The
Burden of Tradition (3): The Lutherans in down-town Cape Town
Every
time I pass Searle Street on my way to the city centre of Cape Town my heart
sinks, filled with sadness. Here we had a wonderful church, but about 30 years
ago it was sold prematurely under the pretext that the area where it was
situated was rezoned an industrial area and that apartheid had come to stay.
The area had furthermore been declared a white area and black church folk
should not bother to hang on to such property.
Had
we kept this church until today (a cross knave church built in the 1920s with
thick, strong walls, easily holding several hundred people), we could have had
a church in down town Cape Town and we would own a property today worth ten
million Rand or more. The predominantly black Lutheran church (formal name: The
Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa, ELCSA, with roughly
700 000 members divided into seven dioceses in South Africa, Botswana and
Swaziland; there are no white members except a few expatriates) is today
referred to the impoverished Cape Flats on the eastern side of Table Mountain.
Our church does not provide worship for our members in down town Cape Town.
Instead, some of them have opted for the German based, previously and still in
terms of leadership and race an all-white Lutheran church, either in Long
Street (St Martini) or Strand Street (Strand Street Lutheran Church).
My
heart sinks when I pass Searle Street; if I care to cast a glance I would only
see a huge office complex covering the whole block except for the old,
beautiful parsonage, built in Cape Dutch style, now harbouring an executive
office of some kind. It sinks also because of discussions that were held there
already in late 1976, when plans were being formed about a new youth centre for
the church. One idea that was proposed from various quarters was to have the
youth centre right there at Searle Street. It would have been possible to
restore the dilapidated buildings, including the adjacent school into a
functioning place for the training of young people of the church. Even though
our members at that time already had been shifted out to Cape Flats, due to the
almighty Group Areas Act (I recall three families still staying there),
communications from Cape Flats to Cape Town were very good as buses and trains
passed nearby.
Mr
Tore Bergman (who passed away on Ascension Day in Uppsala) came to Cape Town
towards the end of 1976, representing Church of Sweden Mission, also our
employer. We held discussions with the leaders of the church about plans for a
youth centre, which Sweden was prepared to finance, and all seemed to agree
that Searle Street was the right place. Monday came, and the mission secretary
from Uppsala was gone. Soon I would (in two consecutive meetings that dealt
with other issues altogether) to my great surprise hear that Searle Street was
not viable, mainly for reasons already indicated above. There was simply no
faith and no hope in a future at down town Cape Town. The winners were the
whites; they had taken it all. There was nothing I could say, after all I was
just an expatriate, coming to serve the church for a couple of years. My heart
is really filled with sadness while writing this text. It could have been so
different. But the sad story also has a sunny side.
I
accepted the argument that a centre for young people should be near where they
lived and subsequently and I would say very successfully we would in due course
embark on developing a major centre for young people, for leadership courses
and conferences, and for a student hostel in Athlone, today a very well-known centre
in the country and internationally (formal name: Lutheran Youth Centre,
Athlone, telephone +27216966612, individual guests are also welcome at a very
reasonable rate, ten minutes’ drive from the airport).
This
youth centre was opened on 1 Advent in 1980 and has since then served thousands
of people. But in the long run this success story of Athlone does not take away
the fact that we missed out on something that was ours and should have been
kept ours.
At
the heart of the matter is again the burden of tradition. Sermons, at this
time, as I remember them, were agreeable, in the sense of always focusing on
salvation in Christ. But it would have been impossible to say: Christ has
liberated us from all our sins, and he will also liberate us from apartheid
(one day). The last part of the sentence would have been impossible and
therefore at this time there was not yet a clear stand by the church against
apartheid. The kind of theology that the missionaries brought to South Africa
was devoid of social and political critique, completely. The legacy, the
tradition that had become a burden was this: in the South African context the
Lutheran theology brought in by the missionaries prohibiting local Christians
to protest a gross violation of their human rights, a crime against humanity, had
in effect created a slave mentality.
It took quite some time for the newly
independent (1975) church ELCSA to up-root this mentality and to take a stand
against apartheid. In the late 1970s we did not hear much. One should however
note that from early1980s and onwards ELCSA broke away from this legacy and became
very vocal in publicly denouncing apartheid. The Soweto uprising in 1976 and
the ecumenical movement through the SACC (South African Council of Churches)
had had their impact also on our church.
2 comments:
What you write is certainly very important but how do you take up a meaningful discussion with the current church leadership? What are they going to do about a historic mistake that cannot be rectified?
HSAE Rottne
Hi Hans ,
I attended school (The Berlin Mission School)in the precincts of the Lutheran Church from 1957-61.Although a Wesleyan attending the Buitenkant Methodist Church( now district 6 Museum )we had a weekly dose of German gospel in the chapel and now in hindsight I see the trace of the hand of God in my journey to become a christian . I do not know who officiated at the Chapel (a white haired minister) but it it would be interesting to know his name .
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