A Struggle for the Church's Soul

What is happening in South Africa is not just a conflict between church on the one hand and state on the other. There is a conflict within the church between those reactionary forces that continue to seek to domesticate the church and those forces within the church, represented by people such as Desmond and Allan and Frank, who are affirming the radical gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a struggle for the soul of the church.

It is very important to ask, if Desmond and Allan and Frank do not represent the entire church, as P.W. Botha charges, why is it that they are perceived as such a significant danger to the status quo and to the state? I believe P.W. Botha is absolutely right when he says they are a danger to the state--for three reasons.

First, they are articulating a message that is instinctively understood and responded to by the majority of the oppressed people, who make up the majority of the church. They recognize that message to be, in fact, the message of the residual gospel of liberation which has been suppressed for so long within the life of the church. It's the gospel they read about in the New Testament, even if it's not proclaimed within their pulpits.

Second, what we are experiencing within the life of the church today is an organization, a mobilization, of the church of the poor and the oppressed in a way that we've never seen before. For the first time in South Africa, there is an overt and explicit attempt, by recognized church leaders to mobilize the oppressed within the churches to be on the side of the broad liberation struggle.

Third, for the first time in the history of this church, we are seeing a new breed of church leadership emerge. We now have leaders who articulate the values, the aspirations, the hopes and the fears, the determination, and the commitment of the oppressed; who are prepared to act ecumenically and corporately to oppose the state.

The confrontation is between the state and that group within the church who are, in fact, seeking to affirm the radical gospel of Jesus Christ, that gospel which has been covered by layers of piety and all kinds of worldly theology, to the point that, it's hardly recognizable. But the people within the church who are oppressed are beginning to rise up almost instinctively, and certainly passionately, in response to this articulation of the gospel which constitutes the hope of the church.

I believe that the church cannot really confront the state until the church has rediscovered itself. We have to discover what it means to be a church not only in solidarity with the poor but a church of the poor--allowing, enabling, and empowering the poor to take control of the church and to be the church, in terms of giving it identity, giving it program, and giving it direction. That's the challenge facing the churches.

And so it is important for church leaders to march. And we will all march from time to time. But more important is for the church to go into Crossroads, to go into the squatter camps.

If the confrontation between church and state is going to happen, let it happen there. Let the, state move in and try to prevent us from being the church when we are about God's business of uplifting the poor and the oppressed. That is a costly presence.

SOLIDARITY FROM THE REST of the church is very important. When you are sitting in prison, when you are being convinced by your interrogators that you've been forgotten, and then you come out and know that there were a whole lot of Christians both at home and abroad who were doing what they could to support you. that's very important.

But I would want to say to my sisters and my brothers in the United States that first you have to discover what it means to be the church of the poor and the oppressed in your own country. When I look at the socioeconomic and racial divisions in churches in this country, and then I go abroad and I visit your country, I get a strange uneasy feeling that I'm right at home.

I don't think that Christians in the United States or in other parts of the world are really in a position to minister to us until they have dealt with the fundamental issues of racism and economic injustice within their own countries. One of the major reasons why the present regime in South Africa continues to exist is because of the good services rendered to this regime by the United States. The South African regime is what it is because of the resources from the multinationals in your country, which sustain, develop, and get rich off our economy.

Until the churches in your country take on those demonic forces within your country, I don't believe those churches are really getting to grips with the issue of this country. If Christians in your country are going to live with all the comforts and all the prosperities of a Western, capitalist, so-called free-enterprise First World nation that oppresses Third World nations--and at the same time make nice, liberal noises about suffering in South Africa--then I get the impression that they are doing it to ease their own consciences rather than to address the fundamental problem that we have in this country.

What you are witnessing in South Africa is not some sort of strange society or aberration. It is, in fact, a microcosm of what is happening globally. Just as First World nations are wealthy and prosperous as a result of the poverty of Third World nations, in South Africa we have one nation in which the wealth of the whites is a direct consequence of the poverty and oppression of blacks.

We are seeing here, in a very explicit, grotesque, diabolical way, what the world is experiencing in a less obvious, less explicit, and less concentrated way. But that does not make it any less evil in other places.

This is why Christians all around the world need to join together. We need to disturb you; you need to disturb us. In solving your problem, you will help us solve ours. We need to join together globally in transforming the social and economic order.