Expository Times, June 2005
The morning service was taking place not far from South Africa 's border with Zimbabwe , close to a hospital established by a missionary from the Free Church of Scotland in the nineteenth century. There must have been five or six hundred people there. It was hot. The slow rhythm of the fans in the roof captured the attention more than they circulated the air. Old Scots psalm tunes had been sung to words in Zulu. There had been a good deal of dancing The Moderator of the Kirk's General Assembly had preached and her sermon had been translated by an interpreter and captured on the video which was being made of the service.
It was an hour and three quarters after the service began, and I was about to begin celebrating communion, when the local minister said to me that there were just a few domestic matters to be dealt with first. He moved to the steps in front of the communion table and two women came from their seats and stood in front of him. He said that the Kirk Session had met the following day, found them guilty of sins they knew they had committed, and banned them from communion until the Kirk Session decided they had served their punishment.
I turned to the church official sitting next to me, who knew the church well, for he had once been minister there. “That was dreadful” I said. “Yes” he answered slowly. “That's what your ancestors left to us, Johnston”. Later we asked whether it was always women who were dealt with in this manner and were told that it was. What of the men? Oh, they were dealt with privately.
If that is the most chilling memory of a visit to South Africa last year, the most moving was a visit to what had been a shop in a poor suburb of East London . An elder in a local church had rented the shop, without enough money to pay for the first month or two's rent. Inside there was a bright foyer where we met Rosemary and three nurses. They had all given up their paid jobs to work with those dying of AIDS. Such is the stigma attached to the disease that, although early treatment is available, they leave it till too late to admit what is wrong with them. Behind a partition four women lay dying on spotless sheets in a dark ‘ward', tended with tangible love: so dark and so loving that it reminded me of Malcolm Muggeridge describing wanting to film in Mother Theresa's House of the Dying, and being told by his cameraman that there was not nearly sufficient light. Nothing would register. But Muggeridge asked the cameraman to film anyway, and back home, when developed, everything was as clear as daylight on the film.
Part of the darkness of the AIDS pandemic is the stigma and the failure to agree to early testing. When someone proposed at the General Assembly of the Uniting Presbyterian Church that everyone there should take a test as an act of witness, the motion was defeated.
In what had been the great missionary college at Lovedale, now municipally owned, a project had been established to teach local women basic sewing. With little money, they would be able to make, not buy clothes for their families. Those women with the greatest aptitude moved on to produce academic gowns and hoods, or tracksuits, and learn basic business skills that would allow them to generate an income. The project was creative, imaginative and effective, and inspired by a missionary and his wife.
Elsewhere we saw churches where young people were creating their own music to attempt to destroy myths about AIDS, where facilities and a tiny amount of capital had been provided for a man who painstakingly produced a few bricks to sell each day, or visited the foundations of a school which will be built for the orphans of AIDS by congregations in the west of Scotland.
It is such a strange amalgam the Church, all our churches: at once judgmental and sacrificially loving, fearful and creative.
So how did the communion service begin in that church where judgment had been passed on the women who the minister called “fallen sinners”? I tried to produce an appropriate version of what the liturgists call “the gracious invitation”, and said that St Paul wrote that we had all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and so this was a sacrament for sinners, a feast for the fallen. But by then the women I wanted to hear the words had left.