I Have Come a Long Way. John W. de Gruchy
Confessing Church struggle about which Naudé was speaking so courageously? One of my deacons told me that I had changed as a result of being in America, and he was not sure he liked it. I could only nod in agreement; it would’ve been surprising if I had stayed the same.
Our daughter, Jeanelle, was born on 5 March 1965, so there was much to keep us busy on the home front. We regularly went to the beach and visited relatives. I did carpentry projects in my workshop, and we often spent Saturday evenings with George and June Booth and their family. George was our church secretary and June a surrogate mother to our children. We also had a close circle of friends outside the congregation; among them were Einar and Inger-Elise Ims, Lutheran missionaries from Norway, who were working in the Indian community in Chatsworth. We also found time for holidays down by the south coast with our friends Duncan and Naomi Davidson. We had known them for a long time, and Duncan was now the Congregational minister in Glenashley, north of Durban.
In June 1965, with Steve and a three-month-old Jeanelle, we drove through southern Natal and the Transkei to the Federal Theological Seminary (FEDSEM), located in Alice near Fort Hare. FEDSEM had only recently been built to train black students for the Anglican, Congregational, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches. It was a pioneering ecumenical initiative, made essential because the government had taken control of Fort Hare. As a result, there was a very uneasy relationship between the two adjacent institutions, and ominous political clouds on the horizon did not bode well for the future. The seminary had an excellent faculty, good library, and the academic standards were high, as was the spirit among the students. I gave a lecture on Social Ethics and addressed many questions about the implications of what I had said for the struggle against apartheid. I was also introduced, in passing, to a young Desmond Tutu for the first time, though he probably doesn’t remember me from back then. He had just returned from studying in London and was teaching at the seminary. On our way home, we had to drive through snow in the Transkei, but a winter in Chicago had prepared us well for this.
Pastoral life continued, but I increasingly felt unchallenged by the daily routine of ministry. I once again considered the possibility of returning to Chicago as Ross Snyder’s teaching assistant and to work on a doctorate; but that was not financially feasible. In any case, we had resolved to stay put in South Africa. So instead, we established a Christian Institute study group, which attracted an interesting range of people, including several Catholic priests who were relishing their post-Vatican II freedom. On one occasion, Naudé visited our congregation and preached at an evening service. He also invited me to become a member of the editorial board of Pro Veritate. This frequently took me to Johannesburg, where I got to know others involved in the work of the CI, including its dynamic Cape Town director, Theo Kotze, a Methodist minister.
In the meantime, I became actively involved in the work of the Natal Council of Churches and got to know Philip Russell, who later became the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town. On several occasions, I attended Faith and Order discussions at the Lutheran Seminary in Maphumulo, Zululand, and at St. Joseph’s Catholic Seminary in Cedara outside Pietermaritzburg. Father Garth Michelson, who taught Theology at St. Joseph’s, became a good friend and was, in my book, a saint. St. Joseph’s considered asking me to teach at the seminary, but Archbishop Hurley did not think a married Protestant could be easily accommodated. It was a nice idea, nonetheless.
In 1966 I was appointed as part-time chaplain at the University of Natal, along with Alex Boraine, director of the Methodist Youth Department. Alex and his wife, Jenny, had recently returned from the United States where they had lived for five years, during which time Alex did his doctorate at Drew University. We were kindred spirits. For two years Alex and I gave extra-mural evening lectures in Theology and on the Bible. These lectures took place on the university campus and were attended by over a hundred people, twice a week during term time. In addition, Isobel and I joined the Boraines in developing a multi-volume Sunday school curriculum project called Breakthrough. This was an ambitious venture, partly inspired by Ross Snyder, who visited Durban with his wife, Martha, at the invitation of the Methodist Youth Department.
An important ecumenical initiative among the churches during this period was the Christian Education and Leadership Training programme (CELT). CELT used insights gathered from sensitivity training to change perspectives and leadership styles in working for social transformation. I went to an early CELT course and suddenly realised that I was participating in something that I had experienced earlier at the University of Chicago. I kept this knowledge to myself, but evidently acted and spoke as someone who had good insight into what was going on. When it was later learnt by my group that I had “insider knowledge” I was shunned for the rest of my time there. Isobel, who was much more committed to CELT, still thinks I deserved what I got for not being upfront about my previous experience.
This was also the age of newfound sexual freedom, as the birth-control pill became readily available, and couples living together before marriage became widespread. Playboy magazine, which was banned in South Africa, and the British movie Alfie starring Michael Caine, which we saw in 1966, were chauvinistic trendsetters. In developing my understanding and critique of what was happening in secular culture, I read Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, published in 1965, in which he argued that the process of secularisation was partly a result of the biblical tradition, but he was critical of the values of secularism. The Secular City is undoubtedly dated now, but it still has something important to say in today’s world of religious fundamentalism.
Early on in my ministry, I had become friendly with several American Congregational missionaries, Lawrence and Carol Gilley among them. In turn, they introduced me to ministers in what was then known as the Bantu Congregational Church (BCC). Congregationalism, as I mentioned earlier, had been planted in South Africa by the LMS. In Natal and Zululand, however, it was established by missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions. The first mission station was established in Umlazi (now a township south of Durban) in 1836. Others soon followed and some fine schools, such as Adams College and Inanda Girls Seminary, were founded. John Dube, one of the first leaders of the ANC, was a Congregational minister, and, as already mentioned, Albert Luthuli was a deacon at the Groutville Congregational Church where I preached on one occasion. Both had attended Adams.
In April 1966 I was invited to a pastors’ conference in Mfanefile College, a small village deep in the heart of Zululand, to give a series of Bible studies on Law and Grace. This was a difficult assignment, because the theme challenged the legalism that had characterised Mission Churches ever since the early missionaries had formulated rules governing their life. I am not sure what the pastors made of my talks. Most of them were older than me and they all had more experience. In any case, the life and culture of their congregations were very different from that with which I was familiar. But it was a good experience for me, and my lectures were all translated and printed in Zulu.
A few months later, I was invited to give another series of Bible studies at the Annual General Conference of the African Independent Churches Association (AICA) held in Umlazi. This was even more challenging, because I had very little knowledge of what was then referred to as the AICs. However, the CI had begun a programme to help them improve their theological education, and a good friend from my Rhodes days, Danie van Zyl, was the programme’s director. During the conference, Danie asked me whether I would consider joining the staff of the CI to help him in his work. There had already been some tentative enquiries from Beyers Naudé about my availability to join the CI staff, but now I had the chance to discuss the possibility with one of my peers who had already done so. It was an opportune moment, because I was feeling that my years at Sea View were drawing to a close, and there was no indication that I would soon receive a call to another congregation. But I was not ready to make any decisions.
With the ANC and PAC banned, the anti-apartheid ecumenical churches had to take on some of the responsibility of leading the above-ground struggle against apartheid. Some churches and church leaders rose to the challenge, which was increasingly coordinated by the CI and the SACC. Since 1967, the latter was led by a new general secretary, Anglican Bishop Bill Burnett.
Burnett and Naudé attended the Church and Society Conference in Geneva in 1966, sponsored by the WCC. Upon their return to South Africa, they convened a number of conferences around the country to discuss the Church’s role in the struggle, in the light of what had transpired