Dr. Martin spent most of the 1990s in South Africa, where he witnessed the inauguration of Nelson Mandela and worked on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In June 2009 he revisited the country with a group of Christian scholars and recorded these images of the church.
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.
