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

Life in Manenberg with Pete

To start a series of occasional posts from inspiring people we’re getting to know, we’d like to introduce you to our friend Pete Portal. He’s originally from the UK but now lives in Manenberg, one of the townships in Cape Town. Enjoy reading about his experience, as he wrote it for the Daily Telegraph International Edition …

An important question: are missionaries expats? Are we who claim to have a calling somewhere (usually) overseas to spread the gospel, living what is generally considered to be the “expat” life? Then again, are 24 year-olds often seen as missionaries? I guess I don’t know what I am. But who I am is rapidly being shaped by where I am and with whom I relate in a country of depressingly deeply engrained racial segregation, dubious leadership, high crime and unemployment levels, great hope and exceptional natural beauty.

Life in Cape Town, apparently Africa’s gay capital and the city with the highest property prices on the continent, is rarely mundane.

There is good reason that (especially with Sepp Blatter’s World Cup Circus flying that came into town in June) this place is a firm tourist favourite. The beautiful mountain was singlehandedly the reason for the BBC falling over itself to secure broadcasting rights from the Mother City rather than frenetic Jo’burg; the white-sand beaches with the crystal azure oceans (yes, two!); the salubrious suburbs running alongside lush vineyards with their elegant Cape Dutch architecture. It all adds up to a rather magnificent picture.

How inconvenient then, to find oneself “called” to live and work in this place that, within 15 minutes’ drive, turns from a cosmopolitan urban frenzy to a bucolic idyll. Oh, the sacrifices of being in full time ministry.

And of course, this is where the story stops – as far as those thick, glossy travel brochures are concerned. Why go any further, when your exhausted, Western office worker in desperate need of an Alluring African Adventure is already hooked? Chuck in the Kruger National Park safari idea and it’s a done deal.

But what wouldn’t be detailed in the generic e-itinerary prior to departure is the extent of the social schizophrenia that prevails here.

The lack of any meaningful dialogue (or even, dare I say it, interest) across race and culture boundaries is genuinely shocking.

What gives me any weight of authority in critiquing the interaction between Cape Town’s diverse population? Nothing really, apart from finding myself intrigued by social dynamics standing, as I do, in a vast gulf between the middle-class whites and the working (or rather 40 per cent non-working) class coloureds for the past 15 months. And I’m not being Victorian and referring to black people as ‘coloureds’ – this is an every day term in South Africa for its people of mixed-race, largely from the Western Cape.

I find myself – as Ross Kemp did a couple of years ago when on the hunt for glamourised gang-life gore for his Gangs documentary series – in Manenberg, my favourite place in Cape Town and the suburb/township in which I’ll be spending the foreseeable future, having just purchased a house there.

Manenberg is seen by many as a cursed place, with shootings and drugs leading residents to purport that putting their address on their CV guarantees minimal job interviews. (Mum always said to try and get on the housing ladder early – though I’m not sure she had this in mind.)

I decided to uproot and leave promising career prospects in London to live in one of South Africa’s most dangerous townships (hate that word), to befriend, mentor and restore drug addicts and gang members and establish a refuge for high risk youth. It really is “life in its fullness”. (John 10:10)

I honestly mean that. I’m not trying to fill a void in my own life (I couldn’t do that if I tried!). It’s not even simply because I want to help (that would be both noble and patronising). But rather that – and when I say this you’ll form a stronger opinion about me, whether positively or negatively – God has called me to Manenberg.

My heart was broken by the next crop of seemingly hopeless and addicted 16-25 year olds in the new South Africa, and I wasn’t able to watch gangsterism ravage it’s way through the next generation unchecked, with nothing but “life skills programs” run by weary NGO workers to stop it.

Suddenly as I move in to my house bought entirely by generous supporters and friends-of-friends, who like what the project stands for, my new best mate is an ‘unga’ (Heroin) addict who tells me of his father issues as I drive him home.

Marwaan is 30 and desperate to turn my rubbish-filled sandy back yard into a “very nice garden”, for a “very nice price” (cynics would question where the money might go – and they’d probably be right. As far as where the money is spent, it’s between food for his baby child and his heavy heroin habit).

Without my prompting, he tells me that when he was six years old he witnessed his father murder his sister, brother and pregnant mother. He still doesn’t know why, but says he struggles to see God as his heavenly father as a result. Wouldn’t you?

Yet midst death and addiction is life, vibrant and pulsating. I have never learnt so much so quickly in my whole life.

With the (ironically?) depressed pluralistic West increasingly condemning Christianity’s absolutist truth claims as false (isn’t that an absolutist truth claim in itself?), and with money having been shown to be the false idol we all know it is really, there has never been a better time to move into a township. Few people have much money and many of them are refreshingly open to the idea that their creator might just be interested in them and believe in them, even if few others seem to.

Read more on Pete’s website or the original story in The Telegraph (published in May 2010)

Updates on the ‘How You Can Help’ page

We seem to have permanently sorted the technical problems we’ve been having with the blog so we’ll get back to regular posts from now on.

Just to let you know we’ve updated our ‘How You Can Help’ page.

There’s all sorts of suggestions including:

• blankets for mothers to take their newborn babies home in for R15/£1.5o each
• books for the kids at the Baphumelele Educare Centre in Khayelitsha
• paying for an orphan to attend pre-school
• equipment for the church
• and a few treats anyone flying over this way might want to bring over for us … chocolate mainly!

Here’s the link or click on the ‘How You Can Help’ tab at the top of the page.

6 months in …

Can you believe it – we have been here in Cape Town for 6 months! Time really has flown by. We’re feeling settled and finding our way round – having a large mountain in the middle of anything certainly helps with navigation!

The photos are from our trip to Drakenstein Lion Park - they rescue lions from canned hunting – which believe it or not is still legal here in South Africa. The Lion Park is one of favourite places we’ve discovered so far – and for R600/£60 you can stay in overnight accommodation in the middle of the lion enclosures (or rather between them). We haven’t done it yet but we’re saving up for it!

It’s been winter here and Capetonians do talk about how cold and horrible it is. For us, though, it’s been more like living through a UK summer. We stick out as we’re the only ones in shorts & flip-flops. There’s been 4 or 5 days of rain – but boy when it rains, it tips it down.

We feel very blessed to be in such a beautiful country, and part of the country. We’re making the most of this and going out and exploring as much as we can.

For Dave’s birthday in August we went on a boat to Seal Island from Simon’s Town. Not only did we see seals (and plenty of them) but also penguins, whales, great white sharks (a research boat was tracking them) and a couple of hundred dolphins that just happened to swim past our boat! You can see all the photos here

We have lots of visitors since we’ve been here – partly due to the World Cup. Maybe more on that another time … but we have now had a full compliment of the Kurk family. With Annie coming over as a surprise visitor for Dave’s installation service, followed by Dave and Harry over for the football. And we’ve just said goodbye to Toni who was here for 5 weeks working at the Baphumelele Children’s Home in Khayelitsha. We also enjoyed a visit from Wendy Brown, an  ordinand from the UK doing a placement in the UK – she’ll be doing a guest post here soon reflecting on her time over here.

We currently have a very quiet house (now the lovely Toni has left us) but next month Cape Town hosts the Lausanne Congress and we’ll be hosting the Bishop of Madagascar and a Canon from Kenya.

We’ll settling into life at St. Peter’s Church. There are some amazing people in the church – many who have been coming for the last 60 years! Dave has introduced a family service and a few new(ish) songs/hymns. A group of us, including 3 of our older ladies, head over to the taxi rank across the road from the church once a month to pray for healing for people. We’ve had some great responses – all but a couple of people have been very responsive and grateful.

The church has a great potential – it’s in a very strategic area right near the transport hub and the university. Mowbray itself is very ethnically diverse and our desire is for the church to reflect that even more than it does.  There are a number of challenges we are facing in the church. We are discovering the areas of the church’s life that need to gradually change and it’s been necessary to make one or two changes to key volunteer positions in the church. This hasn’t always been easy but it’s been the right thing to do as we move forward. We’re already beginning to see some of the fruit of that.

We’ve been really blessed with being able to borrow a fantastic, spirit-filled, organist from another church who is doing wonders to our choir! We’ve got a great group of Christians meeting in the church once a fortnight on a Saturday afternoon that it is very exciting to be part of. It’s a real mixture of people and a lot of fun. We’ve also started inviting other groups to come and use the church building which is a great opportunity to find out about other projects and support them.

As Bev is only on a visitors visa it means she can’t work so she has been doing some volunteering. She is mentoring entrepreneurs in some of the townships. Brenda runs a glass recyling business based in Khayelitsha, Christina runs a restaurant from a shack in Sweet Home Farm and over in Macassar she is working with a group of young guys setting up a pottery project. She is also doing some training with Cara the Black Lab, a rescue dog who belongs to some friends!

What she would really like to be doing is returning to her Phd. She’s started discussions with a couple of the lecturers at the university so we’re excited about that as a possibility. It might take a while to get going as we’ll need to find funding.

Apologies for the lack of regular posts – our internet connection here is really slow & there are some websites (this being one) that we can only access randomly. This is the first time in 3 months we’ve been able to get into our account. We’re working on a solution!

We’ve been having technical problems….

Hi everybody. This is a quick post to say sorry for the lack of action on the blog in recent times. This is because we’ve had, for quite some time now, real problems accessing the website – caused by problems with the speed of our internet connection here. We hope to be able to post more fully again soon, but we can’t guarantee it.  For now, though, we’re both doing well and life is progressing. We’ve been here 6 months to the day! Hope to be able to post more soon….