not good enough!” he replied. “You shall go on a five-day silent retreat, and I shall be your leader. You will worship with the community three times a day. I shall give you some reading for reflection. And on the fourth day you will make your confession. There is no talking over meals.” With that he led me to my room.
A week later, suitably chastened by that monastic experience, I arrived in Rome, eager to visit St. Peter’s Basilica for the first time. But the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) was in session and St. Peter’s was closed to visitors. Despite that, I fell in love with the city and, casting a few coins into the Trevi Fountain, vowed to return.
It was time to end my year of travelling abroad, but I don’t think I fully grasped how different a person I was now from the one I had been just a year before.
6
A Confessing Church?
It should be clear to anyone who is familiar with the developments of the church situation in the Third German Reich … that there are more and more parallels between Nazi Germany and present-day South Africa … If you think about all these signs, then it is clear that the time has arrived for a Confessing Church in South Africa.
(Beyers Naudé)11
While still in Chicago, I had a phone call from a visiting South African who introduced himself as Beyers Naudé. His name rang bells. I had briefly met him in Johannesburg once before, and knew him as the DRC minister who had become an outspoken critic of apartheid and the government. On the phone, he told me that he had established an ecumenical institute, one of whose tasks was to provide support for South African theological students with WCC scholarships. After enquiring how I was doing, he invited me to visit him upon my return to South Africa.
Naudé had been a committed member of the Afrikaner Broederbond – the secret society in the vanguard of Afrikaner nationalism – and was destined for high office. At the time of Sharpeville – an event which deeply shocked him – he was a senior minister in his church and a leading figure at the Cottesloe Consultation convened by the WCC in response to the massacre. The subsequent failure of his church to honour the decisions of Cottesloe angered him. This led to his resolve to establish the Christian Institute (CI), even though it meant losing his status in his church. As a former student of Professor Keet in Stellenbosch, Naudé was inspired by the church struggle in Germany, especially the legacy of Bonhoeffer, and would often write about the need for a “Confessing Church” in South Africa in the CI journal, Pro Veritate.
Soon after my arrival in Johannesburg from Rome, I visited the CI’s offices and met Naudé again. He was in his forties, a graceful person interested in what I had done in Chicago (not everyone back home was), and what I was planning to do in my future ministry. I mentioned that I was hoping to take my studies in Bonhoeffer further, and to become involved in the ecumenical struggle against apartheid. He invited me to join the CI, which I did, and to keep in touch. He also asked me to write some articles for Pro Veritate based on my dissertation. I subsequently did this, too.
A few days later Isobel, Stephen and I returned to Durban and were warmly welcomed back into the Sea View congregation. I had kept my promise to return. But what awaited us as we settled back into the manse and returned to the daily routine of ministry? I had much more clarity on how to resume my ministry, although I was aware that the challenge facing me was not going to be easy if I followed path I had set out in my dissertation. There was no denying that we had been changed by our year abroad, and South Africa had become a different country in our absence.
The ANC and the Pan Africanist Party (PAC) had been banned, and in June 1964 Nelson Mandela was found guilty of treason and imprisoned for life. The armed struggle had begun, and most of the ANC and PAC leaders were either in prison or in exile. The significance of this change dawned on me with considerable force when, soon after returning to Durban, I was invited to dinner at the home of one of our American Congregational missionaries, Bob Bergfalk. There I met the newly arrived US consul and two black lawyers, both of whom were members of the ANC. Soon the discussion turned to the armed struggle, and eventually to the question: Will the US government support the armed struggle? The consul’s answer was evasive, but clearly negative.
As I drove home that night through the peaceful streets of Durban’s white suburbia, I knew that we were all in for a rough time. How could I convey this to my congregation? How could I help them overcome the racial prejudices and anxieties that I had described in my dissertation? More broadly, how was I to participate in the emerging Confessing Church struggle about which Naudé was speaking so courageously? One of my deacons told me that I had changed as a result of being in America, and he was not sure he liked it. I could only nod in agreement; it would’ve been surprising if I had stayed the same.
Our daughter, Jeanelle, was born on 5 March 1965, so there was much to keep us busy on the home front. We regularly went to the beach and visited relatives. I did carpentry projects in my workshop, and we often spent Saturday evenings with George and June Booth and their family. George was our church secretary and June a surrogate mother to our children. We also had a close circle of friends outside the congregation; among them were Einar and Inger-Elise Ims, Lutheran missionaries from Norway, who were working in the Indian community in Chatsworth. We also found time for holidays down by the south coast with our friends Duncan and Naomi Davidson. We had known them for a long time, and Duncan was now the Congregational minister in Glenashley, north of Durban.
In June 1965, with Steve and a three-month-old Jeanelle, we drove through southern Natal and the Transkei to the Federal Theological Seminary (FEDSEM), located in Alice near Fort Hare. FEDSEM had only recently been built to train black students for the Anglican, Congregational, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches. It was a pioneering ecumenical initiative, made essential because the government had taken control of Fort Hare. As a result, there was a very uneasy relationship between the two adjacent institutions, and ominous political clouds on the horizon did not bode well for the future. The seminary had an excellent faculty, good library, and the academic standards were high, as was the spirit among the students. I gave a lecture on Social Ethics and addressed many questions about the implications of what I had said for the struggle against apartheid. I was also introduced, in passing, to a young Desmond Tutu for the first time, though he probably doesn’t remember me from back then. He had just returned from studying in London and was teaching at the seminary. On our way home, we had to drive through snow in the Transkei, but a winter in Chicago had prepared us well for this.
Pastoral life continued, but I increasingly felt unchallenged by the daily routine of ministry. I once again considered the possibility of returning to Chicago as Ross Snyder’s teaching assistant and to work on a doctorate; but that was not financially feasible. In any case, we had resolved to stay put in South Africa. So instead, we established a Christian Institute study group, which attracted an interesting range of people, including several Catholic priests who were relishing their post-Vatican II freedom. On one occasion, Naudé visited our congregation and preached at an evening service. He also invited me to become a member of the editorial board of Pro Veritate. This frequently took me to Johannesburg, where I got to know others involved in the work of the CI, including its dynamic Cape Town director, Theo Kotze, a Methodist minister.
In the meantime, I became actively involved in the work of the Natal Council of Churches and got to know Philip Russell, who later became the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town. On several occasions, I attended Faith and Order discussions at the Lutheran Seminary in Maphumulo, Zululand, and at St. Joseph’s Catholic Seminary in Cedara outside Pietermaritzburg. Father Garth Michelson, who taught Theology at St. Joseph’s, became a good friend and was, in my book, a saint. St. Joseph’s considered asking me to teach at the seminary, but Archbishop Hurley did not think a married Protestant could be easily accommodated. It was a nice idea, nonetheless.
In 1966 I was appointed as part-time chaplain at the University of
