Current issue—Spring 2010:
Highlights from archives
Dr. Stephen Martin
Public theology: some concluding thoughts
While in South Africa, our team of Christian scholars was exposed to a number of examples of public theology—compelling accounts of how the church should be in the world.
read moreMvume Dandala: a Christian in office
Without question, Mvume Dandala has been one of the most widely respected church leaders in South Africa’s recent past. A presiding bishop of the Methodist Church from 1996 to 2003, and most recently general secretary of the All Africa Conference of Churches, Mr. Dandala is best known outside the church for mediating an end to the violence that broke out in Johannesburg hostels between African National Congress (ANC) supporters and Inkatha supporters over a decade ago.
read moreA think tank for the new South Africa
Once the seat of apartheid South Africa’s Calvinist, intellectual elite, Stellenbosch University is yet another site of social transformation. Its School of Theology is evidence of this. While it once trained pastors for the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), the school now provides theological education to members of the DRC’s former “daughter” or mission churches, linked together under the rubric of “The Uniting Reformed Church of Southern Africa.”
read moreOld bricks, new hope in Johannesburg
Central Methodist and J.L. Zwane churches demonstrate the transforming power of the gospel in how they embrace the outcast. But what of South Africa outside the church? Can we discern God’s claim in so-called “secular space”?
read moreThe AIDS church
J. L. Zwane Church has AIDS.
This Presbyterian congregation runs a series of impressive programs reaching out to members of the Guguletu community striken or affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has reached staggering proportions in South Africa’s townships.
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From “fashionable church” to “den of iniquity”
The place resembled a train station. People were seated on rows of wooden benches, mounds of blankets, with heaps of clothes and bags next to them. Some blankets, spread on the floor, were makeshift beds, taking up the interior of the church.
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