Walking Together on the Road - The Church in Times of Division

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.

* * * * *