Читать книгу I Beg to Differ - Peter Storey - Страница 13

Stumbling into Ministry

Probationer Ministers are Methodism’s apprentice clergy – partly cooked. Probation lasted six years, three at seminary and three inservice. The ministry was exclusively male in those days, and when entering we had to be single, assuring the Conference in the quaintly absurd language of the Church that we had no ‘secular encumbrances’, that is, wives. Probationers were also completely at the mercy of the Conference Stationing Committee and could be sent anywhere in Southern Africa. When Conference met in October, the number of senior students slipping into the Livingstone House chapel for earnest prayer increased. I recall one of them, James Polley, praying aloud, “Anywhere, Lord, anywhere – except Otjiwarongo!” But the Stationing Committee was not without compassion; they appointed me to be near my newly widowed mom and the rest of my probation would be spent in Cape Town – at Bellville for one year and then in Camps Bay and Milnerton.

As I hoisted down my suitcase onto the platform at Bellville railway station, a small man with a big smile strode toward me, hand stretched out in greeting. Rob Raven was one of the lay leaders and he loaded me into his car and took me home to lunch where his spouse Margaret had prepared a meal of welcome. I immediately warmed to this homely couple and their children and would find refuge there many times. After lunch we headed for the church. In 1960, Bellville Methodist Church consisted of a multi-purpose hall utilised during the week as a youth club, Scout hall, group meeting place, badminton court and whatever else came up. On Sundays it was converted for worship by introducing a pulpit and Communion table. The congregation was only ten years old and I was to discover that such communities are often a lot more fun than old established ones.

After inspecting the premises, we went off to get the key to my new digs at 10 Boston Street. A single room served as both bedroom and office. Squeezed into the small space were a bed, wardrobe, dresser, desk and chair. The bathroom was down the passage and I would eat around the corner at the landlady’s place. Other tenants were a newly wed Afrikaans couple and an engineering student who had a back room. He and I soon struck up a friendship over the old MG sports car that he tinkered with and sometimes got to go. Our landlady’s claim to fame was that she had been a Jehovah’s Witness. The JWs don’t give up their own without a fight, so she was something of a celebrity among the Baptists to whom she had defected. She would drop bits of her stock talk, “I was a Jehovah’s Witness,” into table conversation. “When I was a JW,” she said as she dished up our not very appetising supper, “I would have called you a goat because when we knocked on a door and got a hostile response, we would tick the ‘Goat’ box.” To earn ‘Sheep’ grade in her visitation book, people had to offer a warmer welcome. Her spouse was a quiet little man, who only came into his own when saying grace in sonorous High Dutch. For me the unusual thing was that it followed, rather than preceded the meal, which made total sense: depending on how edible the food was, I could opt in or out of thanking God.

Our third destination was a garage to pick up a battered maroon Puch motor scooter, which was to be my official mode of transport. After taking possession I went off somewhere quiet to learn how to ride it.

Although I had spent years just thirteen miles away in Rosebank, I had never visited Bellville. Cape Town’s snootily English Southern Suburbs tended to be divided from the Northern Suburbs by a ‘boerewors curtain’ beyond which Afrikaans and a more workingclass culture dominated. I soon found that my Youth Guild took a dim view of their new minister courting a girl from ‘the other side’ but once Elizabeth trusted me and the Puch enough to cross the curtain on my pillion they got to know her and made an exception.

After church on my second Sunday evening the youth leader named Alfie Schnehage told me that the group had arranged a welcome party at one of their homes. All I had to do was follow their cars, so I nodded and mounted the Puch while they packed into three 1930s-vintage Austin 7s and some other jalopies. It was drizzling, but having ridden the scooter for a few days, and been tested and licensed, I felt no concern; all I had to do was stick behind them. They had other ideas of course, mapping out a diabolical route with so many twists and turns that I was soon hopelessly lost. Things got worse when they veered off across a couple of wet fields, with me hanging on grimly, peering through mud-spattered goggles to make out the faint red of their tail-lights. I realised that this was a test I simply had to pass, so I gripped the handlebars, sliding and praying and skidding my way through – and back onto the paved road. When I finally arrived among the laughing youngsters I was mud from head to toe, but I was now one of them. Some remain firm friends to this day.

I had little training in church administration but Rob Raven and the other lay leaders helped me along. The congregation was used to junior probationers, “not broken in yet,” as ex-serviceman Alec Pawson used to say. They showed wonderful forbearance as I stumbled my way into ministry and into their completely unearned trust. Rough-hewn and straightforward, they were some of the finest people I have known. Their faith was simple – it was about living decent lives, working honestly, doing right by their families and trying to take God seriously. Factory foremen, fitters, train drivers, traffic cops – I found that I could move comfortably among them and enjoy the friendship they readily offered.

The year 1960 was of course one of massive political import in South Africa. It was the year of Harold Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ speech in the South African Parliament, of the rise of Poqo, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), and the anti-pass-book campaigns climaxing in the March 21 Sharpeville massacre. Just nine days after Sharpeville, in Cape Town a 24-year-old Methodist lay preacher and PAC activist named Philip Kgosana led a march of 30 000 men from the township of Langa to Caledon Square police station in the heart of the city. That day Elizabeth was attending the Technical College in the same street that the marchers converged upon and she called me later to share her amazing experience: to get to her train she had to walk through the serried ranks of men besieging the police station and filling the adjoining streets. “I was really scared,” she said, “but the marchers were so disciplined. They stood in silence, and quietly made way for those of us trying to pass through. Not a single man touched me.” I silently thanked God for their dignity and also her courage. Kgosana was deceived by a promise that he and other leaders would be given an interview by FC Erasmus, now Minister of Justice, and on the strength of that he ordered his followers to disband. Amazingly, the 30 000 men left the city as quietly as they had come. The government then struck with lightning speed, declaring a State of Emergency the same day. Hundreds, including Kgosana, were arrested and the ANC and PAC were banned.

Langa and Nyanga townships were cordoned off by the military and some of my navy friends were now camped out with units surrounding the townships. I went to visit them, relying on my clerical collar and the Puch to get me through. It was troubling to see good friends and their men being used in this way. “This is not what I joined the navy for,” confided one sub-lieutenant, unfamiliar pistol on his hip. He was right. There was a sharp awareness in me that – but for the intervention of my calling – I could have been right there with him, sent to crush political protest. I came away beginning to understand that God’s call on the cliffs of Saldanha Bay had rescued me from being on the wrong side of my nation’s darkening history. Arrests continued and by May 18 000 people, including Nelson Mandela and PAC leader Robert Sobukwe, had been detained. South Africa’s slide into a deadly cycle of confrontation, repression, uprising and more repression, was beginning to take shape.

However, for a young probationer serving his first church, all this was tangential to my vocational exploration. Life was a series of ‘firsts’. I was learning to come up with a sermon every week. Preparation was a long, painful business and required discipline, patience and prayer, but I found an excitement in quarrying into a passage of Scripture and extracting its relevance for my people’s lives. Seeing I was experiencing the joys and sorrows of courtship too, my first marriage preparation classes were probably longer on empathy than wisdom. Baptisms – which are God’s wonderful way of declaring God’s love and acceptance even when we don’t know it – were a trial until a learned colleague advised me that I should always take the baby’s thigh in a vice-grip. “They are shocked into silence just long enough,” he said. “Then if they planned to cry it only happens when you hand them back to their parents.” My first home visitations were approached with much trepidation, but I was surprised by the readiness with which people revealed their deep selves to this inexperienced pastor. Even more astounding was that in spite of my newness to the task, they would sometimes tell me that my counsel had helped them.

My first encounter with bereavement would have tested much better pastors than me. Five Bellville men in one family had gone out fishing in a blustery False Bay and their ski-boat had overturned. Three of them, two brothers and a brother-in-law, drowned. They came from a low-income Afrikaans background, and one of them had been linked with our church. When I arrived at their home, his widow sat in shock while people came and went. The next hours taught me much about pastoring grief-stricken people, the most important lesson being that presence trumps pontificating every time. I listened as a solemn dominee stood before this new widow and launched into a pious lecture about how her husband and brothers had gone to be with God, and that it was not for us to question “the Lord’s will”, and more of the clichés unthinking religious people offer at times like these. As for me, I wouldn’t be interested in a God whose ‘will’ included a wholesale family drowning. I watched her stricken face, and when she looked toward me pleadingly, I got up and said, “Enough! That’s not the kind of God we believe in,” and escorted him out. A little while later, another visitor arrived, this time a woman who had a fairly racy reputation around the town. When she entered the room, there were no words; she simply walked across to the young widow, took her in her arms and they wept together for a long time. Then, still saying nothing, she went into the kitchen and began to do the kind of stuff people do in kitchens. Of the two visitors, I knew which one was sent by God. I know that some Christian traditions differ theologically, but I sometimes wonder whether we don’t have quite different Gods.

There were the inevitable bloopers too. Later that year I stood in the parking lot at Maitland Crematorium commiserating with a grieving family. Looking down the long path to the crematorium itself, I saw the undertaker signalling me. Without a second’s thought I said, “Excuse me, I must go and see what’s cooking down there.” It was only after two or three steps that it hit me; sweat burst from my pores and ran down my backbone, but there was nothing I could do, I simply had to keep walking.

Meanwhile Elizabeth and I were planning our marriage for the end of 1960. We were excited and quite undaunted by our shaky economic situation. My monthly stipend was £11.15s, and the insurance company where Elizabeth worked had recently raised her salary to £20 a month. Neither of us had any worldly goods to speak of. With timber scavenged from a Bellville factory I spent my days off fashioning an upholstered headboard and side cabinets for our first bed – my wedding present to her. Hers to me, given in advance for obvious reasons, was a Black & Decker drill/sander to which I could attach a small circular sawblade. It was my first power tool and must have been sufficient for the task because the finished headboard lasted us 42 years before we promoted ourselves to a queen-size bed.

Prime Minister HF Verwoerd had announced a Referendum for October 1960 to determine whether South Africa should become a republic. I recall preaching a vaguely ‘political’ sermon on the Sunday before the vote, reminding the congregation of the importance of “belonging to something bigger than our nation alone,” and the dangers for South Africa’s voteless millions if we cut off ties with the Commonwealth of Nations. Only whites could vote, of course, and 52% of them said Yes to becoming the Republic of South Africa. Afrikaner nationalism had prevailed once more. It was the first time I saw the newlyweds in in our boarding house become animated; they were clearly overjoyed. The ex-servicemen in my congregation felt very differently. It was as if their six years of sacrifice ‘up North’ in WWII had been for naught.

Our wedding was on 31 December 1960. I had told Elizabeth for some time that I would still have to conduct the Watch-Night service39 at Bellville on our wedding night. She later claimed that she had only pretended to believe me. The wedding was in the family church at Rosebank on a bright breezy morning, with a reception in her family’s garden. Tom Hardie’s roses were in bloom with Elizabeth the loveliest rose of them all. The Bellville youth group had offered their most presentable vehicle, an Austin A30, so we could drive off in something more dignified than the Puch and we decamped to the usual good wishes and confetti. Our happy honeymoon at the Hout Bay Hotel and then in Hermanus was enlivened by a mouse in our room on the first night and coming upon a homeless and hurting old man lying on the beach the next day. It took some hours to see to his needs and in later years Elizabeth pointed to that moment as the one when she realised that in marrying me she had married the Church.

Bellville could not house a married minister so we came back from honeymoon, suntanned and happy, to move into a new home. The people of Bellville had done a good job breaking me in, and while they prepared to welcome their next greenhorn I was now given responsibility for Camps Bay and Milnerton. Our tiny house in Camps Bay was attached to the church premises in Farquhar Road, only a couple of hundred yards from what is now one of the most expensive beachfronts in the world. In 1961, however, Camps Bay was a still a sleepy village, not quite aware that a great city lay over Kloof Nek. There was a small shopping centre, some sports fields adjacent to the Rotunda Hotel and a few hundred homes set on the slopes below Table Mountain’s western buttresses known as the Twelve Apostles. Until we arrived, my new congregation had been an autonomous ‘Interdenominational’ church. Having fallen into difficulties, they had voted to join the MCSA and my job was to shepherd them into Methodist ways. I soon found that while the word ‘interdenominational’ sounded admirably inclusive, it was really code for a more fundamentalist-leaning Christianity and they might have been happier with the Baptists than with the theologically liberal and socially conscious MCSA. They also found that there was a world of difference between the autonomy they had enjoyed and the highly organised and integrated Methodist Circuit system. We had inherited a group of conscripts rather than volunteers, and if they were not feeling too comfortable about the change, neither was I.

Milnerton, on the other hand, was an encouraging contrast: the suburb was in its infancy and the Methodist congregation still very new. Sunday services were held in the local pub, with an early morning team airing the place, clearing out the empties and arranging the chairs. Young families were moving into the suburb in numbers and on the days I was there I simply had to watch for removal vans, drop in to welcome them and invite the new arrivals to our Sunday ‘Pub Service’. It was a different era, of course, with most of them keen to have their children in a Sunday School – these days I’m not sure that would be most people’s priority. During my four years there we grew rapidly, requiring two moves, first to the tennis club and then to the primary school hall, by which time plans were afoot to build our own church. Like Camps Bay, many of our new members knew little about Methodist ways, but there the similarity ended. They were wonderfully open to newness and some of my most enjoyable times were spent in discussion groups in people’s homes, turning over all sorts of questions, debating issues of faith and life.

It was during the Camps Bay/Milnerton years that our first two sons, John and Christopher, were born. Elizabeth was a natural when it came to mothering, both before and after birthing the boys. Both pregnancies went off without problems and the boys were born in the Mowbray Maternity Home, each for the princely sum of R6.50.40 The rules had recently changed, allowing expectant fathers to be present during their baby’s birth and I will always be deeply thankful for the experience. I was horrified at the level of pain involved and still recall my feelings of utter impotence, unable to do anything for Elizabeth’s agony except hold her hand. The birth-struggle and first breaths and cries announcing new life were astounding, sacred moments. Far from being the text-book proud father, I felt myself in the presence of the Life-force itself and humbled beyond measure. The moments following – between a heroic mother now at rest and a dad seized by wonder – were indescribable. With our firstborn, John, safely in Elizabeth’s arms I blinked back tears of joy and looked round to thank the doctor, only to find him as tearful as me. All choked up, he said, “It was my first too.” The ‘Mowbray’ was of course a teaching hospital and I breathed a prayer of thanks for the steady hand of Sister Townsend, who had supervised the whole process. Christopher’s turn came only 20 months later in August 1963, and with the same sense of miracle, but Chris didn’t want to wait. On the hectic ride we were stopped for speeding on De Waal Drive, but the ruddy-faced traffic cop quickly paled when he realised what was happening. He became our speedy escort to the hospital and looked much relieved to hand us over to the same doughty sister.

The work at Milnerton continued to expand rapidly, and though I struggled with the conservative-leaning leadership at Camps Bay, that congregation also grew. The growth there, especially among young adults and couples, tended to send my more rigid critics underground but never completely silenced them. I tried my hand at a more public approach and held services a couple of times in the famous Rotunda. Good crowds turned up and I enjoyed engaging with less ‘churched’ people, some of whom decided to join our regular services. Younger members responded to my more open theology and found it refreshing. Elizabeth and I formed some special friendships among them. With occasional bumps in the road, Camps Bay and Milnerton were pleasant and undisturbed places in which to spend our early marriage and learn how to be young parents ourselves.

Then two things happened to change our lives.

The first was my appointment as part-time chaplain to Robben Island Prison, and the second was the decision by my Circuit to invite a controversial Australian evangelist, Alan Walker, to come and preach to the people of Cape Town.

Robben Island came into my life in 1962. At the weekly staff meeting of ministers in the Cape Town Circuit we were told that a new prison was being established there and the church needed to provide chaplaincy. Were there any volunteers? None of us was looking for extra work, but the sailor in me saw a chance to get on the water again, so I put up my hand. That started the formalities to arrange my security clearance for monthly visits. What none of us knew was that Robben Island was destined to become South Africa’s notorious political prison and one of the ugliest symbols of apartheid’s cruelty. The story of my 30-month chaplaincy to the prisoners there is told in Chapter 9, but the almost obscene contrast between dreamy Camps Bay, modern Milnerton and the conditions I found on the Island evoked a deep disconnect. Like the Kilnerton experience of my schooldays, my visits there took me into a separate world – this time a starkly alienating one. It was a wake-up call reminding me that I was ministering in one of the most unequal and unjust societies in the world.

My first meeting with Australian Dr Alan Walker was in September 1963, when he arrived to lead a controversial preaching mission among us. The ministers in our Circuit had read his book The Whole Gospel for the Whole World41 and we had invited him because he was an evangelist with a difference. We were used to American evangelists preaching a pietist message about personal sin while completely ignoring the besetting social sin of our land – apartheid. Walker was different: he was not so much interested in getting people to heaven as seeing God’s kingdom of love and justice established on earth by transformed people. While all of his packed evening services in Sydney ended with a simple altar call, he was also a resounding voice for social justice in his country, a trenchant opponent of the ‘White Australia’ policy and of militarism world-wide. It was said that the first question Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies asked on a Monday morning was, “What did Walker have to say yesterday?” We felt that this man would shake up not only the Methodist Church, which had gone uncomfortably quiet, but the nation itself, and we were soon proved right.

The Alan Walker Mission of 1963 was nothing if not controversial. Even before he arrived, National Party politicians and media were calling for him to be refused entry. He had criticised apartheid from afar and clashed with apartheid propagandists in Australia. On his arrival at Cape Town airport he strode purposely to one side of the barrier separating white and ‘coloured’ welcomers, reaching out to shake coloured hands first. His press interviews were uncompromisingly anti-apartheid. On the special trains we hired to take people to Goodwood Stadium, people ignored the colour bar and the South African Railways encountered integration for the first time. Evening rallies in the stadium attracted about 8 000 people each night and Walker waded into the issues, never failing to attack racism and segregation. Yet, shot through each sermon was a winsome appeal to consider not only the challenge of Jesus’ social ethic, but the intimate offer of new life through God’s forgiveness and acceptance. For me this personal-social balance was Wesleyan theology at its best. On the closing night I stood next to Bert Pfhul, one of Cape Town’s betterknown conservative Methodist lay preachers. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “This man has just preached a political sermon on apartheid and hundreds of people are walking forward to offer their lives to Jesus.”

Our campaign was a joint venture with Pretoria Methodists, so Walker’s mission addressed the two capitals of the nation. The most provocative moments were lunch hours in the Cape Town City Hall and Pretoria’s Church Square, where Walker’s I Challenge the Minister format consisted of a brief, punchy address, followed by questions from the public. Typical of those encounters was when a man shouted, “Who the hell are you to come lecture us? What do you know about South Africa?” and Walker’s sharp riposte: “I don’t know everything about South Africa, but I do know something about the Kingdom of God and there is no apartheid at the gates of heaven, so you shouldn’t have it here.”

For some months I had been involved with Theo Kotze42 in publicity and communication and, with some prescience perhaps, had been tasked with editing a newspaper to promote the Mission. Knowing little except the Rhodeo experience, but keen to have a go, I asked cub reporter Tony Heard to help me. He was a member of my Camps Bay church and did know something about journalism, rising later to be perhaps the best-known editor of the Cape Times. Together with my friend John Gardener, we put together Christian Impact, a successful, if brief, venture. Its main legacy for me was a ‘feel’ for journalism that opened me to later opportunities.

Meanwhile, a conviction was forming in my mind. As I read and heard about Walker’s home church in Sydney I yearned to experience what seemed to be the most effective city church anywhere in the world. Suburban ministry, serving people who looked alike, lived the same comfortable lives and all seemed to visit the same hairdresser, had never truly grabbed me. I preached and pastored as conscientiously as I could but something was missing. On the other hand, the inner city, with its robust pace, its myriad needs, its polyglot populace, and its grit and grime, always stirred me. We had large city churches, of course, but no specially trained city ministers. Our downtown congregations consisted largely of suburbanites who drove into town to hear the ‘big’ preachers and consequently their programmes offered little genuine engagement with the needs and cries of the city. They were suburban churches in the wrong place. By contrast, in the 1960s Sydney’s Central Methodist Mission (CMM) was deeply immersed in the struggles of big-city life and was pioneering new ways of communicating with, and pastoring, mass society. I so wanted to see Walker’s CMM in action that for the only time in my ministry, I initiated a conversation about my future. Securing an interview with Walker in his hotel room, I haltingly spoke of a growing call to city ministry. Was there any hope of spending perhaps a year with the CMM team, testing that call and learning from them? To my surprise he was wide open to the idea and promised to follow it up when he returned to Australia.

During our time in Camps Bay my probation had ended and I had been ordained. The last lap had not been easy. Before my final exams I had woken one morning to find the right side of my face paralysed. I couldn’t close my staring right eye or blink at all and when I tried to speak only the left side of my mouth worked and my words sounded like a gobbling turkey. I had been struck by Bell’s Palsy and it was a devastating blow, especially for someone in a vocation requiring regular public speaking. There is no known cure other than the passage of time, but one of my congregation was determined to act. Jacques Marais was a specialist at Groote Schuur Hospital and within hours he had me there receiving electric massage treatment, repeating this daily for some time. I believe his intervention made the crucial difference and over the next six months some 80% of function was restored. Most importantly, even if I would go through life with a slightly lopsided face, months of word exercises paid off and normal speech returned. The final rituals before Ordination required us to bear witness to our call and undergo an oral examination before the assembled Synod of ministers. Still sounding very turkey-like, I found this to be an ordeal, and was immensely relieved when the Synod voted for me to proceed.

There is something overwhelming about Ordination. It is a moment made holy by its reminders of call and commitment, of love and service, of duty and sacrifice. Stern words are spoken, vows are made, prayers are prayed and hands laid upon your head. You rise from your knees knowing that you have joined a two-millennial-old Order – the ‘Ministry of Word and Sacrament’ – and are wedded to it for the rest of your life. Moments in the service still live powerfully with me: the sense of panic when the congregation replied to the question about our worthiness to be ordained with a full-throated, “They are worthy!” How did they know? If only they knew …! And then, feeling the crushing pressure of seven pairs of hands on my head: this was not a gentle benediction. It was a heavy, heavy transmission of gift and task. I specially missed my dad that day. He had been ordained exactly 30 years previously and his had been a sadly truncated ministry. I knew that he had kept faith with his vows. Would I? In the moment of my Ordination when the Presiding Bishop prayed, “Father, send the Holy Spirit upon Peter …” it was very much as if those pressing their hands upon me were urging a new measure of God into my frail soul.