How we started loving this country: two NCNC leaders take church trips to South Africa

"South Africa is part of my spiritscape."

That’s how both Mary Susan Gast, NCNC Conference minister, and Pat de Jong, senior pastor at First Congregational UCC, Berkeley describe how South Africa pulls and pushes their faith and ministry in new directions.

This summer Mary Susan visited there for the third time, with a group of Conference ministers and staff of our UCC Wider Church Ministries, which has had a presence there for 150 years.  Previously she had been part of a women’s delegation to South Africa in 1993, as part of her work with the UCC Coordinating Center for Women.  In 1994, with the antiapartheid women’s group Black Sash, she served as a peace monitor during the first democratic elections there.

Her first connections to the nation came from South African seminary classmates, both black and white, in the 70’s. "For years I kept those folks in my mind and heart as I followed the violence and the courage of the struggle against apartheid."  When she joined the Indiana Kentucky UCC Conference staff in the 80’s, she sought a way to encourage change in South Africa through economic sanctions. Since the I-K Conference offices were in the state capitol, she and 3 other ministers new to Indiana (including her husband, Roger Straw) began sending Indiana Senator Richard Lugar frequent mailings and calls about sanctions and how the UCC General Synod had voted in support of justice and freedom in South Africa.  When Lugar became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, he introduced the first successful bill for economic sanctions. "I can only assume our contacts had some influence."

Mary Susan Gast in Zambia

Pat had gotten to know South African democracy leaders like Oliver Tambo, Desmond Tutu and Alan Boesak when they spoke at Riverside Church in New York, where she was on the staff, in the 80’s before apartheid ended.  She first visited the county during her sabbatical in 2006, at the invitation Dr. David Harrison who founded the nationwide South Africa AIDS prevention and education program, Lovelife.  Harrison had attended the Berkeley church while completing a Masters in Public Health at UC Berkeley and then returned to his native land.  This past fall, Pat traveled there again, this time with a group from her church, revisiting Harrison and Lovelife, as well as the Rondebosch Church where he worships in Capetown.

Your editor interviewed Mary Susan and Pat to learn more about their connections with the country and its people.  Both relish the opportunity to talk with other groups about their connections, the work of the UCC there and the South Africa church community.  Some highlights of our conversation:

-For some years, staff at First Congregational UCC, Berkeley have led international trips (Spain and Morroco, Greece and Turkey, Israel/Palestine and Jordan) to experience global issues, meet church leaders and build partnerships, education and service. On this trip Pat and nine lay people spent two weeks in the Capetown area.  A highlight was meeting a young woman named Queen Monamudi, a former volunteer at Lovelife AIDS project, whose four year college education the Berkeley church had helped to fund.  Check out their blog.

Members of First Congregational UCC, Berkeley with pastor Pat de Jong (lower right), meet Queen Monamudi, center, whose college education they helped fund.

- Mary Susan’s trip was one of several educational trips that Wider Church Ministries has sponsored, from the David Stowe endowment fund, for the education of church leaders about our global ministries.  A highlight for her was revisiting Inanda Seminary in Durban, a school for young women founded by Congregational missionaries in 1869.  (One of the founders was Congregational missionary Daniel Lindley, whose great great grandson is Dan Hatch, a minister is our Conference who served the Berkeley church some years ago - small world!)  Get more info about our Global Ministries.

-"Why are you here?" is a question both groups heard, and Pat and Mary Susan have heard before.  Their answer: We are part of the same Christian family.  We love you. We want to learn from you as you go through this journey into democracy.  Maybe you won’t make some of the mistakes we have made in the US

-"Please come back," many people said to Mary Susan in the 90’s soon after the first elections.  "We will need you more in ten years than we do now."  Both women said with some sadness that those heady first years of freedom, with the powerful presidency of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s profound leadership on forgiveness and reconciliation, are over.  Today’s South Africa has a more troubled and ambivalent leadership and great challenges.  Nonetheless, energy, excitement, and commitment are tangible.
 
-What can local churches here do?  First Congregational UCC, Berkeley formed a South Africa Ministry Team of 15 laypeople some years ago, and has kept informed, met with South Africans at UC Berkeley and in the San Francisco area.  They also organized knitters to make 97 wool caps which the Berkeley delegation presented to Go Go Grandmothers, a South African group raising the orphaned children of their own children dead of AIDS. The ministry team raised $20,000 over four years for Queen Monamudi’s education.  Now that she has graduated, they are considering other forms of ministry, perhaps in support of the prison ministry that Rondebosch church is doing.

-Prisons - similarities to our nation: Pat pointed out the huge prison population, which is the result of massive poverty, drugs, and HIV, all of which lead to a desperate population and serious overcrowding.  The Berkeley group visited two prisons; the prisoners they spoke and prayed with, warehoused without charges or trial, are mostly young men.  Mary Susan added that Theological Education by Extension in South Africa, an interdenominational ministry supported by our UCC Wider Church Ministries, offers theological education by extension at low cost, and that people in prison are one of the largest group of students.  "Might this be a market for us here in the US?" she wonders.

- The difference one person can make: when Mary Susan traveled there in 1993 and 1994 the groups were led by Louann Parsons, for over 40 years a UCC Wider Church Ministries missionary in South Africa teaching Christian education, theological education and leadership skills.  Dozens of the new youth leaders in the African National Congress had been trained by her, and everywhere the groups went, young leaders stopped their meetings or speeches to greet Louann in affection.  Mary Susan asked her,  "Did you know when you came here in the 50’s what you would be doing, what effect your work would have?"  "No, I had no idea," she answered, "But when you teach the Gospel, what can you expect?"  Our support of our Wider Church Ministries through UCC Share supports work like Louann’s.

-Hope over time:  both Pat and Mary Susan spoke of the value of returning to a country again and again, seeing old friends, making new ones, seeing change.  Both visited the Apartheid Museum, whose brochure reads, "This is where apartheid belongs, in a museum."  They were struck by how the violent struggles have been lifted up in memorials as a way to build a new mythology for the nation, in Freedom Square in Soweto and all over the country.

-The role of education in training leaders and making change.  When Mary Susan first visited the UCC founded and sponsored Inanda Seminary in 1993 she had her then 14 year daughter with her.  So taken was Susannah with the school that she wanted to stay there, not go home, but go to school there.  Young women told Mary Susan, "We go into class and we know we are expected to do great things."  Many of the women in leadership in South Africa are Inanda graduates.

Students at Inanda Seminary

-What could our Conference do to continue these partnerships? Mary Susan suggests we could become a "global mission conference." "In this way we would broaden the way we look at things and be open to gifts we receive by being globally connected.  I notice how local churches become more vital when they look beyond themselves, how they grow in numbers and faith.  More engagement leads to flourishing.  It is consistent with our calling to reach out globally."  Our Conference representative to Wider Church Ministries is Mei Wang of Congregational UCC, Sunnyvale.

-Pat echoed the value of partnerships, "We found that our church has much in common with Capetown’s Rondebosch church that welcomed us so warmly.  We are affiliated with United Church movements.  We are both closely related to universities with similar opportunities and challenges in ministry.  We want to reach out to the wider community.  I see great value in deepening relationships, church to church, pastor to pastor, people to people."

-To learn more: Both recommend the novels of Alan Paton, and the writings of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela and a good history, Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa.