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. Central Methodist and J. L. Zwane churches were what one might call ecclesial embodiments of public theology; the Constitutional Court was a secular parable of public theology; and the Beyers Naudé Centre was a place of disciplined reflection on public theology. I think each was important in its own way. At the same time, each without the others would represent a distortion.

Without ecclesial embodiments, public theology can become dangerously abstract. Perhaps the best example of this danger is found in the leaflets that I saw scattered on the information tables of some churches—including Anglican churches—I visited. These leaflets listed in point form the features of a “values agenda” for the New South Africa. While one would never want to overlook the urgent need to address the corruption of political leaders, the selfishness promoted by consumer capitalism, and the careless and non-committal sexuality characterizing a “liberated” society, such lists omit the crucial question of how such “moral” people are formed.

One cannot simply choose to be morally upright, as if choosing makes it so. This is the error of liberalism. Morally upright people are formed—and from a Christian perspective they are formed by discipleship, and by having their desires shaped by Word and Sacrament. And yet the formation of disciples can never be simply a means to the end of creating a more moral nation without falling into the folly of idolatry, of forgetting that we live “during the world.”

Without secular parables, the church might find herself in danger of thinking that it is she and not the world that is the object of God’s redemption. And yet without the church, we have no way of “reading” what God is doing in the world. As Stanley Hauerwas says, “That I go to church does not mean I think that Jesus is only to be found there.  It just means that he has promised to show up there in a manner that can help us discern how he shows up in other places.” The practices that discipline our desires “during the world” also provide pictures—in Karl Barth’s well-known phrase “parables of the Kingdom”—that map our situation in the world, but also (if we have ears to hear) point us beyond it.

Finally, without disciplined theological reflection, public theology isolates itself from academic life. Proceeding from a holy disposition (1 Pet. 3:15), public theology gives a reasoned account of the life of the church for the world. But the kind of public theology that I think apt is not the speculative, philosophical description of how to apply  free-floating “values,” but a kind of anthropological “thick description” (as Clifford Geertz writes) of those practices that form citizens of the world to come, who live in amazingly faithful ways in relation to this world. And those practices are available to all of us Christians—yes, even you and me!—who participate in the Liturgy.

And so in baptism we are transitioned from a world of conflicting interests and agendas and enfolded into a people who live in conformity to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. We become that people who share the world’s rejection of Christ, but who also live the hope of God’s ultimate victory of life over death. In thus dying to the world we are liberated to be a people in solidarity with the despised and rejected, as the J. L. Zwane congregation shows. The sharing of our gifts in the Eucharist takes us up into a new economy—God’s economy—such as at Central Methodist where the hungry are fed and the homeless sheltered. Seeing the world refracted through these practices, we participate in a redeemed world that irrupts into this one “like grass through cement.” We become a strange and peculiar people. We become the church.

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. He is known to be a man of integrity and of deep holiness.

But this was in a previous phase of his life. As the political culture of South Africa degenerated into cronyism and corruption, a section of ANC members saw an opportunity to break away from the ruling party to form the Congress of the People (COPE). And they approached Mr. Dandala to lead the party into the most recent election.

For many, this would have been an immediate career-defining move and a high promotion. But not for Mr. Dandala. The request resulted in a time of soul-searching, prayer, and discernment. He had always agreed with Archbishop Desmond Tutu that the place of a pastor was outside partisan politics—at least in a "normal" situation. And Mr. Dandala has always had “a pastor’s heart.” But South Africa was descending into abnormality—at least in terms of its professed democratic vision. So Mr. Dandala asked to be released from his position as pastor, effectively laying aside his clerical collar, in order to bear witness as a politician.

As he spoke to our group, I could hear the struggle in his voice. The questions he faced were stark. How could he, a well-respected bishop, expose himself to abuse as a politician? Would the give-and-take of parliamentary debate and the often-unsavoury nature of partisanship corrupt him? But the alternative, in his view, was to perpetuate the idea that party politics was "unholy"—a significant issue given his Methodist theology. Even this calling must be sanctified. So he agreed—and agreed to suspend his credentials with the church. But he remains a Christian fulfilling what he and his spiritual advisors consider a redeployment by God.

But Mr. Dandala also had a message for the church from his new location. He argued that pastors need to engage in “political education,” shaping members as citizens aware of their responsibilities. They should remain non-partisan, but at the same time be passionately informed about the political process.

Mr. Dandala’s talk raised a number of important issues for our discussion group (and others who joined us), and had us arguing rather loudly—to the point of being asked to “quiet down” as we were disturbing the sleep of our fellows! Here were some of the issues raised:

1. What is the nature of citizenship for Christians? Are Christians citizens of one city (the New Jerusalem)? Or two?

2. If a Christian becomes involved with party politics, what norms should govern their behaviour? Is creation, cross, or resurrection most determinative?

3. How should Christian political office-holders be held accountable to the church? What does it mean when a president who professes to follow Jesus disobeys his bishop (George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq comes to mind)? What would the electorate think of a bishop excommunicating a president?
It’s possible to read Mr. Dandala’s decision as a form of kenosis—renouncing divine attributes as Jesus did—and perhaps even of embracing a form of suffering. And I do think his soul is in danger, given the recent cutthroat practices of South African parliamentarians. But Christians are sometimes called to dangerous and risky service. St. Augustine said that a Christian should not seek office, but neither should he (or she) refuse to serve when called upon. I remain unwilling to make a conclusion—which is probably just as well. But I do commit to keeping the former Bishop Mvume Dandala in my prayers.

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.” But in addition to providing theological education, the faculty retains its identity as a “think tank” for the church. And there’s perhaps no better example of this than the Beyers Naudé Centre, headed by Prof. Nico Koopman.

Beyers Naudé was an Afrikaans pastor, serving the DRC in the 1950s and early 60s, when he encountered the conditions under which black South Africans were living. He spoke out, not just about the complicity of the white church in apartheid, but exposing the way the Afrikaner establishment had wended its way into all aspects of South African society. What resulted was the formation of the Christian Institute: an organisation that openly engaged in dialogue with the emerging Black Consciousness movement, led by Steve Biko, as counter to the all-pervasive ideology of apartheid. The Christian Institute called for the white churches to embrace the aspirations of black South Africans, but especially to repent, materially, of their racism.

Beyers’s was a kenotic move: in the process, he was defrocked, disowned, and eventually “banned”—that notorious practice of forcing “affected” persons into exile within their own country, forbidding the publication of their work, and even the use of their name in public—by the apartheid government. Banned persons were non-persons. As far as “the public” was concerned, they simply did not exist. As Winnie Mandela once said of him, Oom Bey (as he was affectionately known) became “one of us.” Suffering “outside the gate” (Heb. 13:13), he became “black.”

Several of South Africa’s current religious and political leaders were directly involved in the work of the Christian Institute, which was doing “public theology” long before the term became fashionable. And so it’s not surprising that the Naudé Centre at Stellenbosch has “public theology” as its mandate.

In his presentation to our seminar, Koopman told us that the task of public theology is to reflect on “the inherent public nature, character and thrust of Christian faith; the public rationality of Christian faith; and the public implications of Christian faith for politics, economics, environment, civil society, public discussions, debates, opinion-formation, and policy-making.”

As one can imagine, this makes a lot of reflection! It also, arguably, makes a lot of reflection… in the sense that it contrasts with the active embodiment of the Gospel in churches like Central Methodist and J.L. Zwane. One might be tempted to quip that “the kingdom of God is not words but power.” But that would be too easy. There’s an important need to interpret the significance of embodied action, as well as to “read” the theological significance of the Constitutional Court and other (nation) building sites.

And this is the sort of interpretive work the centre does. But it also extends the reach of the Gospel into the language of policy-making and criticizing, providing resources for initiatives such as the Alternative Budget Process—which forms a “people’s budget” in consultation with progressive economists, churches, and labour unions. The centre also coordinates dialogues about development with  its international partners—again something that Naudé fostered during the 1960s and the 1970s.

My own interest in the centre (where I‘ll be doing my sabbatical research in 2010) is in the “Congregations and public life” focus. Here the public significance of ecclesial practices (Eucharist, baptism, polity, and so forth) is fruitfully explored. In my own research I hope to look more at how in academic public theology, the “public” is constructed by a set of political elites, or defined within a static constitution as a “structure” of society. If this is the case, the church (and theology) in order to be considered “public” must play by the rules of such elites. But if there’s something that the above examples teach us, it’s that “publics” are constituted, contested, and sustained or transformed by ordinary people sharing their lives.

The fact that all this  rich and diverse work can now be explored within the former elite corridors of Stellenbosch University signals an important change in South Africa. Of course, the name of Beyers Naudé is no longer “black” in the sense Mrs. Mandela used it in the 1980s. Nor does the centre have the marginal identity the Christian Institute did. Yet its work remains in prophetic continuity with the man for whom it is named. As Naudé called the church to conform to its professed, baptismal vision, so does the centre call the New South Africa to realize its promise of a better life for all.

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”?

Apartheid-era South Africa was a place of homogeneous conformity, with geographical space tied in to cultural representation. In the new South Africa, however, the tools of oppression—including Christian symbols and ideas—are used to construct what might be called “liberating polymorphisms.” So there’s something uniquely South African about the aesthetic of many public sites here, in which the materials of the old are used to construct the new.

Take the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg. When the justices discussed the site for the new court in the mid-1990s, they decided on the old Braamfontein jail, where Nelson Mandela and other activists had been incarcerated.

Rather than levelling the site and creating the new by erasing the old, the Constitutional Court combines African traditional themes with the relics of past suffering. The foyer contains a large wall built from bricks of the old prison—including a concrete slab displaying the graffiti of the past. Older traditions are also invoked, as with the foyer’s tree trunk seats that refer to the ancient African tradition of mediating disputes while sitting on stumps under a tree. Further inside, the courtroom is decorated with cowhide, representing the significance of cattle in African traditional society. A large South African flag made of thousands of tiny beads stands to the right of the justices’ seats. To the left is a window, about half a metre high, but extending for the length of the wall. The justices can see only the feet of passers by through that window, with no idea of race, class, or gender.

Perhaps the most moving piece of art in the court  is Judith Mason’s triptych, “The man who sang and the woman who kept silent.” Inspired by testimony from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mason’s work  is centred around a complete dress made of blue plastic bags. It recalls an anti-apartheid activist who was captured, stripped naked, tortured, and then marched out to a field to be executed. As she walked, she picked up a discarded shopping back and used it to cover her private parts. When she knelt over her grave, according to the testimony of her executioner, she asked to be permitted to sing the liberation anthem “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.” She was then shot in the back of the head and buried. When the commission recovered her remains, the plastic bag was still wrapped around her pelvis.

The seeming hodge-podge aesthetic of the court is visible in the many “informal settlements” that dot the South African landscape—corrugated metal and cardboard shacks assembled on the outskirts and backyards of townships. Here, the very poor take the things cast off by the well-heeled, and use those materials to build dwellings. Old sheets of advertising become colourful wallpaper. Bits of wire and discarded Coke cans are twisted into intricate sculptures which can be found for sale at the side of South Africa’s highways—craftwork that is novel to the tourist, but life-sustaining to its maker. While the “briocoleur” is fashionable intellectually in the West (or at least was), bricolage is a matter of survival in the south.

In his book, A Theology of Public Life, Charles Mathewes reminds us that we live “during the world”—that time from the ascension of Christ to his second coming. During the world, our lives are constituted by anticipatory waiting. The temptation, however, is either to fall into cynicism on the one hand, or to prematurely announce the closure of history on the other. The former temptation is that of conservative reactionary movements; the latter of liberal utopianism. The fact that South Africa decided not to start anew, erasing the past, is significant in this regard. Think of that utopian project called the United States, which sought to erase the history already present in the land, to clear space, to erect a new res publica. Or think of revolutionary France, which sought not to erase space, but time, starting its republic at the year one.

Taking a lesson from the 19th century writer Ernest Renan, who once said that nations were founded on forgetting, South Africa has chosen to place memory front and centre. Its form of nation-building is to use and reuse the material and symbolic resources of the old, reminding its citizens that they still live in media res. “During the world,” history is a site of contestation, deconstruction, and reconstruction. Yet we also see signs here of a longing for a true “new heavens and new earth” (Rev. 21:1), in which our relations are governed by love, and our lives stretch forth to the God who fills all things. We use the sometimes cast-off materials of the old to stretch toward a new which we will never reach on our own, but which we believe will come to us as a gift. As long as South Africa remains in media res there is hope.

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. Guguletu itself has an HIV-positive rate of 29 percent. But J. L. Zwane is not interested in statistics; it is too busy providing refuge for suffering bodies.

Every Sunday during worship there is an AIDS presentation, where a member of the church addresses the congregation. As Mandisa approached the platform on the Sunday our group visited, the congregation sang, as only an African congregation can sing, “Never, never give up.” The same words are embossed on a wall of the sanctuary.

Diagnosed in 2001, Mandisa “didn’t expect to live three years, much less eight.” Despised and rejected by her family members, she came in fear and trembling to “the AIDS church” (as J. L. Zwane is popularly, if not notoriously, known). There she received a warm welcome, medical care, and support from one of the groups established for that purpose. The antiretrovitrals she’s taking allow her and her three children (all HIV-negative, praise God!) to live relatively normal lives.

AIDS remains a silent killer, but the stigma associated with it is nearly as destructive as the disease itself. According to J. L. Zwane’s minister, the Rev. Dr. Spiwo Xapile (who himself has lost five family members to the disease), pastors who dare talk about the issue run the risk of losing their jobs. As South African Council of Churches President Tinyiko Maluleke said to us later, AIDS denialism is the reason the disease is so “successful.” Denialism is not simply former President Thabo Mbeki claiming that the link between HIV and AIDS is not proven. Denialism is everybody (well-meaning liberals included) who want “to help those people who are suffering with AIDS.” AIDS thus remains someone else’s problem. And the basic problem with this, actually, is ecclesiological. I’ll return to this point.

The J. L. Zwane Centre has a number of programs that promote responsible behaviour, and take care of those affected by the disease. Each Sunday, public health volunteers come to the church and offer a clinic for those who cannot afford health care (which, with an unemployment rate of 70 percent, is the vast majority of Guguletu’s population). The church also supports grassroots initiatives, including the work ofPriscilla, an elderly woman who has opened her small home to 12 —soon to be 15—AIDS orphans. Another woman, Nancy, who herself has a 16-year-old severely handicapped daughter, is taking care of 12 abandoned children who are physically and developmentally challenged.

The public support structures are simply inadequate in Guguletu to meet these kinds of needs. So the J. L. Zwane church has organized itself into zones. Members in each track the needs of their community, and initiatives like Priscilla’s and Nancy’s. A network thus extends through the body of Christ, linking such small spaces where the kingdom of God has taken root.

We ought not romanticize—despite this good work, the challenge remains enormous. The Rev. Xapile put it baldly during one of our discussions: “we are dying.” Not they, but we. Here I return to the ecclesiological problem: AIDS affects the church precisely as Christ’s suffering body. “By his wounds, we are healed,” said Isaiah (53:5). And so as the church suffers with those bearing the social, as well as the physical, effects of the disease. It imparts the healing of Jesus Christ—one face, one body at a time.

Mark’s gospel tells the story of an unnamed women who had been suffering from “an issue of blood” for 12 years (Mark 5:25-34). She came, incognito, to Jesus—pressing her way through the crowd, hoping to touch the hem of his garment.

Contact with the woman would have made Jesus ritually unclean. However,  the real miracle is not that the woman’s uncleanness is passed to him. His healing power, instead, flows from him to her. This story takes on new significance in the context of the “uncleanness” of HIV/AIDS. The unnamed come fearfully but courageously to “the AIDS church.” But rather than experiencing condemnation by the pure, they participate in the healing of Jesus Christ.

The lesson of J. L. Zwane Church is that the body of Jesus Christ has AIDS. We who are in communion with J. L. Zwane—which means all Christians who share the Eucharist—also have AIDS.

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. Inside the chapel, more people were lying on the floor. Even the pulpit was occupied.

So begins an account of the “once fashionable” Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg, published in the Johannesburg Star. Our group visited this “den of iniquity” (as the reporter went on to call it) on June 4, and were privileged to be addressed by Bishop Paul Verryn, whose commitment to the gospel has transformed this church from respectability to notoriety, giving refuge to 3,200 mostly Zimbabweans fleeing the regime of President Robert Mugabe. In so doing, he has brought the principalities and powers to bear on this historic church in Johannesburg’s Central Business District.

As our group entered the building, we immediately realized this was no ordinary church. Informal traders lined the paths leading to the entrance, while inside the cries of infants could be heard throughout. The window awning was covered in drying laundry, and as we sat in the sanctuary the sight of clothes flapping in the breeze silhouetted against the stained glass conveying stories from the life of Jesus. No ordinary church indeed. Central Methodist is probably the only church in the world that has resident representatives of Medicins Sans Frontiers.

I’d known Verryn only by reputation, though I’d had strong memories of his testimony before the TRC in the “Mandela United Football Club” hearings back in 1997. There he spoke tearfully of his inability to protect 13-year-old Stompie Sepei—in whose murder Winnie Mandela was implicated. Verryn had been pastor to the Mandelas in Soweto at a time when whites were as forbidden to live in that township as blacks were from living in white Johannesburg. His credentials as an anti-apartheid icon were even then incontestable: he officiated at activists’ funerals during his first charge in the highly politicized Eastern Cape, and served as a pastor in the hotbed of Soweto during the height of the liberation struggle. The poor had never been pictures to Verryn, so opening the doors of Central Methodist is an action in continuity with his life story.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. With thousands sleeping in such close promixity, and fearing for their lives outside the church, it wasn’t surprising to hear that every conceivable social problem happens in this building.  Indeed, the residents of Central Methodist represent a microcosm of humanity-in-exile. Rules have been formulated to facilitate peaceable living: no drinking (two alcohol-related murders have occurred), smoking, fighting, stealing—and no sex outside of marriage. These don’t represent an arbitrary moral code, but the minimal conditions under which conflict and violence can be curbed.

Every evening after curfew, the church doors are closed and an unusual worship meeting takes place. Announcements concerning employment opportunities are made and other matters concerning the life of the community are addressed. Once a week, this meeting takes the form of a service of healing. The most recent of these featured an explosion of energy as dancers dramatizing the pain of the AIDS pandemic encircled the communion table—as Verryn told us, the exact place where AIDS should be addressed. Part of the healing of this ecumenical, “African orthodox” church, according to a community leader named Ambrose, is the social networking in which displaced people are incorporated into a body social.

In the increasingly xenophobic environment of South Africa, Central Methodist’s actions of radical hospitality and countercultural welcome earn the ire of police, media, and the public. This doesn’t faze Verryn, who noted that the church should discriminate against the well-off, and consequently “ought always to be arguing with lawyers.” Neither do the numerous death threats he receives daunt him. Verryn is simply engaged in performing the gospel story, remapping and remaking space to welcome and include vulnerable outsiders. A “round peg” no longer “fitting into” the “square hole” role given it by society, the church has become radically visible—and vulnerable. (The day after we left, a municipal truck drove past the throng waiting to get into the church, spraying them with sewer water.) But this only reminds us of what the church is called, in every locality, to be.

As we filed out of Central Methodist Church, the sun had gone down, and we were meeting throngs of people moving toward the church. Their day’s work (or day’s looking for work) done, they were preparing to settle in for the long night. But in that night, the light of Jesus Christ was shining. And they were returning, in the best—temporary—sense of the word, home.