When the elephant in the room is a bicycle

We have LOADS of (good) news to catch you up on, so we’ll do that soon. But for now, here’s a story with a sting in the tale about one of the big issues that faces Christians in this country … and anyone who has ever been wronged, or wronged someone else. 

There once was a man. Think of a name for him. Go on…

He lived in a poor community in South Africa. He lived with his extended family – partner, children, sister and 2 brothers. In a small shack somewhere. He used his bicycle to get to his job as a car guard in a shopping mall in one of the nice parts of the city. One day he came home from work later than usual. Only an hour so, nothing to worry about. But he was so tired (it was after midnight after all), that he forgot to properly secure the door to his shack when he put the bicycle away inside.

In the middle of the night he woke up. He wasn’t sure why. He heard nothing unusual. Just the township night. So he went back to sleep. It was only when he woke up sharp at 5:15 a.m. as every other morning that he discovered what had woken him so suddenly. The door to his shack was ajar. The bike was gone. That was what had woken him. So he got to work late. Which meant he came home early, his job gone. Which meant he couldn’t buy the food his extended family relied on him for. Which meant …. well he kept looking for another job but they’re not easy to come by. Maybe he begged. Maybe he waited by the roadside with the other men every morning hoping for causal labour. Maybe he got ill waiting there in the early morning cold and the torrential winter rains. Maybe he picked another of the desperately few options open to him and out of desperation turned to crime. Maybe…  You decide.

There was another man. Think of a name for him. He was the one who stole the bicycle. He was desperate too. But his motives don’t matter for now. That’s for another day.  A few months later he realised what he’d done. He was in the church where he goes every Sunday. In the midst of the high ceremony of bells and smells, God speaks to him and he’s convicted of his sin of stealing the bicycle. So he leaves the church service, goes to the shack he took the bicycle from, and finds the owner. I’m the one who took it, he said. I realise now what I did was wrong. I’m very sorry. Please forgive me. I want to be reconciled to you so we can be brothers in Christ again.

The former owner of the bike is surprised. He appreciates the courage of the apology. But he’s also angry. You see losing the bike meant he lost his job. Losing the job meant … well, you know. So he told the man – thanks, but … where’s my bike?

Don’t let’s talk about that, comes the reply. That will get in the way of us getting reconciled. Forgive me, and we’ll move on.

Well, the first man says, I can’t move on. Because, you see, when you took my bike, this is what happened….

And he tells him. Everything. Except he can’t, because the ripples of a simple bike theft go on and on in ways we can scarcely comprehend. What he needs isn’t reconciliation. It’s called restitution.

There’s an elephant still lingering in many South African living rooms, churches, poorer communities and nice suburbs. It’s effects linger from years ago. People displaced from communities they knew and loved way back when … and still love. Their old family homes now holiday homes for the better off – now the 2nd generation of better off. Or maybe it’s the death of a loved one years ago from health care she couldn’t afford. Which lead to food not making it to the table. Which lead to hunger, health problems and desperation. Which lead to… well, you decide.

These are painful issues – for everybody. They’re the usually unacknowledged elephant in the room (or, in the image of our story, the bicycle) that lurk behind so many conversations and decisions and actions…on a national, city-wide, community, family and personal level. People understandably want to forgive and move on.

But how do you?

How do you get to restitution?

You decide.

This is Dave’s own expressing of a metaphor developed by others to help explore the issue of restitution in South Africa. To read about how our good friends at The Warehouse are tackling this, have a read of their latest newsletter by clicking here. 

Turning Tides

When we made the decision to come and serve at St Peter’s, we knew that it wasn’t likely to be a very easy process. Not just the whole moving abroad, away from the family thing; but also that the job itself would not necessarily be an easy one. St Peter’s is a traditional church, with a traditional style of worship that has grown used to doing things one way for a long time. Dave’s predecessor had been in post for over 20 years, and retired at the age of 86. With this information, we knew that it wouldn’t be easy for any new Rector coming in – not to mention a (relatively!) young one from another country.

So there have been some significant challenges in the first year and a half here. Some of them have been very stressful and painful. Change, even gentle change, is never easy. That’s not a criticism of anybody – change  of any sorts leads to a sort of grieving process, which different people need to take their own pace. Add to this the fact that any time a new minister comes to a church, there will inevitably be some for whom this means they want to find a new church.

The tide is, though, turning. We had our annual church  meeting in May, just before we flew to the UK for Dave’s Mum’s funeral. It was an inspiring and positive occasion. The new church council was elected; it now consists of some of the same people who have been on the council for a long time previously, some new to the council who have been in the church for a few years and some who are new to the church in the last year or so. This combination is really positive – it’s a sign that new life is taking root. Financial giving is on the up; and the council has already agreed to some new things like the tutoring project I referred to in the previous post. We’re going to start a Saturday morning meeting to go deeper in prayer and community together.  We even have a new church website – click here! The council also addressed a few things regarding Dave’s pay and some issues around the house we’re living in  – more of which in another post.

We just celebrated St. Peter’s Day the Sunday before last. It was our 157th birthday! We were very blessed to welcome Archbishop Thabo Makgoba and his wife ? who came to celebrate with us – that’s where the photo is from at the top of this post. It was a wonderful service and very significant day in the life of St. Peter’s.

Now none of these things by themselves are guaranteed indicators of things moving in the right direction. Together, though, they hint at a change in the spiritual atmosphere around the place. This was confirmed when I spoke to our cleaner the other day. She wouldn’t call herself a Christian, and I was speaking to her about the new council. She said she knew something had changed – she used to come into the building to do her work and feel tense, wanting to leave as soon as she could. Now she doesn’t want to leave when she’s finished.

When a tutorial isn’t just a tutorial

Sorry again for the the lack of content. As some of you will know, Dave’s mother was taken ill in February and died in May. So between work and two trips to see Dave’s family in the last 3 months, our lives have been pretty full. We’ll post some news in the near future, but for now here’s an inspiring story of something that happened just the other day…

Some days are better than others. Some days are run of the mill. Some days are busy. Some are boring. Others you just want to end. On Tuesday this week, though, I (Dave) had one of those rare and special encounters which will live long in the memory.

For a few months now we’ve been supporting The Warehouse in a  weekly project offering tutoring to school children on any subject they need help with. It’s been a real success, with as many as 30 children dropping in each time for help in anything from English to Physics to Afrikaans. This week I offered my services for the first time. It won’t be the last.  I was there to offer support with the subject in which I gained my first degree (English). A 16 year-old from Khayelitsha township, who goes to a school not far from us and during the week lives in a home for girls who need extra support, was pointed in my direction.

Her name is Serena. It quickly became obvious that she is intelligent, articulate and highly motivated. We barely touched on English, talking instead about her Geography lessons and the factors behind large-scale population movements. She told me about tectonic plates, which she’d researched for her own interest in her lunch-break that day. Then we moved on to history. She wanted a bit of background on the American Civil Rights movement and the differing tactics of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King (I have to admit, neither of these subjects are high in my knowledge base, but I think we got somewhere). We talked about Nazi Germany and anti-Semitism, something about which I am more confident.

Then we shifted, fairly naturally, to apartheid-era South Africa. She knew some of the history already – not least from her parents – but she had one specific question. She remembered her teacher saying something about riots in Soweto and showing the class a photo of a parent and child. She wanted to know what it was about. This was what will remain unforgettable to me. With the film Cry Freedom fresh in my mind from watching it over Sunday lunch, I told her how, in the mid-1970s, the apartheid regime imposed on all schools that subjects should be taught primarily in the Afrikaans language. For the black school children this was not their first language, or even their second. The anger at being forced to be taught in a language not their own eventually reached a tipping point, and students left classes en-masse to protest. You can read a fuller account of how events developed and tumbled out of control, leaving a still disputed number of people killed, by clicking here or here (this includes the photo to which I think she was referring).  The government claimed 23 school students died; other figures suggest 200-600. Thousands were injured: men, women and children; most of them injured in the back, wounds received whilst running away.

So I attempted to do justice to that story to an increasingly open-mouthed and disbelieving 16 year-old girl. I tried to tell her how people her age died, protesting to have school classes in their own languages. She was gobsmacked, I was watery-eyed.

Serena was born in 1994, the year of South Africa’s first democratic election; Nelson Mandela was elected President of a country thought then to stand on the brink of a civil war. Many people really believed the country would be ripped apart by hatred, revenge and anger.

Serena knows that didn’t happen. There are many problems still to overcome – she described her parents’ tin shack to me. Many go without what they shouldn’t have to go without. She, though, demonstrates two things to me. First, we must never stop telling the stories that shape us. I talked about this with our friend and fellow tutor Heidi, and Heidi insisted that Serena must know what has led her and her family to where they now are; that it is the product of an evil system, not their own failing. This is not unforgiveness – that is another issue entirely. You can’t, though, know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve come from. Second, Serena demonstrates hope. She, like many of her age anywhere in the world, wants to learn and grow. She wants to be part of something new. Born the same year as the new South Africa, she already is.

What Bev’s up to next week …

I thought this would be a good time to give you a quick update on something I’m doing next week.

On Saturday I fly to Johannesburg for the week to be part of the annual Social Enterprise World Forum. This annual conference, now in it’s fourth year, is a gathering of all of the key practitioners, academics and policy makers in the social enterprise field from around the world. And this year it’s coming to Johannesburg!

I’ve been asked to speak as part of a panel on Measuring Social Impact on the last day of the conference along with some of the top experts from the US, Australia and South Africa.

The conference is being held at the University of Johannesberg. Just before the conference I’ll be joining a study tour of social enterprises in the Royal Bafokeng Nation, a region to the North West of Johannesberg. Then after the conference I’ll be staying one more day to visit Vukani-Ubuntu, which is the largest trainer of black jewellers in South Africa and Khulisa Crime Prevention project, which works to reduce crime in the area through community developments work – both social enterprises in Pretoria.

How You Can Help …

Please pray for me as I prepare for, and go on this trip. This is the biggest event I’ve spoken at – I did a number of regional and national conferences in the UK and US – but never anything on this scale! It’s exciting and I’m looking forward to it – but a bit daunting as well!

It’s been well over a year since I’ve been fully part of the whole Social Enterprise sector both in terms of the sector in the UK, but also on an international level. It’ll be weird jumping back in. Some of the same people will be there but I’ll have some catching up to do!

Pray for the practicalities of my trip. I don’t know Johannesberg at all and won’t have my own transport to get around. I’ll be staying on campus which will make it easier.

As you may not know, my Phd which I was just starting, has fallen through (my supervisor decided to move to Moscow, so I’m having to start the whole process again!). Please pray for opportunities and inspiration on this trip!

We are funding this ourselves, in faith. We and the others who prayed with us about this trip felt it was right for me to go even though how we were going to pay for it wasn’t obvious. You know how these things work!

If you feel you would like to support me financially the breakdown of the costs are below:

• Conference Fees (I get a 50% discount as a speaker) R1850 / £168
• Flights R1400 / £127
• Accommodation R1800 / £164
• Study Tour to the Royal Bafokeng Nation R2600 / £236
• Study Tour to Vukani-Ubuntu & Khulisa Crime Prevention Project R695 / £63

Thank you for travelling this journey with me … I’ll let you know how it goes!

love

Bev

One year on …

On the 16th of February we will be celebrating not only Bev’s 38th birthday, but also one year since we got a plane and flew out to Cape Town! This year has gone so quickly it really doesn’t feel like we been out here for 12 months already.

Although we arrived mid-February Dave didn’t start at St. Peter’s until mid-March and we didn’t get to move into the house until mid-April. We spent the first two months staying with newly-made friends – it was a lovely time. It felt like a real blessing to spend such a large amount of time with people getting to know them – we ended up with some very good friends very quickly because of it.

We have settled into Cape Town well. It is a beautiful place to be and the people are incredibly friendly. There is lots of wildlife and we’ve seen penguins, whales, sharks, seals, dolphins, baboons, tortoises, elephants, giraffes, rhinos, buffalo, hippos and lions since we’ve been here! We’re also enjoying the beaches and the wine farms – very beautiful and peaceful settings with nice wine to taste.

We’ve also settled well into life at St. Peter’s church. There are some wonderful Godly people who are part of the congregation and it’s a great area of Cape Town to serve in. A year in, we are more aware than ever of the potential for St Peter’s to be a church that has an impact on community, city and country. It’s been very exciting to see some people get behind this and start to come on board. Some wonderful, Godly and passionate people have decided to come and join us on our journey at St. Peter’s – we feel very blessed.

We’ve restarted family services as of last month (January), and it was a real glimpse of what the future could hold – a vibrant, diverse in every sense of the word, church that’s growing, learning and ministering together.

We’re really looking forward to seeing how that develops over the next year.

Another area we’ve seen grow has been the monthly prayer on the streets at the taxi rank opposite us. We’ve had some great conversations and seen people touched by God in a variety of different ways – as well as been amazed at the number of people from church who’ve taken a risk and found they’ve enjoyed this ministry.

Bev had started her PhD at the University of Cape Town but her supervisor was pushing her into an area of study that she did not want to go in, so she has walked away from that. She will be talking to other departments and universities over the next few months hoping to start again soon.

We just recently hosted Dave’s parents for a three week trip. In 1993 they stayed in Stellenbosch for three months where John was lecturing, so this trip was a great time for then to re-connect with friends. We also took the opportunity to do a couple of trips with them – one up the West Coast to Langebaan and Paternoster, and another to a private game reserve just past Worcester and then a night in the very beautiful Franschhoek. The photos in this post were of the lions from the Aquila Game Reserve we visited.

As for what we have planned for this coming year …

The priority for this year will be setting up a couple of missional communities. These are groups of people meeting regularly out in the local community with the purpose of reaching out to people in the community for Christ & providing for their needs. We’re currently playing around with ideas as to how that might look.

Once a month, at our family service, everyone from the missional communities will come together to meet with those at our 10am service and worship together as the wider family of St. Peter’s.

We have been asked, in May, to join a small team of leaders from the churches in Cape Town, on a trip to the US for a training course in developing missional communities run by Mike Breen at 3d ministries (www.3dministries.com). We would love to be part of this – if we manage to go there’s also a chance we might get to spend a couple of days down in California with Dave’s sister Liz, Marius and our nieces and nephew who we haven’t seen for too many years! Please pray that if it is right for us to go God will provide enough to cover the flights and other costs – in total it’s going to be about £3,000/R30,000. When we first saw the cost of the flights we thought it might be a mistake – £1,300 – but then we realised we are of course flying from the southern tip of Africa as opposed to London!

Bev has been asked to speak on a panel at this year’s Social Enterprise World Forum on the topic of measuring social impact which is happening in Johannesburg in April. She has agreed, in faith, as we try to get the money together for her to go – it’ll cost much less than the trip to the US! We are really excited about this an opportunity for her – it’s the biggest event she’s been asked to speak at so far. There’s a real buzz in South Africa around social enterprise – but it’s still a new concept here, and with the experience Bev has this could create some really interesting opportunities for her.

She had hoped to get a part-time job by now. If the PhD had happened she would have been able to work 10 hours a week as part of her student visa. This now won’t be happening for a while. Because of visas Bev can’t just go out and get a job as she needs to apply for a work permit for any work she does – and the employer needs to prove that they couldn’t find a South African citizen to fill the post (quite rightly).

We manage well on Dave’s salary for the day-to-day expenses – it’s just the extra things like emergencies or replacing anything that is broken and things like Dave’s medication. We finally have the agreement of Medical Aid that they will pay for his medication for his back condition, however the limit on the amount we can claim which is less than the cost of one month’s supply. The extra income from Bev having a part-time job would have helped tremendously towards that.

The medication Dave brought over from the UK runs out in April so do pray for provision to cover that.

Apologies for the long post to start the year off (ok it’s February, we’re a bit late) … but after an update to our IT equipment we suddenly have access to our blog again, so do look out for more frequent (and shorter) posts from us this year!

And if you want to see more of Bev’s recent photos you can just click on this link to  Flickr.

Quick Trip to the UK

We’ve just returned from a quick trip back to the UK to see family, attend the last day of the Arrow Leadership Programme Dave has been doing for the last 18 months and seeing as many friends we could possibly fit in.

It was a good trip back, but not the most restful with so much running around.

Here are a few photos from our time in Scotland with Dave’s parents.

We spent some time with friends from St Stephen’s & St Michael’s (our previous church), stayed with Bev’s Dad & met up with her brother and family, including the 3 lovely nieces. Then there was a few days in Edinburgh with Dave’s parents – and in both cities, time with friends also. We also managed to fit in the NFL game at Wembley, which was a real treat – the 1st time we’d seen the San Fransisco 49ers (our team) live. Great night out.

So we return to Cape Town as summer is beginning, glad to have seen people but in need of some time where it’s just the 2 of us. It’s a busy time coming up, building up to, of course, our 1st Christmas in the sun. We will, of course, be thinking about all our friends in the UK shivering in the cold and the long nights….

More news and thoughts to follow over coming days and weeks.

What we do in our week …

Church work being what it is, it’s hard to answer the question ‘what do you do in a typical day or week’? Life is unpredictable, and that’s the way we like it. We’re both people who adapt to circumstances relatively easily, so we’re fairly comfortable with the lack of routine. That having been said, we also need discipline to make sure we have the right balance of things in our week, so here’s a taste of the sorts of things we get up to week by week.

Sunday

Unsurprisingly Sunday is a busy day. Dave gets up at 6am to finish any preparation and then heads over to the church around 7:15am. The first service of the day is at 8am. It’s a traditional Book of Common Prayer Communion Service without any sung worship at all. The next service is at 10am – week by week this is a mixture of traditional communion service and slightly less traditional ‘family worship’ (although at the moment all the children are in Sunday School for this). The music at the 10 am is with an organ and choir, though our wonderful organist (Richard from Christ Church) is helping us teach some newer items.

We try and take the afternoon off on a Sunday – we’ll have a quick lunch and then head out for a few hours. One of our favourite thing to do on a Sunday afternoon is go and visit a wine farm out in Stellenbesch and do some wine-tasting.

In the evening we go the 7pm service at Christ Church in Kenilworth which is part of the St. John’s Wynberg parish. The service is more what we are used to – a good segment of sung worship with a band, and some good teaching. Many of the people in our Connect group that meets on a Saturday attend this service, and we’ve made a number of really good friends. Dave has preached once so far, on the evening of the World Cup final (they wanted someone who was mad about football!).

Sunday evenings after church we either go and hang out with our friends Duncan & Hilary (Duncan is the Rector of Christ Church) and the rest of the McClea family, including Cara the black labrador or have wine and cheese whilst chatting on Skype with the Kurks back in the UK.

Monday

On Monday mornings Dave has a ‘retreat time’. This is when he heads off to a local coffee for a time of reading, reflection, writing and prayer. Once a month he takes a day’s retreat. A wonderful family who live near to us have set aside a room in their house for people to take retreats in.

Bev heads off to one of the townships called Sweet Home Farm every couple of weeks to go and visit Christina, who runs a restaurant in one of the shacks there. Along with Gareth from the Warehouse project Bev is spending time with Christina looking at how she can develop her business.

Once a month we also meet together with other church leaders in the Cape Town area that are part of the New Wine network. It’s a great time for support and for getting to know people.

Every two months on Monday evening is the Council Meeting. We also have a finance sub-committee that meets on Monday evenings a couple of times between each Council meeting.

Tuesday

On Tuesdays Bev spends the morning out in Macassar at a pottery project working with young guys in the township. Macassar is about 30km outside of Cape Town and is a collection of small houses and blocks of flats. There is high unemployment, even more so amongst the young people. The gang culture, drugs, alcohol abuse and violence are common place.

Bev is getting to know the guys and helping them as they develop the project as a social enterprise. They are going to be entering a social enterprise business planning competition in the next couple of months, so she is helping them with that.

Once a month we join with all the staff that are part of the six churches of the parish of St. John’s and the Warehouse for their monthly staff meeting. We have be really welcomed by the parish – and their support has been invaluable.

Dave is also invited to join with the bi-weekly Parish Rectors’ meeting. Although St. Peter’s is independent and not officially part of the St. John’s parish we have made ourselves accountable to them as otherwise we’d be completely on their own.

Once a month on a Tuesday afternoon Dave heads over to Arcadia old people’s home where he holds a communion service for the residents.

Tuesday night is half-price night at the cinema. Thanks to the generosity of a couple of friends in the UK we are able to go the cinema every couple of weeks. If you know anything about us at all you’ll know we love films & going to the cinema, so this gift is a real blessing.

Wednesday

Dave has been going into Pollsmoor prison in Muizenberg, just south of us towards the coast on a Wednesday morning to run the Alpha course. He’s in the medium security wings, running a course for ? inmates. Many of them are gang members …

Thursday

On Thursday mornings Dave holds a communion service at the church. It’s one of those weekly events that has been going on for years. Since we’ve been at St. Peter’s people have only turned up for the service twice in that time. It one of those things whose time has past.

Bev spends Thursday mornings at the Warehouse with the Fusion team. The Fusion team work in one of the areas in Cape Flats called Mannenberg. Jonathan, Pete and Craig has been working alongside high risk youth in this area for the last three years. This area is renowned for its gang culture and drug problems. They are an amazing group of guys and Bev really enjoying playing a part in what they are doing. She sits in their team meetings and helps them with their strategic thinking and planning.

Friday

Friday is our day off. We try to make sure we get out of the Parish on our day off. We are very blessed living in Cape Town, for many reasons, one of which is that it is very easy to relax in this city. Being surrounded by mountains, beaches and let’s not forget the wine farms, many within a 20 minutes drive is a real blessing – and many of these things you can do for free. We always make sure there is extra in our budget for petrol so that on our days off we can just in the car and drive somewhere new.

We also try to get our shopping & chores done during the week so we don’t end up spending all of our day off cleaning & going to the supermarket (that wouldn’t be very relaxing!).

Saturday

On Saturday morning Dave will finish off his sermon and any other preparation needed for the Sunday. Bev will get any of the practical stuff ready for the church services the next day. We’re beginning to teach new songs in the service, so if we’re singing one of those she’ll get the printed sheet with the words on ready to go into the hymnbooks.

Every other week we host a Connect Group, originally set up by Christ Church in Kenilworth. Many of the 30 or so members live in Mowbray, and those that don’t have a heart for our community. We meet from 5pm – 7pm and start by eating a meal together. Then we spend time together, both adults and children, listening to each other’s stories of how God is working in their lives & learning together.

These are a great bunch of people, that have made up feel very welcome & we’ve made some great friends already. We are hoping this group will work with us at St. Peter’s and help us look at ways to reach outwards into the community.

Once a month we also take a small team out to the taxi ranks in Mowbray, to talk to and pray with people for healing. A group of 4 or 5 older women from the church get in the minibus taxis on a Saturday morning from Mitchell’s Plain & Bergvliet and come to the church so they can be part of the team that goes over to the taxi rank. We’ve also been blessed with some extra people from Christ Church coming to join with us.

We’ve had some amazing answers to prayer – you can read about those here.

The rest of the week …

During the rest of the week Dave does his preparation for the services and any visits that are arranged and visiting groups that are running in the church.

There’s also the everyday stuff that comes with running a church in an urban area – we get regular visits from local homeless people and other individuals.

Bev spends two days a week doing the admin for the church – there’s no other paid staff, so at the moment until the church can afford a part-time worker Bev does it voluntarily. This is getting more tricky as she is now undertaking research with the University of Cape Town (UCT).

She is writing a research paper with the Accounting and Accountability in Africa research unit. The research is looking at measuring the social impact of projects in the townships. The organisation they are using as a case study is an educare centre (pre-school) in Mfuleni, an informal settlement, 40km outside of Cape Town.

We are hoping that this will lead to the opportunity for Bev to do her Phd at UCT – it’ll be a long process as she’ll need to secure funding from outside of South Africa (being an international student), but we are hopeful.

As you can imagine Bev now has a whole load of reading, research, site visits, writing and meetings that go along with undertaking a research project.

Bev

email: bevmeldrum
phone: +27 (0) 21 689 1903
cell: +27 (0) 79 150 1020

twitter: bevmeldrum

What happens at St. Peter’s Church, Mowbray …

St. Peter’s Church in Mowbray was founded in 1854. It is an Anglican church but has an unusual relationship with the Diocese of Cape Town as it is independent – so it’s associated with the Diocese as opposed to be managed by it.

We have two services on a Sunday – one at 8am and the other at 10am. The 8am service is a traditional 1662 Book of Common Prayer Communion. It’s a ‘said’ service so there is no worship. The 10am service is a different type of service depending on the week of the month. It is currently traditional in nature with a choir and an organ. Since arriving 6 months ago we have had two family services – the first two the church have ever had – which were very successful.

During the week the church had always had a 10am Communion Service on a Wednesday morning – although after 6 months of running this service people have only showed up twice.

There was also a Bible Study and Prayer Meeting on a Wednesday night – this is another one of the activities that have died a natural death as people have stopped coming along.

During the day a small group of the older women meet once a month to pray. We also have a group called the Missionary Work Party who once a month meet together. During the month they knit jerseys for the Red Cross Children’s Hospital that is local to us. Each month they knit around 20 jerseys. They also co-ordinate buying blankets and collecting clothes for newborn babies at the Mowbray Maternity Hospital next door to us.

Once a month the Women’s Fellowship gets together. It’s a rather formal affair with minutes being taken, a speaker being invited to talk about work they are doing and then tea. The Women’s Fellowship have, in the past, arranged the church fete, tea after services and church lunches. None of that happens now, they feel they are too old to do all of this regularly.

Many of the congregation who have always been heavily involved in the church and have been the ones to come along to the extra activities and run different groups are now getting older. Many live outside of Mowbray and drive to church – as they get older they don’t want to be going out at night, or drive at night, or even come more than once a week.

It’s time for a new generation of people to get involved in the church. It’s not that the people who come to St. Peter’s are all pensioners – there are a significant number who are younger, including a slowly growing number of younger families from the the local area and one student! It’s just that until now all of those really involved have been older.

But that is changing.

Dave & I have re-launched the annual Church Fete – the first one is Saturday 20th November. We’re looking to get lots of other people involved that haven’t had the opportunity before. We’d also love to re-start refreshments after the service … at the moment everyone rushes out of church and don’t hang around to chat – we’d love to see that change.

As well as the main church building, which also includes a hall, kitchen, meeting rooms and a garden the church also owns a building across the road from the church which used to be a Girl’s School and is now an Educare Centre (pre-school) for the local community.

We’ve also opened up the church to be used by outside groups … although this is a slow process.

Currently we have an AIDS support group that meets once a month and some enterprise training for unemployed mothers run by a Social Enterprise called The Clothing Bank who are just down the road from us.

Some of the Council still struggle with the idea of people other than themselves using the building – but we keep encouraging them to think about the community the church is based in (even if they don’t live in that community anymore themselves).

One of the groups that meets at the church every fortnight is a group made mainly of Christians from Christ Church, Kenilworth – a church we have a lot of connections with. They are all people who have a heart for Mowbray, the area that we are in, and are keen to reach out to the local community. We’re excited at how our relationship with this group will develop over the coming months.

So that’s where we’re at at the moment. It’s not a particularly busy church but that’s great because it gives us space to focus on ways for the church to reach out to the local community. We’ll keep you updated.

Prayer On The Streets

Getting out of your comfort zone has become something of cliche in some Christian circles. It can be the sort of phrase that’s casually thrown out as shorthand for something that wants to be seen as risky, edgy or alternative but in reality ends up as being a little irritating. It’s probably best understood in relation to Peter getting out of the boat and walking on the water. He leaves the relative safety of a boat to walk on storm waters. If anything is getting out of the comfort zone, then it’s that. The key thing is, though, that Peter is walking towards Jesus as he does so. He’s safe as long as his course is fixed steadily on responding to the call of Jesus – it’s only when he takes eyes off the beckoning figure, looking instead at the impossibility of the situation and the price of apparent failure that he does start to fail.

I’m sure there’s at least one sermon in there somewhere – much of it covered in John Ortberg’s excellent book If You Want To Walk On Water, You’ve Got To Get Out Of The Boat. It’s that sense, though, of getting out of comfort zone and walking towards Jesus that we’ve been having with one of the new initiatives which we’ve started at St Peter’s. Right opposite the church is a busy transport hub – buses, minibus taxis and trains are all taken within three minutes of us. So as part of the process of enabling St Peter’s to become a community which is good news outside of the walls of our building, we’ve been taking a small group across the road once a month on a Saturday morning to see who is around and offer to pray with people as we find them.

On many levels, it’s exactly the sort of thing we find very difficult. Neither of us are the sort of people who find it easy to go and talk to complete strangers. There are two things, though, which encourage us to get out of that particular boat. One is the enthusiasm the idea is generating. We’ve had some helpers from Christ Church on some occasions – but last time we went it was all St Peter’s people. Seven of them – many of them being older ladies who travel a long way by public transport to get here, and then have no problems at all walking up to people they don’t know and getting on with it. These people inspire us.

The second is that quite simply, it works. Taking church out, rather than expecting people to come to us, works. People are willing to be prayed for – they want to see God in act in their lives. Over the 4 months we’ve been doing this, I think only about 4 or 5 people of the 50 or more we’ve approached have said ‘no thanks’. When we pray, people are thankful, encouraged – and sometimes we see the sort of answers to pray we might be hoping far. We’ve had two (so far unconfirmed – it can be difficult to be 100% sure!) healings. We also prayed for one of the station cleaners for her job contract to be extended. She desperately needed it be, but it looked very unlikely. The next morning we saw her in the church service. She’d come on a break from work, leaving her dustpan and brush in the church foyer. She’d come to tell us and give thanks for the fact that later the day we prayed, her boss had come to tell her that her contract had been extended. I won’t pretend that Bev and I find it easy. It does leave us tired. This, though, is a simple way of starting the long process of changing the momentum of church life from inward to outward. It can be done in just about any parish. I wonder what would happen if every parish did it?

By Dave

Prison Alpha

As we keep saying, you can’t go anywhere in South Africa without coming up against the stark reminder of the universal truth that the poor always suffer, always get the rough end of already rough deals. It’s just the way life is. If you come from a background of relative wealth (and if you’re able to read this blog, then you do) then life will be easier for you – even in the difficult times.

Take Pollsmoor  Prison – Cape Town’s largest. It’s huge – an admission wing (where prisoners await trial or a move to other prisons), low, medium and high security wings as well as a women’s block. The admission wing was built to house just over 1,000 inmates. The problem is, that those from poorer backgrounds don’t get the bail they would otherwise benefit from  – their loved ones can’t afford it. This means that the admission wing currently holds over 4,000 men. Think about what that means for the days, weeks, months, years you can wait there for. Never tell me prison is easy.

Anyway, it’s into that context were running an Alpha course. I’m not doing it ‘on behalf’ of St Peter’s; in fact I’m doing it in under the leadership of our good friend Jeremy, the Associate Minister at Christ Church, with a small team of others.

The Alpha course is surely the most widespread evangelistic tool of the last 50 years. For those who don’t know, it emerged out of Holy Trinity Brompton church in London. It’s 10 weeks long, with a day/weekend away in the middle. It’s an introduction to the Christian faith, covering everything from Jesus and His death, the Bible, church, prayer, seeking guidance, the person and work of the Holy Spirit and how to resist evil. The essential ingredients are food, a talk and a no-holds barred group discussion guided by a group leader who isn’t going to give ‘the right answer’ but just allow discussion to flow. Alpha has since spread all over the world – there are 7,000 courses running in the UK alone. You can see more if you click here . As this other website shows, it’s prevalent here in South Africa too.

The fruit of Alpha in prison has been well recorded. It’s my first time in being involved in a course in prison – though one of the best experiences of my ministry was the week’s placement I spent with the chaplaincy team at Belmarsh prison in London while training for ordained ministry. At Pollsmoor we’ve just had the second week of the course, where the subject is ‘Why Did Jesus Die?’. I gave the talk to 24 men in one of the medium security wings of the prison. It’s hard to describe the power of the experience. We’re aided by a team of prison evangelists trained up by the man responsible for the spiritual care of the wing. I should mention that all these evangelists are inmates. Awesome.

I gave a very similar talk to that which I usually do on such a week of the course elsewhere. Talked of punishment for sin, and God taking it for us. Talked of our slavery, our addiction to sin and the freedom that’s bought for us. Talked of how we’re all equally guilty; orange-suited inmate, English preacher or ‘law-abiding’ citizen … that to Jesus the angry word is as bad as murder, the lingering lustful glance as adultery. In well-behaved suburban England that would often provoke violent disagreement from long-standing Christians and church members. In an old shower block in a prison on the tip of Africa all I saw was nodding heads and moist eyes. And double-figures numbers of people committing their lives to Jesus.

Tell me, then, why we find it so difficult to believe that God has a special love reserved for the poor, the marginlalised and the vulnerable?

I’ll blog some more about this later in the course

Dave