Category Archives: Ministry

Jesus is HIV+ and hell is a township

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In the Mail and Guardian’s recent annual ‘Religion’ special one of our Cornerstone alumni, now a pastor in Khayelitsha, featured in a lead article.

Xola Skosana is doing an excellent job of contextual theology and using exactly the kind of paradox and shock tactics that Jesus employed in helping people read Scripture with fresh eyes and reframing their view of current reality.
Xola made headlines last year when he said in a sermon that Jesus was HIV+, indicating that Jesus identifies completely with the marginalized and stigmatized. Of course some took offense accusing him of blasphemy. But it did the job of getting people talking!
Referring to more recent events, I am not sure if Xola is even aware of Rob Bell’s latest book and the controversy surrounding it, but his reframing of the concept of hell using a very Pentecostal technique (a vision) is an ingenious melding of Pentecostal, black and liberation theology, and a helpful perspective considering the (Western) preoccupation with personal salvation and reward/punishment:

“I saw myself standing by a highway with a big banner that said ‘Welcome to hell: South African townships’.” This is Skosana’s way of drawing attention to the squalor of informal settlements and townships, which he described as “glorified refugee camps, rat-infested hell holes”. “Let it be known across the breadth and length of this country that the continuation of separate development and integration, based on affordability, is the perpetuation of the notorious Group Areas Act of yesteryear,”

Keep up the good work Pastor Skosana!

Don’t just do something, stand there!

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I had lunch with my friend Nic yesterday. We were bemoaning the fact that often we try so hard to make things happen but see no results or responses. This is a general truth in life, but it is particularly true in ministry.

I remember when I started my first ministry at an inner city church, full of plans and dreams of an alternative community with innovative programmes and interesting people. But week after week of Sunday services with between 5 and 10 people (in a church that seats 400 hundred!) wears down even the most optimistic dreamer. I remember printing thousands of fliers, going door to door in the neighbourhood, visiting people on the membership roll that hadn’t been to church in decades, and slowly realising that nothing I did could turn the church into a roaring success (since then I have radically revised my measures of success!).

At the time a chapter entitled ‘Ministry as Grief Work’ in James Dittes’ book Re-Calling Ministry really helped me. He writes:

“To be a minister is to know the most searing grief and abandonment, daily and profoundly. To be a minister is to take as partners in solemn covenant those who are sure to renege… To be a minister is to make that all-out, prodigal commitment to a people who cannot possibly sustain it. This is the nature of ministry, as it is of the God thus served.” (1999:15)

It dawned on me (duh!) that this was the way of Christ. His physical ministry ended in death, abandoned and betrayed by even his most beloved friends: “He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with grief…” (Is 53:3).

I remember reading about a distant ancestor of mine (one of the Murrays) who was one of the first missionaries in Malawi. He got his first convert after 11 years!

So my point is this. Ministry (and everything else that is of value in life) is relationship. The nature of human relating is brokenness and alienation. We know this, yet expect and hope for connection and intimacy. When we do taste intimacy it is grace. We cannot manufacture it or do something to create it. We can only provide the space where the Spirit can work and be in that space. We must enter relationships (superficial or deep) hoping for connection but expecting hurt, and ready to do the grief work of unmet expectations.

That is what it means to follow Christ, to give yourself, to empty yourself, and to trust, in faith, that resurrection awaits on the other side of the death of rejection.

So don’t just do something, stand there!