Gospel Lenses for Mzansi
This March, I had the opportunity to lead a Partner Cultivation Trip to support one of our new member churches in Pretoria, South Africa. I walked away deeply encouraged by Red Door Church and the work they are doing. Allow me to tell you why, beginning with a little history of Mzansi.
Flawed Lenses
On March 21, 1960 at the Sharpeville township in the then Transvaal Province (now Gauteng), police opened fire on a crowd of unarmed protestors killing 69 and wounding 180. This heartbreaking event became known as the Sharpeville Massacre and March 21 is now commemorated as a public holiday in South Africa celebrating human rights against the backdrop of the atrocities that took place at Sharpeville.
About 33 years later, on July the 25th 1993, 11 people lost their lives at the St. James church in Cape Town when four members of the Azania People’s Liberation Army (APLA) opened fire inside of a place of worship in what was later said to be a revenge attack for the killing of five school children in Umtata in the Eastern Cape.
How on earth could the shooting of worshippers inside of a church ever be justified as an acceptable course of action? It staggers the imagination that this act was not only conceived, but also actually executed by members of the APLA. Now, without being overly simplistic or reductionist while touching on so grave a matter, it is nonetheless worth noting that the APLA by the time of the St James church massacre had developed strong strains of Marxist ideology.
Through the lenses of Marxism, the world is made up of oppressors and the oppressed, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the owners of capital and the disenfranchised. The key to resolving this imbalance in the status quo according to these lenses, is revolution. However, the critical failing of these Marxist lenses, which is a failing shared by all the other “isms” that try to diagnose and remedy the brokenness of our world is this: they are all merely horizontal in their view; purely anthropomorphic and without regard for God. Because of this critical flaw, all their diagnoses fail to diagnose the root malady and it is therefore a sine qua non that all their subsequent prescriptions must ultimately fail. And so as history has borne out, it is not that the revolution eats its own children but rather in more precise terms, one group of sinners merely supplants another.
Unlike the fundamentally flawed “isms,” the biblical diagnosis of what is wrong with our world is this; all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). To this one true diagnosis is attached the one true prescription, “the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 6:23).” This is how one ought to process such terrible things as the Sharpeville and St. James church massacres; that they are the acts of sinners on two sides of a sin-born social divide, who all need the saving gospel of Jesus Christ. To go to war against the social divide is merely to address the fruit rather than attack the root of the malady. What needs to be done is to bring all sinners, be they black or white, rich or poor, male or female, young or old to the obedience of the gospel.
Gospel Lenses in Pretoria
And for five days in South Africa this March, we had the joy of seeing this diagnosis and its attendant prescription being boldly lived out by the Red Door Church Pretoria under the leadership of Rhynhardt de Bruin. At Red Door, black and white, young and old, male and female, poor and rich, all gather together to joyously worship the Lord in a moving display of Spirit wrought unity. It must be Spirit wrought unity because what else could bring together such a disparate group of individuals, in a nation with such a painful and divisive past, which even now is navigating potentially disruptive issues, except the sin-exposing, sin-killing ministry of the Holy Spirit?
So disparate is this group that one ministry worker who grew up in the township of Mamelodi confessed to never having interacted with white people until the day he began attending university in the city! To see this young man and his wife now worshiping joyfully at Red Door and serving shoulder to shoulder with Rhynhardt in the ministry is surely a testimony to the triumph of the gospel. And to speak this way is not naive triumphalism but rather bold gospel optimism that sees all the hard edges in Mzansi but nonetheless hopes against hope in the God who raises the dead.
That was Sunday.
During the week we witnessed and joyfully participated in campus ministry that Red Door is doing in partnership with Campus Outreach (CO) and like minded churches in the city. We were particularly encouraged by these partnerships and more so when we gathered together with various city pastors and ministry leaders to think together about how Neopolis could come alongside what these brothers were boldly doing in their churches and ministries. These brothers see clearly, having put on the lenses of the gospel. The resultant gospel centrality and gospel optimism that these men have is cause for genuine hope and joy. It is also impetus for prayer.
Pray with us that the Lord would guard and grow these men and their churches as they boldly hold out the gospel as the one true hope for Mzansi.
