A conspiracy of silence – South African church history

The charismatic renewal movement in South Africa — don’t talk about it!

A little over a year ago I read Charles Villa-Vicencio’s Trapped in apartheid, which had been published 25 years previously, at the height of the struggle against apartheid. Villa-Vicencio’s thesis was that “the English-speaking churches” were trapped in apartheid, and so could not effectively struggle against it. What struck me, though, was that his book left out huge chunks of church history, and things that were very influential in the Christian churches in that period. One of them was the charismatic renewal movement.

I blogged about my response to Villa-Vicencio’s book at the time: Notes from underground: Trapped in apartheid – South African churches, and after discussing it with a few other people began to do some research into it. I thought it was a story worth recording. I posted an outline for a research project and began to collect information.

Some people were willing to share information, while others were not. That was when I discovered the conspiracy of silence. So it raised yet another research question. The first was “What can account for the rise and fall of the charismatic renewal movement in South Africa, and what effect did it have on South African Christianity?” The second question raised by this was “Why are some people apparently so unwilling to talk about it, and so eager to pretend that it never happened?” That is in itself a significant historical question.

As I tried to find out more, I began to hear rumours. John de Gruchy, a Congregational minister and a respected academic, I was told, had written a book on the history of the charismatic renewal in South Africa, but it had never been published. Another rumour went further: de Gruchy had been told that he should not publish it, because if he did so, it would destroy his academic career.

Here are some extracts from Dawid Venter’s review of a book by John de Gruchy that was published:

John de Gruchy’s The Church Struggle in South Africa first appeared in 1979–a year after P. W. Botha’s ascension to power, two years after Steve Biko’s death, and three years after the Soweto uprising. Still to come were Botha’s two states of emergency (1985, 1986-1990), arrests of thousands, death squads, and assassinations of activists (such as Matthew Goniwe, died 1985), torture of clergy (like Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, 1986), destabilization of frontline states, surveillance through the multilevel Joint Management Centres, detentions without trial, and endless rounds of forced removals.

Actually the forced removals and detention without trial had been around a long time, and one of those who had died in detention, about the same time as Steve Biko, was Phakamile Mabija, an Anglican youth worker in Kimberley.

Venter goes on to say

The title inevitably raises questions about what “the church” and “struggle” may mean. For John de Gruchy “the church” is a theological term encompassing all Christian denominations (see p. 3). Not all denominations were involved in “struggle,” nor does De Gruchy deal with all who were (p. 86). Instead, he concentrates on “English-speaking churches” of British origin (p. 18) that opposed apartheid policies and participated in the South African Council of Churches (p. 84). The resultant list comprises Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists (in which John de Gruchy is ordained). The four denominations are conflated with major ecumenical organizations to connote the “ecumenical church” (p. 201), which by implication also incorporates “the mission church” and “the black church.”

In a footnote Venter remarks

One of the earliest references to English-speaking churches in this manner is found in Peter B. Hinchliff, “The Crisis for English Christianity in South Africa,” Pro Veritate 1.7 (1962): 1. Hinchliff wrote, “By ‘English’ Christianity in South Africa I mean those Churches which derive from Britain, who use English as their principal language of worship, who are in communion with a ‘mother’ Church in England, and some of whose clergy come from England … [and] are probably unhappy about the apartheid policy of the present government” (p. 1).[1]

Like Venter, I had been struck by the references to “the English-speaking churches” in Villa-Vicencio’s book. It seemed a strange limitation. There were many other denominations involved in such bodies as the South African Council of Churches, though there were two ecumenical institutions that did seem to be coterminous with “the English-speaking churches”: the Church Unity Commission and the Federal Theological Seminary. The latter, after surviving government pressure and persecution, failed disastrously about 10 years ago. Both seemed (to me at least) to end up showing disunity rather than unity.

Among the excluded groups are the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Churches and the Baptist Churches. Though they spoke English at their gatherings, the Roman Catholics and Lutherans were not, for the most part, of British origin. The Roman Catholic Church had Irish, Italian, German and other missionaries. The Lutherans had German, Swedish and Norwegian missionaries. The Baptists, however, had a fair prioportion of British missionaries, so what made them different? And yet the Church Unity Commission admitted the Tsonga Presbyterian Church (later the Evangelical Presbyterian Church), which had Swiss missionaries.

While it may be metahistory, the concentration of some South African church historians on what they called “the English-speaking churches” is in itself a fact worthy of historical study. What motives and attitudes lie behind this selection and conceptualisation? What has shaped South African church historiography in this way? Could its roots perhaps be found in Brit-Boer rivalries that go back to the Anglo-Boer War, and beyond? Certainly some Afrikaner nationalists saw it in this way. They saw the multiracial nature of “the English-speaking churches” as part of an elaborate conspiracy against the Afrikaner people, an attempt to coopt blacks into the anti-Boer forces and promote “Boerehaat”. And the nationalisation of church schools uinder Bantu Education was one of the steps taken to counter it.

I’m caricaturing now, of course. But the “English-speaking churches” school of historiography invites such a caricature, and my preliminary research into the history of the charismatic renewal showed me first, that there was in fact such a school, and secondly, that they rather pointedly ignored the charismatic renewal movement in their writings, even though I know for a fact that it affected two of the “English-speaking churches” (the Anglicans and the Presbyterians).

In my search for sources I looked through several issues of the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, which might almost be described as the official journal of the “English-speaking churches” school. Over 25 years there was only one issue that attempted to deal with the charismatic renewal, Number 7, of June 1974. But in its article on the Catholic charismatic renewal it dealt almost entirely with events in America — information one could find in numerous books. It said next to nothing about people and events in South Africa like Fr George Purves, Fr Ignatius Heer, and the ubiqutous lay evangelist Cliff de Gersigny, whose jaunty spirituality some found rather daunting. [2] When you read each issue of the journal as it comes out, these things don’t strike you. But when you look through the table of contents of 80 issues one after the other, a pattern begins to emerge, a pattern of gaps and absences.

In 1973 Godfrey Ashby, also an academic, but from a different school of thought than the “English-speaking churches” school, said that there were three forces shaping the life of the Anglican Church in the Eastern Cape at that time: group dynamics, challenge groups and the charismatic renewal. movement. Many people seemed to back one of those and scorn the others, but he said they needed all of them. He said all three were affecting the churches, and that there were some Anglo-Catholics who were alienated from the charismatic movement, and some Evangelicals (mainly non-Anglican) who were pietist, and alienated from the challenge group thing, but generally all three were causing a real turmoil and revival in the church.

None of this is apparent in the writings of the Cape Town school (which might be another name for the “English-speaking churches” school). Yet all three of these forces — group dynamics, challenge groups and the charismatic renewal — had a significant influence on the Anglican Church, at least, in the period 1965-1985. And the question church historians need to ask is what influence they had, or failed to have, on the life of the church and the role of the church in society.

Group dynamics (also referred to as T-groups, or sensitivity training) was seen as a huge threat by some government commissions, softening people up for communism, and generally weakening their neurotic grasp on “their own”. For some people, however, it became an obsession, an idol, a cult, so that they wanted the entire life of the church to be all process and no content. This sensitivity training was done ecumenically (yes, mainly by the “English-speaking churches”, though some Roman Catholics and Lutherans were allowed to muddy the waters).

“Challenge Groups” were set up by Anglicans to challenge instances of racism in the church. In my own experience they were talking shops, adept at sidestepping the real issues and getting bogged down in bureaucratic trivialities. But that is just one person’s impression, and clearly Godfrey Ashby’s experience was different. Some historical research is needed to get a clearer picture. Other denominations may have had similar programmes.

The charismatic renewal certainly affected Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians. At one time I was told that there were 13 Presbyterian ministers in Durban who had been “zapped” (baptised in the Holy Spirit), but where are they today? One is in America, but he’s not saying anything. The Methodists, too, are keeping mum. “It was divisive,” was all one would say, from which I deduce that the Methodists were affected by the charismatic renewal, but don’t want to talk about it.

It also seems to me that a big change came over the charismatic renewal in South Africa about 1980, and that it did indeed become divisive after that. It would be quite important for understanding the history of Christianity in South Africa to know what happened and why, and what effects it had.

So after a year of preliminary research, trying to see if there is anything worth writing about, I seem to have uncovered a conspiracy of silence, and wonder what is this big secret that no one wants to talk about.
——

[1] Dawid Venter. “Review of John W. de Gruchy with Steve de Gruchy, The Church Struggle in South Africa,” H-SAfrica, H-Net Reviews, May, 2007. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=261071183842994.

[2] Cliff de Gersigny later left the Roman Catholic Church and joined a Protestant group.