Pray that Mvume Dandala will COPE

On Friday my digsmate James, his girlfriend Jo and I were driving to East London. As we were chatting, James mentioned that he had heard somewhere that a Methodist ex-bishop was going to run as the Congress of the People's presidential candidate. I thought about it for a moment and then laughed it off: "Naah, that's a long shot."

Well, it turned out the long shot was right. A bit later in the trip we heard a press release on the radio news announcing Mvume Dandala's candidacy. Immediately, I was excited. I met Mvume about ten years ago when he was the presiding bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. He came to preach at a church event in Springs, and my father was the superintendent minister in charge of the Methodist churches in Springs at the time. He gave an amazing sermon, dripping with passion for God's people to get out and do the work of making disciples in the world. After the sermon, he came back to our house for tea and was really friendly.

That was just a brief encounter long ago, but what I've heard about Mvume from other sources since then has only been good. He went on to become general secretary of the All-Africa Council of Churches, based in Kenya. I take that as a sign that he has a heart for church unity just as I do. He's been involved in political peace negotiations both in South Africa in the bad old days of apartheid, and in Kenya after their more recent bout of post-election violence.

Imagine what such a leader of real integrity could do to the South African political scene right now? My mind reeled at the thoughts. But I was brought harshly back to reality when I remembered the last Methodist presiding bishop to enter political leadership, Stanley Mogoba. He became the leader of the deeply divided Pan-Africanist Congress in 1997 and while the party seemed to have enjoyed a short period of growth under his leadership, it remained pretty much divided and in political oblivion when his term ended in 2003. He seems to be remembered more for some injudicious remarks he apparently made about gays and lesbians, and for advocating amputation as a punishment for criminals, than for any good he did for the PAC or the country while leading the party. It seemed like a sad ending to Mogoba's great career of service.

I started feeling still more ambivalent when I talked with the family friends I was staying with in East London that evening. One said that men of the cloth had no business getting involved in partisan politics. Of course, it's right that the Church should be seen to transcend party politics, and the Methodist Church's current presiding bishop, Ivan Abrahams, did a good thing when he said that the church does not support any one party. As Jim Wallis in the USA loves to remind people, God does not belong to any one political party, and his people should be the ultimate swing voters, ready to vote for any party they believe best represents what is on his heart.

Despite all this, we're not going to have any Christian voice in political parties at all if we believers choose to remain outside the messiness of party politics, and Mvume has every right to get involved in a political party if that's where God is calling him. I'm sure he'd be one of the last people to suggest that COPE is the only party that Christians should vote for.

At the end of the day, Mvume Dandala, like Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and George Bush for that matter, is just a brother in Christ who has been sent into the harsh world of politics, where he requires much wisdom to retain his integrity and lead by following Jesus. So, as one of my father's colleagues said recently, we who are his brothers and sisters need to be praying hard for him. Let's not let our political leaders down in our duty to "pray... for kings and all others who are in authority, so that we can live in peace and quietness, in godliness and dignity." (1 Timothy 2:2) May our brothers and sisters in politics be able to live this way too!

O-Week: The Adventure Continues

Orientation Week at Rhodes is like a wave on a stormy day at Jeffreys Bay: you don't ride it; it rids you. The drinking crowd all have stories about nights they can't remember. (I don't quite know how it's possible to tell a story about stuff you can't remember, but many Rhodents are quite good at it.) And the Christians' stories can sometimes be just as wild.

Take Tuesday morning. I was in the Linguistics department and one of the lecturers asked me how I was. "Well, but sleep-deprived," was my answer.
"Why?" he asked.
"It's O-Week," I said.
"Oh, why did I ask?" he replied, not daring to probe for specifics.

Little did he know that the reason I was sleep-deprived was that I'd woken up before 5 that morning to take a graveyard shift in our O-Week 24-hour prayer room, after getting to bed past midnight, having socialized the evening away at an Isaiah 26:8 coffee bar. Just to top it off, I'd done a 30km training ride on my bike with my digsmate James after my prayer room slot.

As Christians @ Rhodes chairperson, I planned to spread myself out, visiting at least one evening event hosted by each Christian society. I had a wonderful time at each of these: they were all hugely blessed by God's Spirit and a bright, friendly atmosphere. People came to know Jesus, and they got in touch with friends they'll keep forever. But as usual, the highlights of O-Week were the unplanned moments when God took over and did something great.

On the Saturday, which also happened to be Valentine's Day, we had planned a Church Crawl, a walking tour to show first-years where all the churches in central Grahamstown are and what they're like, to encourage them to visit some and find one to call home. It was a great idea, but for one thing: it was raining that night.

I should have smelt trouble when on Thursday I saw that rain was forecast for the day of the Church Crawl, but I blithely thought it would probably happen at some other time in the day and not affect us too much. But on the day, it started raining in the early afternoon, and carried on and on and on and on. Meanwhile, I was praying everywhere I went, asking God to dry up the weather. As the evening drew closer, I oscillated between despair that no one would come and the thing would just be one big fiasco, and hope that things seemed to be clearing up. They didn't.

Nevertheless, about 20 people joined me under the Rhodes Theatre's porch, ready to explore. Among them were some random exchange students staying in Port Elizabeth, who had come up to Grahamstown for the weekend and decided that our Church Crawl was just the kind of guided tour they wanted. These 20 people were the most intrepid students I've ever seen! We squelched all around central Grahamstown in wet shoes, visiting all the churches on the programme with hardly any complaint about the weather.

And the stops at the different churches were wonderful. We'd asked each church to give a five-minute presentation welcoming the students and telling them what their churches were like in the most creative way possible. Some churches had audiovisual presentations; one even led us in five minutes of worship. The presentations showcased the beautiful diversity of Christ's Church, and as a friend remarked to me afterwards, you could feel the presence of God in all of the churches and their warm welcomes. On the way back, the new students excitedly chatted about which church(es) they would visit the next day.

I somehow got the feeling that God had allowed the rain to continue so that only really earnest first-years who loved the Church would be brave enough to come along with us. These people had been stretched in what they were prepared to do to find where God wanted them to be, and he blessed them greatly for it.

Then on Monday afternoon, after O-Week had finally wound up, and I was trying to slow down to the normality of termtime life, I got a random phone call saying something like "Hi, is that Ian? The university gave us your number. We're on a prayer journey, and would like to know if you have anything on that we can participate in today." I told the guy on the phone that his team could come and pray in our prayer room, and agreed to meet them to show them the way in an hour's time.

When I met them, I found out that they were from United Christian Student Association (UCSA) in Jeffreys Bay, that they were going around the Eastern Cape praying in different places, and had been led by the Spirit to stop in Grahamstown. Here they had found out that the previous week was O-Week and that it was a big event in the life of the city, so they had gone to the university administration, who had directed them to me. I told them how much of a Godsend they were, and how much in need of prayer we were. I explained that while the Christian societies had made great gains over O-Week, there were also tragic setbacks, such as the rape of a student in a local pub on Friday night. They prayed with me in the prayer room, writing encouragements on our posters on the walls and in the prayer journal we kept in the room for O-Week. They prayed for mercy for the many people here who have turned away from God, and really just strengthened us, saying that revival here would not come quickly or easily, but it will happen.

The prayer team had been going around completely on faith, not arranging places to stay ahead of time. So that evening, I tried to find people who would be willing to put some of them up for the night, when I went to our men's ministry fellowship meeting at church. I got a few very kind offers, but when I called them again, I found that God had already provided them with accommodation. He's so amazing!

So I'm left now without having got much academic work done in a week and a bit, wondering at what God is doing and trying to fit all the pieces together. I can't wait to see what the final picture will look like, but what I do know is that these are just a few baby steps of obedience on the great adventure of following Jesus. Watch this space!

Saddle up Your Horses!

A couple weeks ago I had a moment. It was a stunningly relaxed, balmy summer Sunday, and I was taking full advantage of it, lying on my bed and listening to a CD of beautiful Christian rock I had borrowed from my digsmate. There it hit me: There's no other place in the world where I'd want to be than right now and right here with God. There's no other life I'd rather live than the one I'm living now with him. It's the great adventure of following Christ.

Now to understand this moment of mine fully, we need to back up to last year, when I was doing something pretty ordinary, writing an advertisement for a Christians @ Rhodes term service to send out to a general student mailing list. A little while later, I got a reply from the list administrator, a powerful official in the Dean of Students' office, saying that she'd seen my advert and wanted to know if we could advertise a march that the Dean of Students division was organising for right after the service. I said I'd look into it, and we did announce the march at the service. I was the only one who went through to it. It wasn't hugely meaningful for me; I don't even remember what it was for.

But the official in the Dean of Students' office now had my email address, and I'd established some kind of vague contact with her. Now you must understand that the Dean of Students division and the Christian community on campus have traditionally not been seen to have a great relationship, due to a bit of a sour history. So I was very surprised when this official emailed me a couple weeks ago, asking if Christians @ Rhodes would like to co-host an event with them as part of Anti-Alcohol Abuse Week. I thought it was a great idea, and the rest of the leadership team agreed.

Meanwhile, Joe, the Isaiah 26:8 society chairperson, had emailed me in December about the possibility of Christians @ Rhodes negotiating with the other Christian societies about doing a joint programme of Orientation Week evening events. In the past, each society had just done their own thing to reach out to first-years during Orientation Week, leaving us open to criticisms that we were just recruiting for our own societies, which according to the Dean of Students division was a no-no. I thought it was worth a try to organise a joint programme, so I went ahead and started talking with the other societies about it.

Unfortunately, by the time everyone woke up to the new year, some societies' O-Week programmes were already in place, and so we weren't able to organise one combined event for every night of the week as we had hoped. Instead, I thought of designing one poster with all the societies' activities on it, so that people could get the picture that we were working together and not trying to compete with each other. Everyone was enthusiastic about this idea.

Then when I got to Grahamstown, I scheduled an appointment with a couple of pastors to talk about the plans for O-Week. One pastor told me that he'd been pleading unsuccessfully with the official in the Dean of Students' office to let his society advertise their events on campus. However, the official said to him that if Christians @ Rhodes wanted to put up a poster, we would be allowed to do it. He suggested that we add a combined Christians @ Rhodes event to the poster as well, to make it look less like Christians @ Rhodes advertising what the different societies were doing, and more like an O-Week programme that we were sharing with the societies. I told him that I'd speak with the official and see what she'd let us get away with.

I must admit I was rather nervous, and took a good amount of prayer and false-starts before I could go up to her office and speak to her. But when we chatted, I talked about the usual animosity that there seemed to be between the Dean of Students division and the Christian societies around O-Week, and said I thought there was a way we could co-operate. I told her about the idea of the joint poster and combined event, and said I could negotiate with the societies to try to prevent clashes between their events and the official Dean of Students/SRC events. She not only allowed us to put up a poster, but also said that she would be happy for her office to stick it up in all the university residences! I thanked her, and struggled to keep my cool until I was safely out of the building. But once I was outside, I had to shout and sing and dance around for joy. With the bad vibes that usually seemed to exist between us and the Dean of Students division, this was a miracle!

So two days later, I found myself on my bed listening to music and thinking through all this. I laughed to myself, hardly believing that somehow I had gone from negotiating between the Christian societies to mediating between the Christian community and the Dean of Students division, and that now the official I had feared for so long was offering to stick up our posters for us! These are things that only God can do.

And I thought, "What other kind of life would I be living? What could be more of an adventure than this? What work is there that satisfies like serving God?" As I said to a friend a couple of nights later, I know I haven't arrived yet. I have so much still to learn, so much to surrender to God. But I know I'm on the way there, and the journey is literally incredible! God is on the move here.

And so, as an old Steven Curtis Chapman song goes, it's time to saddle up our horses and ride out into the wild unknown of God's grace. Who knows what we may find this year?