were also those who
chose a different road. After the World Council of Churches'
Cottesloe Consultation in 1960, Beyers Naudé paid for his conscience
with his standing in his own Dutch Reformed church and was persecuted
and restricted by the apartheid government. I think also of Denis
Hurley, the Catholic archbishop who waged perhaps the longest and
most consistent struggle. And of Frank Chikane and the South African
Council of Churches, not to speak of Desmond Tutu, my mentor and
predecessor. And the signatories to the Kairos Document of 1985,
which named three theologies: a “State theology” that blessed the
oppressor, a “Church theology” that spoke of reconciliation while
avoiding justice, and a prophetic theology that took sides with the
oppressed.
That is my first lesson for
us: neutrality in
the face of injustice is not neutrality. As
Desmond Tutu used to say, “If an elephant has its foot on the tail
of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not
appreciate your neutrality.”
Reconciliation without justice
is not reconciliation, it is sedation.
My second lesson is harder.
After 1994, many of us thought we had arrived. The Church moved from
the margins to the corridors of power, and we grew comfortable, even
quiet. It took the corruption of the years in which greedy
politicians and business captured state contracts, the worst police
massacre of the democratic era at Marikana, and the persistent
inequality of our society to wake us up again. Liberation did not end
the struggle. It began what I call the New
Struggle: for
equality of opportunity, for dignity in daily life.
So division does not end when
the regime changes. The Church must keep walking, or it will quietly
go home to Emmaus and close the door.
The stranger who walks
alongside
Then a stranger joins the two
disciples. Notice what he does first. He does not preach. He asks:
“What are you
discussing as you walk along?”
He lets them tell their story, in their words, with their grief.
That is the beginning of true
solidarity between the churches of the North and the South.
We in South Africa did not
survive apartheid alone. We were accompanied: by the World Council of
Churches, whose Programme to Combat Racism cost it dearly in
reputation and donors; by Anglican partners across the Communion; by
Trevor Huddleston and the anti-apartheid movement here in Britain; by
Christian Aid. Those who walked with us took risks for people they
had never met. We remember them and we give thanks for how they
supported us.
But that is in the past, and
we have to turn to the present, and the future, and I have to name
the challenges that confront us now. I have to name them because
friends can be honest with one another.
Too often, solidarity has
flowed in one direction: money and expertise from North to South,
with the North also holding the microphone. Yet the centre of gravity
of world Christianity has moved. Most Anglicans today live in Africa.
The Church of the global South is not a project to be funded. It is a
partner with gifts to give: resilience, joy, a theology forged under
pressure.
And our Communion structures
are under strain. The Anglican Communion has struggled deeply over
questions of human sexuality and authority, and we have learnt that
“walking together” is easy to say and costly to do. Ecumenical
bodies like the WCC face shrinking resources just as the world needs
a united Christian voice more than ever.
Here the Holy Land teaches us.
When Palestinian Christians wrote their own Kairos
Palestine document
in 2009, they drew on our South African Kairos. They asked the
world’s churches not to speak for
them, but to listen to
them, to come and see. A just peace means dignity, security and
justice for every Palestinian and every Israeli, and it begins when
we let those who suffer tell us their story first.
So my plea: accompany
before you advise. Listen before you lead. And let the South also
accompany the North.
Because Christian nationalism, polarisation and the loneliness of
secular societies are northern wounds, and the South may have
medicine to share.
Hearts burning, bread
broken, the road back
Where do we find the strength
to keep walking together? The Emmaus story gives us three resources.
First, Scripture
read on the road.
“Were not our
hearts burning within us while he opened the Scriptures to us?”
The Bible read together, across our differences, still sets hearts on
fire. The same Scriptures abused to justify apartheid were the ones
that set Desmond Tutu and Beyers Naudé free. We must not surrender
the Bible to those who would use it to divide.
Second, the
table. The
disciples said to a stranger: “Stay
with us.”
Hospitality came before recognition. And Christ was known to them in
the breaking of bread. Christ is recognised in brokenness: in broken
bread, broken communities, broken peoples. Our unity is not
uniformity. It is a shared table where no one is a stranger. In
Southern Africa we call this Ubuntu:
I am because we are. We practise it through Indaba,
sitting together long enough to truly hear one another.
Third, hope
that gets up and goes back.
The disciples got up that same hour, at night, and returned to
Jerusalem, to the very place of danger and death. That is what hope
does. My friend Denise Ackermann defines hope as a form of active
resistance. Not optimism, but the refusal to let despair have the
last word.
This is why I love A
Million Acts of Hope.
Not because one act changes the world, but because a million small
acts of hospitality, courage and truth-telling make a road others can
walk on. A letter to an MP. A shared meal with a refugee family. A
congregation that refuses to let the flag stand above the cross. A
prayer for Gaza and for Israel on the same Sunday.
And let us keep our sense of
humour. Desmond Tutu laughed in the face of apartheid, because he
knew how the story ended. Joy is a form of resistance too.
Closing
Friends, the road to Emmaus
begins in disappointment: “We had hoped.” It ends in mission:
“The Lord has risen indeed!”
Between those two moments,
Christ walks alongside, often unrecognised, in the stranger, the
partner, the one we disagree with.
So may we be churches that do
not walk away. Churches that accompany, that listen, that open the
Scriptures and break bread together. And churches that get up, even
at night, and go back together to the places of pain.
And, to use a saying that
speaks to me with power: Faith
sees further. Justice reaches further still.
God bless you, and God bless
the work of Christian Aid.
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