Reforrm and Renewal - the South African way

From the website of the Archbishop of South Africa, Thabo Makgoba:

In just over six weeks' time, representatives from all 28 dioceses, including experts in strategic planning, will hold two meetings, back-to-back, in which the Province will seize a Kairos moment to review our Vision and Mission as a church, to strategise around ways to implement our priorities, and then to make practical decisions on how to implement them in a manner that is productive, holistic and transformative.

Five years ago, the Province adopted a Vision and Mission Statement. In it we declared that the Anglican community in Southern Africa seeks to be:

• Anchored – in the love of Christ
• Committed – to God’s mission
• Transformed – by the Holy Spirit

Archbishop visits victims of Duduza tornado
4 October 2011 (Hope Africa gallery)

We added that across the diverse countries and cultures of our region, we seek:

• To honour God in worship that feeds and empowers us for faithful witness and service
• To embody and proclaim the message of God’s redemptive hope and healing for people and creation
• To grow communities of faith that form, inform, and transform those who follow Christ.

Within the context provided by that statement, we declared our Provincial priorities in the succeeding decade to be: 

• Renewal for transformative worship
• Theological education and formation
• Leadership development
• Health (HIV and AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis)
• The environment
• Women and gender
• Protection and nurture of children and young people
• public advocacy

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To me the tone and substance might have significant and constructive lessons for the CofE, if we could hear.

1. To begin with God-orientated vision. Not fear of collapse.
2. A history of Kairos (remember the Kairos document of 1985?): embracing the possibility of transformation (wiki). As opposed to cautious and arthritic legislative reform and tinkering.
3. To look equally inwards and out: to see that the church is only whole when it is engaged in a transformative - and reflexive - manner with the injustices of the society in which we live.
4. And, as a united church, to be prepared to address public issues which are neither easy nor one-sided but where there is the possibility that the church could make a substantive and positive difference to people's live.

And, frankly, a sense of excitement. 

I don't doubt that in the cities and the deep countryside there will also be significant anxiety about what all this will mean for them. The view through the Archbishop's eyes is most unlikely to be the same view as a worshipper in a village outside Olifantshoek, say, or in the centre of Bloemfontein.

But we are buried under too much sediment: not only our history but also the weight of being the State church.