Returning to De Aar, revived and refreshed from our few days holiday, it seemed the right time to sit down and work out a programme of what it was possible for us to achieve in the four months remaining. It is obvious that doing a kind of general visitation to members of the congregation was going to be futile especially as we have discovered that our lack of Afrikaans means that ordinary discourse is very difficult. So a strategy for a good use of our time here was needed and that is what we have been trying to do with the help of the two churchwardens.
The problem is knowing what can be achieved in such a short time. There is so much that we would like to do but most of it would take us years rather than months to execute. However we have identified a couple of areas which we might tackle. We want to try to make St. Thomas more user-friendly to the visitor, stranger, searcher or outsider. At the moment when you arrive at church there is no welcome and no hymn book or service sheets. You are expeced to bring your own! And after the service most people rush away and there is no socialising. So how they expect anyone to feel part of their community is beyond us. But then they are not really geared up to the idea of the service being a vehicle for mission; it is in fact the coming together of a section of the community who see themselves as Anglicans.Talking with the churchwardens we did discover that the previous Rector had invited other churches of a more Pentecostal nature to join St. Thomas and use their facilities. It soon became obvious that these zealous christians wanted to take over the church and were highly critical of Anglican worship. They even accused St. Thomas' congregation of idolatry because they had an altar so you can see how extreme they were. This obviously caused a great deal of upset and explains why there is a great emphasis placed by the church council and by Fr. Joseph, the self supporting priest here, that we re-discover what it means to be an Anglican christian. While that tends to go against the whole idea of ecumenism, we can understand why they are saying this and see many good reasons for going along with this and playing our part in sharing with them what being a good Anglican might mean in this situation.
Then there is the question of the service itself. The tradition of the Anglican Church of South Africa is of the High Church variety due to the fact that the first Anglican missionaries were from religious orders. So to be traditional Anglican is to be of the kind of Anglo-Catholic variety that takes us both back to our childhood in the 1950s. Much of the service is sung to a variety of settings, incense is liberally used and the hymns are from the old Ancient and Modern books with the occasional Mission Praise song (many of which are "old hat" now in England). Luckily the Archbishop of Cape Town (a wonderful man with great presence and leader of the Anglican Church in Southern Africa) has pinpointed liturgical renewal as one of the priorities for the next few years. So I can use this as a way into some discussion about what goes on in St. Thomas' Church.
So it has been agreed that I work on these two areas and I will be giving a Bible Study/Church School each Tuesday evening (starting soon) where I hope we can explore some issues about what it is to be an Anglican christian in De Aar and how the worship can be made much more mission orientated. Not rocket science but I hope that will move the church on a little.
In other areas of church and community life, it continues to be little doing during this holiday period. But we do hope eventually to work with a small HIV/Aids group here and to have some impact on the work with children and young people. But they need to return to De Aar from being away in the south before things can get going. It has been a frustrating time where this has been concerned and a lesson to us. So if you are considering coming to Kimberley and Kuruman for a visit or sabbatical remember that nobody is around at Christmas time and very little happens!
It was lovely to have Sue Booys and her husband Richard staying overnight with us as they made their way from Cape Town to Kimberley. Sue is rector of Dorchester (the one in Oxfordshire) and is having her sabbatical in South Africa. It was lovely to do some real chatting and gossiping and to get news from the diocese. Today we are waiting for Alastair Blaine to come and stay with us. Alastair has just given up his teaching job and hopes to start training to be a priest later this year. He has South African relatives who he has been visiting and now he is coming to spend a couple of months with us in the rather forlorn hope I guess of learning something of how to be a priest! It will be good to have him here.
The mornings here are wonderful. They have been made even more glorious by the news from Sydney of England's wonderful thrashing of the Aussies. There is nothing quite like sitting in front of the TV at 6am in the morning, with a cup of tea in hand and the sun streaming through the windows, and seeing the Aussies grovel!!! It was a great victory but I cannot believe the paucity of the Australian attack and some of their inept batting. The run-out of Watson reminded me of some farcical moments in Church Times cricket.
Our passport/visa problem has returned and we have to make a journey to Kimberley on Sunday so as to be at the Department of Home Affairs there early on Monday morning to see whether we can get an extension to our visitor visas which run out on February 8th. We are not sure what we will do if we cannot sort this out – perhaps you will see us back home earlier than expected. I guess all will be well but it is a bit of a bore and I expect we might be waiting in queues for a long time. But then this is how it is in South Africa at present, mainly because of the Zimbabwe question.We have enlisted the help of a rather distinguished local lady politician who insists on coming with us to Kimberley so I hope she will be able to pull a few strings.
We hope 2011 has started well for all concerned. We are delighted to hear of a number of couples (children of friends) getting engaged. And we thought marriage was on the way out! We will be back with more news from De Aar soon when I trust we can report that things are really getting going.
