Lutherans Celebrating in Saldanha

Saldanha Church Celebration
Sunday 24 October a new Lutheran church was dedicated in Saldanha on the west coast 130 km north of Cape Town. It was also the farewell service of Ulf Cyriacs from the Hermannsburg Mission in Germany. Saldanha is basically a port for shipping out steel via railway from inland South Africa, not very old. The town is very small and we could only identify one restaurant and one B&B. The church is placed in the middle of a not so well off township by the name Diazville, over the hills and you cannot see the sea from there, but you can smell it. The church has a wonderful architecture, wider than long and with an impressive nave that can seat quite a number of people, be they servers and acolytes or choir. About 500 people had congregated and many had come from other parts of the Western Cape Circuit, as far away as Laingsburg; not many in comparison with some Charismatic churches these days. Let me give a few aspects of this important day in the life of the Lutheran church and say something about the blessing that this day brought with it, but also about what was sorely lacking.
It was a liturgy to remember. Most of it was taken from the African Imisa, and the choir from Eureka congregation in Elsies River was instrumental in bringing in the whole congregation in the singing of the liturgy. Very young girls and a few boys acted as servers and acolytes. No less than eight other choirs from other Lutheran congregations in the Western Cape had come to contribute. Bishop Bowles’ dedication ceremony was very touching, very personal and relaxed and joyful, and so was the whole service in many ways. About ten clergy were able to join the bishop around the new altar. One can say that Lutherans know how to celebrate. When they come together it is often with that particular zeal that says that “it is good to be together” and that “God has done marvellous things for us”. The fact that there is much more of an emphasis on the liturgy nowadays and not just on very long sermons has led to a deepening of the sense of togetherness and has anchored that celebratory quality that already has been there for long. One is also touched by the almost extreme faithfulness with which Lutherans stick together and the unwillingness to join other churches or even to co-operate too closely with them. This is strength but also weakness.
The very being together a day like this is indeed a blessing and you will never forget a Sunday like this. It makes a mark in your life, a kind of a dent in the otherwise striking ordinariness of everyday life. And there is indeed a need for this kind of celebration, getting away from a life that is too much filled with strife and uncertainties. And yet, this very blessing is also, not a curse, but a kind of undermining of the crucial sense of mission that we also are called to have. You start off early in the Sunday morning and a service that has started rather punctually at 9h00 a.m., is still ongoing at lunchtime, i.e. 13h00; in addition there must be time for speeches by various representatives from near and far and there were two occasions in one: a farewell of the pastor and the opening of this wonderful church. This means that we were in effect stuck in this building for more than five hours, before there was any mention of lunch. The ladies who had prepared it were not respected properly and the food could not be kept warm for so long.
To me a long service is OK but there also has to be a driving force in what is happening and one should try to stick to the set-up plan. I can see that for many and to most, a day like this is a wonderful blessing, a day to remember, but I on the other hand am lacking two things, sorely. The first is the dimension of evangelisation. We are not there for our own sake only; we are there for the sake of others, and how easily this is forgotten, and what is worse, a church that has forgotten this has not got so much longer to live. The second thing that was just as sorely missing was a necessary sense of social justice and a prophetic voice of the church to those in power, to society at large, to the world. Only if these two things are held up high will we have a church that is worthy of celebration, such as the one in Saldanha on 24 October 2010.