The Story of the (Dis)unity of the Church (Part2)

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Origins of Church Unity and Church Disunity

Chapter 2 Persecution as an Ingredient of a Divine spiritual Recipe

Chapter 3 Disunity as Demonic Strategy

Chapter 4 Some special Gospel Tools towards Unity

Chapter 5 Honour for the Despised

Chapter 6 Obstacles to Unity

Chapter 7 Antidotes to Disunity

Chapter 8 The Word unites the true Church

Chapter 10 Uniting Dynamite

Chapter 11 False Alternatives

Chapter 12 Two special Facilitators of Church Unity

Chapter 13 Leadership in Humility

Chapter 14 The Herrnhut Moravians in Church Unity Endeavours

Chapter 15 Unifying Christian Movements and Events

Chapter 16 Evolving International Prayer for Unity

Chapter 17 Fighting Discrimination against People

Chapter 18 Prayer erupts in different Places

Chapter 19 The Road to the Global Day of Prayer

Chapter 20 Challenges at the Cape in Recent Years

Appendix 1 - Jews First!

Appendix 2 - Some Autobiographical Background

Chapter 15 Unifying Christian Movements and Events

It is no co-incidence that a meta-historical battle of unseen things was revolving around slaves (not only) at the Cape for centuries. The inhuman practices of slavery were regarded as reconcilable with Christian norms in spite of the views of early critics, such as the Spanish priest Alfonso de Sandoval in 1627. Furthermore, influential high-ranking people like Queen Isabella of Spain and Queen Elisabeth I of England however had their reservations about the trade in human beings. Through the lack of international communications, the sensitivity to the inhumanity of slavery broke through only relatively slowly.                                                                                                                 The slaves - and their offspring who came to the Cape in the 17th century - turned out to be an important part of the ideological battleground of the forces in the unseen world. Therefore it is no surprise that God used a slave as a divine instrument at the time at the coronation of Denmark’s King Christian VI in 1731.                                                                                                                              While the Church in the West was hardly aware of the presence of unseen occult forces, Islam gained ground in different parts of the world. The spiritually dead church at the Cape had no credible message. The mystical Islamic Sufism could expand unchecked and was hardly detected. A sore point, and consequently a matter for confession, is the effect of slavery on family life. During the 15^th to 18^th century, very few people in Europe and North America had ethical problems with slavery. 

The Rebirth of Western Christian Culture                                                                                 The rebirth of Western Christian culture can be traced back to those men and women who carried the revival fires across America and Europe during the twenty years of 1727-1747. It became a predominantly German movement until 1740. Then the Anglo-Saxons took over the leadership. The Great Awakening started in 1720 with the preaching of Theodore J. Frelinghuysen, who was born in New Jersey from German-Dutch parentage. The revival that began with Frelinghuysen, a Dutch Reformed Pietist, was spread to the Scottish-Irish Presbyterians under the ministry of Gilbert Tennent. The fire leapt over to the Baptists of Pennsylvania and Virginia when the extraordinary awakening began in Northampton, Massachusetts, under the ministry of Jonathan Edwards in December 1734. Edwards played a critical role in shaping the First Great Awakening.

Across the Atlantic Ocean George Whitefield, the other key figure of the First Great Awakening in America, studied together in Oxford at this time with the Wesley brothers John and Samuel. There Whitefield became serious about spiritual things, joining the ‘Holy Club’. A key step in the development of John Wesley's ministry, influenced and initially egged on by Whitefield, would travel and preach outdoors. In due course John Wesley and George Whitefield would revolutionalise Church ministry, using open-air preaching. Thousands flocked to hear the irresistible eloquence and engaging fervor of Whitefield especially.

Second Wind of the First Great Awakening in America                                                         Since late 1735 the New England revival had begun to decline. But Whitefield’s arrival there heralded a second wave of deep spiritual impact. He took the revival to heights it had never before attained, inspiring a host of others to engage in revival work. During these first two visits to the US he began with open-air preaching and remarkable scenes that had accompanied his ministry in Britain.

John Wesley helped form and organize small Christian groups in Great Britain and Ireland that developed intensive and personal accountability, discipleship and religious instruction. Under Wesley's direction, Methodists became leaders in many social issues of the day, including prison reform and the abolition of slavery.

The first Great Awakening faded out by the middle of the 1740’s. But its results for the forward movement of the unity of the Body of Christ were very significant. As a result of the Great Awakening many African Americans and Native Americans came into the Protestant Churches. As oppressed peoples, who had been denied educational opportunities, the emotional elements of “The New Light’ Protestants had great appeal to them. Ambivalently, the Great Awakening also led to the rise of many denominations and sects.

Sadly, doctrinal differences between prominent role players did use some energy, thus affecting the impact of the movement adversely to some extent.  John Wesley and Count Zinzendorf parted ways a mere two years after the former had reported excitedly about his visit to Marienborn, (Germany) in 1740, a rift developed between Wesley and the Moravians. In the following decades relations between the Moravians and the Methodists were strained. A low point was reached when Wesley published a pamphlet against Zinzendorf and the Moravians in 1755. John Wesley and Whitefield also separated because of doctrinal differences.

Evangelism with global Ramifications

The seed that Georg Schmidt, the first missionary to South Africa, had sown at the Cape during his stint of not even seven years, germinated with a global impact. Schmidt was said to have been a man of great faith and a prayer warrior. In fact, colonists told his two colleagues Nitchmann and Eller admiringly during their stay in Cape Town en route from Ceylon, how Schmidt succeeded ‘to teach a Hottentot to pray as he has done.’ The intelligent Khoi female referred to got the name Magdalena when Schmidt baptized her in the river near to the present day Genadendal. She became the first indigenous evangelist of Sub Saharan Africa. Magdalena was also the first known indigenous female church planting evangelist of all time.

          Another convert of Schmidt impacted Ds Helperus Van Lier, a young minister from Holland, who would have a worldwide influence from the Cape.

A spiritual Giant: Reverend Helperus van Lier

Officially Van Lier was appointed as the third minister (also in rank) of the Groote Kerk, the first Cape church. He had already been impacted spiritually in a deep way before his departure from Holland. The evangelical revival which started in England under John Wesley, had swept into the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia.

          Van Lier found fertile ground among a group of Christians at the Cape, including a group of pietistic Lutherans, the spiritual descendants of those believers who had been impacted by the short stint of Georg Schmidt, more than 40 years before Van Lier’s arrival. Quite soon after his arrival at the Cape in 1786, the legacy of Schmidt worked through into Van Lier’s life when he was present at the deathbed of one of the missionary pioneer’s converts. He saw how the Khoi believer died ‘in volkome rus en vrede van sy siel en in vertroue op die Here.’[1] It made such a deep impression on Van Lier that he mentioned this in one of his letters to his uncle Professor Petrus Hofstede, an influential academic in Rotterdam, who was at that stage still an opponent of the Moravian brethren.

          Van Lier was encouraged and inspired in yet another way.  In 1787 the boat carrying the Moravian Bishop J.F. Reichel en route to Germany from India made a stop at the Cape. It would have been natural for Reichel not only to share something of the Moravians’ passion for the lost but also about the 24 hour prayer watch that was still going strong in Herrnhut after 60 years. Reichel’s visit spurred Van Lier and all his followers on to do something about the spiritual welfare of the Khoi and the slaves. Conversely, Reichel took the challenge of the resumption of the mission work in the Cape Colony back to Herrnhut.

The international Impact of Van Lier

The young preacher Van Lier almost single-handedly set the evangelical world ablaze. His letters from the Cape to Europe were very influential indeed. His testimony - in the form of six letters to Rev. John Newton - was originally written in Latin and translated by the well-known poet William Cowper. The title of the booklet in English is The Power of Grace, illustrated in six letters from a Minister of the Reformed church to the Rev John Newton. Van Lier’s story of the influence of divine grace in his life seems to have made a lasting impression on Newton who belonged to the inner circle of (slave) abolitionists.[2] Van Lier’s humility came through when he insisted that a pseudonym Christodulus (slave of Christ), and not his own name, should be used on the publication of his letters to Rev. Newton. (It was published in Edinburgh by Campbell and Wallace, 1792.)[3]

          Various letters of Van Lier had the goal of getting the Moravians back to the Cape. After initially failing to sway his uncle, the Rotterdam clergyman and academic Professor Petrus Hofstede (1716-1803) into action on this score, Van Lier wrote to Ds. Hubert in Amsterdam. In a letter to his uncle, Petrus Hofstede, he wrote about the Khoi believer whose death he witnessed, that the native believer was putting other Christians to shame (Schmidt, Ds Dr Helperus Ritzema van Lier, 1937:6).

          It is only natural that the prayer chain – 24 hours a day seven days a week - at Herrnhut would have included intercession for their Bishop Reichel on his trip to the East. But no one probably have envisaged that this would lead so soon to the resumption of their missionary work at Baviaanskloof.

          Van Lier’s correspondence continued to have an impact in Europe. Through his evangelical zeal Van Lier definitely laid the foundations for a Cape missionary society. Van Lier’s correspondence may have influenced his uncle not only to attack the internal ‘onverdraagzaamheid’ (intolerance) in the church in Holland, but also to challenge the general arrogant attitude towards ‘de heidenen’ (the pagans). God used Hofstede hereafter to such an extent that religious tolerance increased significantly in the Netherlands towards the end of the 18^th century.

Impact of Prayer in Europe and America

In Europe there was a significant increase in missionary zeal at the end of the 18^th century. The 24-hour prayer chain of the Moravians in Herrnhut that started in 1728, was definitely still going strong. In England evangelicalism was gaining ground and Christians were praying. Starting in 1784, believers throughout the British Midlands met for one hour on the first Monday of every month to pray for a revival which would lead to the spread of the gospel to the most distant parts of the globe. Intensive prayer preceded the revival of 1792-1820 when no less than 12 mission agencies came into being. In London and Rotterdam two interdenominational missionary societies were founded in 1795 and 1797 respectively.

The Gospel gets Wings                                                                                                          William Carey, a young Northamptonshire shoemaker, differed with the prevailing view among Protestants. (For centuries Protestants had been insisting that the office of apostle was limited to the first century only, and that it was to the apostles that the Great Commission had been given. It was taught that they had died out.) Carey yearned for God's people to persevere in their new commitment to prayer and to translate that commitment into action.                                                                          He began in 1788 to plan a pamphlet setting out his conviction that the commission to preach the gospel to every creature was obligatory on all Christians for all time. He was clearly influenced by the Moravians, possibly especially after reading the pamphlet Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren Established Among the Heathen. It first appeared in 1790 under the editorship of the well-known British Moravian leader Christian Ignatius la Trobe, who also later impacted missionary work at the Cape.                                                                       Carey’s work eventually appeared on 12 May 1792 under the title An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens: in which the religious state of the different nations of the world, the success of former undertakings, and the practicability of further undertakings, are considered. His treatise was seminal. Carey’s opportunity came on 30 May 1792 when he preached to the Northamptonshire Baptist Association at Nottingham. Carey chose as his text words from Isaiah 54:2: 'Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes . . .' Carey saw a parallel between the centuries-old plight of the exiled nation of Judah – perceived by many people as forgotten by God -  and the unproductive and desolate Church of his own day; in the biblical promise of a new and wider destiny for Judah lay the promise of countless new members of the Christian family to be drawn from all over the world. Once again, however, Carey insisted that God's promise was also his command. God was about to do great things by extending the kingdom of Jesus throughout the nations, and therefore Christians must attempt great things in taking the gospel to the world: 'Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.'                                                                          That William Carey was disseminating the Moravian legacy of holistic missionary work is evident when we consider that J.E. Hutton, the prime 20^th Century Moravian historian, includes Carey with the pioneers of modern missionary work. The effect of William Carey’s book An enquiry into the obligations of Christians to use means for the conversion of the heathens was quite deep in Britain and North America. Protestant missionary work literally exploded hereafter, with forays from Europe and America to all parts of the globe in the 19^th century. Doctrinal differences slowing the advance of the Gospel only to a limited extent.

The Cape Missionary Contribution to the Abolition of Slavery

The early 19^th century battle that raged at the Cape around the Khoi and the slaves – in which the missionary Dr John Philip had a big hand - had worldwide ramifications when it aided the cause of the abolition of slavery.

          During Dr Philip’s visit to England in 1826, he met the evangelical parliamentarian Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. The latter had close links to William Wilberforce, the staunch fighter for the complete emancipation of slaves.  In his subsequent correspondence with Buxton, Philip linked the slave issue to the situation of the Khoisan in the Cape Colony already in his first comprehensive report on the LMS stations although he made a distinction between the problems with the Khoisan and those pertaining to slaves (Walker, A History of Southern Africa, 1964:153). Ordinance 50 of 1828 and last not least the publication of Philip’s two-volumed Researches in South Africa were major factors in the run-up to the final emancipation of slaves worldwide.

No lame Duck                                                                                                                           Injured in an accident in infancy, Thomas Pringle could not follow his father into farming. After attending Edinburgh University he worked as a clerk and continued writing, soon succeeding to editorships of journals and newspapers. In 1816 one of his poems came to the attention of the novelist Sir Walter Scott, who admired it. A friendship developed between the two and through Scott's influence, whilst facing hard times and unable to earn a living, Pringle secured free passage and a British Government resettlement offer of land in South Africa, to which he emigrated in 1820. Being lame, he took to literary work in Cape Town rather than farming, opened a school with fellow Scotsman John Fairbairn, and conducted two newspapers, the South African Journal, and South African Commercial Advertiser. However, both papers became suppressed for their free criticisms of the Colonial Government, and his school closed.

          Thomas Pringle returned to the UK and settled in London. An anti-slavery article which he had written in South Africa before he left was published in the New Monthly Magazine, and brought him to the attention of Thomas Buxton, William Wilberforce and others. This led to his appointment as Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. He began working for the Committee of the Anti-Slavery Society in March 1827, and continued for seven years. He offered work to Mary Prince, a former slave, enabling her to write her autobiography, describing her experiences under slavery in the West Indies. This book caused a sensation, partly arising from libel actions disputing its accuracy, and went into many editions.                                                                                                                                      As Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society he helped steer the organization towards its eventual success; in 1834, with a widening of the electoral franchise, the Reformed British Parliament passed legislation to bring an end to slavery in the British dominions - the aim of Pringle's Society. Pringle signed the Society's notice to set aside 1 August 1834 as a religious thanksgiving for the passing of the Act. However, the legislation did not came into effect until August 1838. Thomas Pringle was unable to witness this moment; he had died from tuberculosis in December 1834 at the age of 45.   It is doubtful if William Wilberforce would have been able to die with satisfaction after his half a century of pioneering fighting of slavery, if he did not receive the support from the Cape.

The Start of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA)                                                   The Young Men's Christian Association and its female counterpart (YWCA) were established to provide low-cost housing in a safe Christian environment for rural young men and women journeying to the cities in search of employment. It was associated with industrialisation and the movement of young people to cities to work. The YMCA combined preaching in the streets and the distribution of religious tracts with a social ministry. Philanthropists saw them as places for wholesome recreation that would preserve youth from the temptations of alcohol, gambling, and prostitution and that would promote good citizenship.                                                                                                              The YMCA was founded by George Williams, a London draper, who was typical of the young men drawn to the cities by the Industrial Revolution. He and his colleagues were concerned about the lack of healthy activities for young men in major cities; the options available were usually taverns and brothels. Williams's idea grew out of meetings he held for prayer and Bible-reading among his fellow-workers in a business in the city of London, and on 6 June 1844, he founded the first YMCA in London with the purpose of improving the spiritual condition of young men engaged in the drapery, embroidery, and other trades. By 1851, there were YMCAs in the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States.

Charles Finney as a Vanguard of the mid-19^th Century Revival                                         Charles Finney can be regarded as a vanguard of the revival of the mid-19^th century in the US. The highlight of Charles Finney's evangelistic ministry was the 'nine mighty years' of 1824 to 1832, during which he conducted powerful revival meetings.  In addition to becoming a popular Christian evangelist, Finney was involved with the movement for the abolution of slavery in America, denouncing it frequently from the pulpit. In 1835, he moved to Ohio where he became a professor and later president of Oberlin College from 1851 to 1866. Oberlin became a bastion against slavery and was among the first American colleges to co-educate Blacks and women together with White men.

Beginning of the US Holiness Movement

In 1835 Phoebe, wife of the Methodist physician Walter Palmer and her sister Sarah Lankford, began women’s prayer meetings each Tuesday afternoon with Methodist women. Two years later, Phoebe Palmer became the leader of the meetings, which were referred to as the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness. The meetings were held in the Palmers' home.  Beginning in 1839, men were allowed to attend the meetings.  Among these men were Methodist bishops, theologians, and ministers. That women were thus presiding over influential men was therefore quite revolutionary for the time.

            Phoebe Palmer and her husband Walter became itinerant preachers as they received more and more invitations from churches, conferences, and camp meetings. Although Walter Palmer spoke at these meetings, it was Phoebe who became better known. She played a significant role in spreading the concept of Christian holiness throughout the United States and the rest of the world. She wrote several books, including The Way of Holiness, which became a foundational book in the Holiness movement. This renewed interest in holiness eventually influenced the Methodist Church nationwide.                    Word of these successful prayer meetings inspired similar gatherings around the country, bringing Christians of many denominations together to pray. Phoebe soon found herself in the limelight - the most influential woman in the largest, fast-growing religious group in America. At her instigation, missions began, camp meetings were organized, and an estimated 25,000 Americans got converted.

 

Revival in Hamilton (Canada)                                                                                                                

The revival that started at the end of September 1857 with Jeremiah Lanphier, a 48-year old New York businessman, received great prominence traditionally. However, the revival that started at the same time in Hamilton (Ontario), had a much greater impact. By 1857, prayer movements were growing in Ontario. In August or September 1857, Walter and Phoebe Palmer came from New York to hold what turned out to be very successful meetings. Returning to the States, they were delayed in Hamilton. On 8 October, the next day, the Methodist ministers convened a prayer meeting at which sixty-five people attended. The greater number of these people pledged themselves to pray for an "outpouring of the Holy Spirit." That night, Phoebe Palmer felt that God was about to move. On the evening of the 9^th October, a larger crowd met in the basement of the John Street Methodist Church. Twenty-one people were converted.

The following meetings were made up mostly of exhortations and testimonies. Many testified of conversion, while those who were already Christians testified to an entire dedication of heart and life to Christ. The Canadian Awakening of 1857 sparked the Third Great Awakening in the United States.

The Revival of 1858 in the USA was easily the most unique awakening that the US has ever experienced. Its beginning, its approval from almost every source, its spirit of cooperation, and its lack of emotional excess easily set it apart from other awakenings. It contained all the wholesome features of other awakenings and sifted out the questionable ones. Ultimately, this awakening gave birth to a new era in evangelism. Its force was felt on three continents.

The Revival in the UK                                                                                                                 News of the North American revival soon hit the UK. The first place to be affected was Ulster, and a mighty revival hit that region in 1859 with somewhere around 100,000 people converted, which as a percentage of the people in that country was quite staggering. About the same time and quite independently Wales was also affected and a revival brought around 100,000 people to Christ. The 1859 revival was one that affected virtually the whole of the UK. The revival arrived in Scotland in the north of the country and as time went on it spread down south, until it arrived in England. Liverpool was one of the centres of this revival.

            A report from the 1859 revival in the US was a direct spark that helped to ignite the Worcester event of April 1860 at the Cape. Just as that revival brought Dwight Moody into the international frame, Dr Andrew Murray became a personality that would impact the Church globally. Ironic divine interaction followed when Andrew Murray had no liberty to accept the invitation of Moody to address a big international mission conference in New York of 1900.

Social Impact of the 1857/8 Revival

Because of evangelical pre-occupation with evangelism first, then social action. This caused some disunity. Unitarian "keepers of the social conscience" asserted that a true religion was not merely a spiritual experience to enjoy and a holy life to be lived. But the Evangelicals also had advocates of "self-sacrificing zeal in good works." The churches were bettering the condition of destitute and needy as well as giving them the Gospel message. Interdenominational societies as well as the local churches distributed food and clothing, found employment, resettled children, and provided medical aid for the poorer classes. From just a few before the Revival of 1857-58, the city missions increased to several hundred by 1860. It must never be forgotten that a great Civil War erupted within three years of the 1857-58 Revival. To understand what the 1857-58 awakening might have done, one has only to look at the increase of the societies for social betterment in Britain following the 1859-60 revival there.

Out of the 1858 Awakening came the introduction of the Y.M.CA. into American cities. It produced new leadership, such as that of Dwight L. Moody, out of which came the religious work carried on in the armies during the civil war. It gave impetus to the creation of the Christian and Sanitary Commission and numerous freedmen's societies that were formed in the midst of the war. Benevolent enterprises flourished during the civil war, and the period saw charities on a larger scale than ever before.

Leaders in Church Cooperation

South Africans were among the world leaders in church cooperation when the Evangelical Alliance was formally started in 1857 in Cape Town. In fact, at this occasion the founders declared that an Evangelical Alliance existed in the Mother City in all but name already in 1842. The South African Evangelical Alliance thus functioned long before it kicked off formally in England and six years before it started in Germany. They referred to the move when pastors of different churches had a weekly prayer meeting a few years after the slave emancipation.  The South African branch of the Evangelical Alliance was the first outside Europe. This was the start of the worldwide movement, which again brought the major correction in Lausanne in 1974, after Marxists had successfully infiltrated the World Council of Churches.

          Cape Evangelicals got together in Cape Town in 1842 to work out a strategy to reach the lost of Southern Africa. Within five years after the centenary of the start of Georg Schmidt’s endeavour ‘concerted action had arrived.’ At that stage there were only 9 mission societies in South Africa, the bulk of which had to be contributed to the endeavours of Dr John Philip, the superintendent of the London Missionary Society.

The Run-up to the Cape Revival

The start of the Alliance in Cape Town led indirectly to the opening of the Stellenbosch DRC theological seminary in 1859.  The next year some 400 delegates from the Dutch Reformed, Congregational, Lutheran, Methodist, Moravian and Presbyterian churches converged on Worcester for an epoch-making conference. Worldwide it was one of the first of its kind.

          The 1860 revival of Worcester that started in the church where the well-known Dr Andrew Murray was the minister, has been described as a result of teamwork (Brandt, 1998:58). It has been reported that his father, Rev Andrew Murray (sr.), had prayed for revival every Friday evening since 1822. By 1860 he would thus have prayed more or less 38 years.  The gifted young dominee Andrew Murray, who had just come to Worcester prior to this, would be impacted during the revival along with thousands in the Western Cape. The younger Andrew Murray appears to have at least matched his father as a prayerful minister of the Word. About his life the secular Dictionary of South African Biography, Volume 1 (p.578) wrote: ‘The golden ray of prayer illumined all he did... He believed that nothing that was amiss and demanded correction could not be corrected or endured by prayer.’  This is confirmed when one takes a closer look at the titles of his 250 books. There one finds titles like De Kracht des Gebeds (1860), Pray without Ceasing (1898) and The prayer life (1912).

          A significant contribution to the revival came from Montagu where three believers came together for early morning prayer on Sundays from the beginning of January 1860. Then there was the missionary conference in Worcester in April 1860 that can be regarded as the run-up to the revival. Three hundred and seventy preachers and laymen attended. The Presbyterian Dr James Adamson set the tone with a report at the conference of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in America, and the conditions for revival.  Ds Andrew Murray (sr.) was so overawed by the same topic that he burst into tears. And then there was a passionate prayer by his son and namesake that stirred the hearts of many, so much so that someone has suggested that this caused the beginning of the revival.

          Montagu was the first place to experience revival under Rev James Cameron, a Methodist minister. In May 1860 the revival spilled over there with three prayer meetings per day. There was also great conviction of sin and confession.

         

Special Results   

An interesting view expressed at the mission conference in Worcester was: ‘the home of every Christian should be a mission station’. The success of Worcester led to a similar one in Cape Town in January 1861. A special innovation – worldwide perhaps a first – was that the conference was conducted in two languages on alternate days, Dutch and English. The next missionary conference took place in Genadendal in 1865 where 20 participants of the Rhenish, Berlin, London, Dutch Reformed and Moravian groups gathered. In 1872 Andrew Murray suggested regular missionary conferences with all churches and missionary societies.

William Booth and the Salvation Army

The most prominent successor to implement the legacy of street preaching was William Booth. After his marriage to Catherine Mumford in 1855, Booth spent several years as a Methodist minister, travelling all around the country. He shared God's word to all who would listen. Yet he felt that God wanted more from him, that he should be doing more to reach ordinary people. He returned to London with his family, having resigned his position as a Methodist minister.

One day in 1865 he found himself in the East End of London, preaching to crowds of people in the streets. Outside the Blind Beggar pub some missioners heard him speaking and were so impressed by his powerful preaching that they asked him to lead a series of meetings they were holding in a large tent. Booth soon realised he had found his destiny. He formed his own movement, which he called The Christian Mission.                                                                                                                Slowly the mission began to grow but the work was hard. His wife wrote that Booth would 'stumble home night after night haggard with fatigue, often his clothes were torn and bloody bandages swathed his head where a stone had struck'. Evening meetings were held in an old warehouse where urchins threw stones and fireworks through the window. Outposts were eventually established and in time attracted converts, yet the results remained discouraging. It was not until 1878 when The Christian Mission changed its name to The Salvation Army that things began to happen on a significant scale. The idea of an army fighting sin caught the imagination of the people and the Salvation Army began to grow rapidly. Booth's fiery sermons and sharp imagery drove the message home and more and more people found themselves willing to leave their past behind and start a new life as a soldier in the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army championed holistic ministry, including care for the poor and needy, almost unprecedentedly.

John Mott, a Church and Missions Leader                                                                            Dwight Moody became an important divine instrument to impact John Mott. The New York-born John Mott (May 25, 1865 – January 31, 1955) was nurtured in a devout Methodist home. He came to faith at Cornell University after hearing and speaking personally with C. T. Studd, the renowned cricket-player-turned-evangelist (and one of the "Cambridge Seven" who later worked with Hudson Taylor in China). Mott was struck by Studd's admonition, "Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not. Seek ye first the kingdom of God." That same year, at the 1886 Northfield (Massachusetts) Student Conference led by Dwight Moody, Mott stepped up and became one of the 100 men who volunteered for foreign missions.                                                                                                                            Mott's destiny, however, lay not in foreign missions but in evangelizing college students and inspiring others to foreign mission work. He became college secretary of the YMCA in 1888, when the organization was consciously evangelical and aggressively evangelistic. That same year, he helped organize the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM), a branch of the YMCA and YWCA. By the time he spoke at SVM's 1951 convention, over 20,000 volunteers had gone to mission fields through its efforts.

The Rise of Faith Missions                                                                                                                                                               Whereas the Moravians and the Salvation Army still had close connections with the mainline churches, the so-called faith missions made a point of it that they do not solicit funds from anybody, also not from churches. Born in Germany, the son of a tax collector, George Müller lived a wicked life as a youth but was converted at about age 20 at a Moravian mission. This connection must have accounted for his desire to minister to Jews. Another connection was the impact of August Hermann Francke’s biography which he read at this time. The orphanages and other institutions of Halle already had impacted other great men more than a century prior to this. (There Count Zinzendorf started his Order of the Mustard Seed as a teenager in the boarding school.) George Müller went to England in 1829 to prepare for missionary work among Jews and eventually became a preacher affiliated with the Plymouth Brethren.                                                                                                                                  He was determined to rely totally on the Lord for his financial support. His policy continued even after he started an orphanage in Bristol. Without direct appeals for funds, his orphanage was supported well and grew. By the time he died, more than ten thousand orphans had been cared for. God not only supplied the needs of Müller and his orphanage work but provided for many other missionaries around the world through Müller’s obedience and stewardship. Hudson Taylor was not only one of the beneficiaries, but also in other ways George Müller impacted him.

Engaging so-called non-Entities in Mission

The names of George Mueller, Hudson Taylor and CT Studd ushered in a new era of missions. After the 18^th century Moravians and Methodists, the next spiritual giants who engaged so-called non-entities in missionary work significantly were William Carey and Hudson Taylor, a British Protestant missionary to China, and the founder of the China Inland Mission (CIM, now OMF International). James Hudson Taylor (21 May 1832 – 3 June 1905) spent 51 years in China. The agency that he founded was responsible for bringing over 800 missionaries into the country. He started 125 schools and his ministry resulted in 18,000 Christian conversions. More than 300 stations of work were established with more than 500 local helpers in all eighteen provinces of China.

            Hudson Taylor was known for his sensitivity to Chinese culture and zeal for evangelism. He wore native Chinese clothing even though this was rare among missionaries of that time. Under his leadership, the China Inland Mission (CIM) was exemplary non-denominational in practice, accepting members from all Protestant groups, including individuals from the working class and single women, as well as multi-national recruits. Primarily because of the CIM's campaign against the opium trade, Hudson Taylor has been referred to as one of the most significant Europeans to have lived in China in the 19^th century. Historian Ruth Tucker (2004:186) summarizes his influence as follows: 'Few missionaries in the nineteen centuries since the Apostle Paul has had a wider vision and has carried out a more systematized plan of evangelizing a broad geographical area than Hudson Taylor'.

Prayer as the Key to the Missionary Problem

Dr Andrew Murray put in practice what he had taught about ‘waiting on the Lord’ when he was invited to be a speaker at the World Missions Conference in New York, 1900 - billed as the biggest ever to be held. (At this time the effect of the Enlightenment and rationalism had significantly diminished belief in unseen forces like the Holy Spirit.) Andrew Murray had no inner peace about going to New York, not even after the organizers tried to use his famous friend Dwight Moody to entice him. Moody invited Murray to join him in outreaches in the USA after the World Missions Conference, but Murray was not to be swayed.  He felt morally bound to stay with his people because of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). We may safely surmise that Murray was sensitive to the Holy Spirit, only wanting to take instructions from the Lord.

          Murray’s subsequent absence at the conference ironically became the biggest cause of missions in the 20^th century.  After he received the papers and discussions at the conference, Murray wrote down in a booklet what he thought was lacking at the event: The Key to the Missionary Problem. This book had an explosive influence on the churches in Europe, America and South Africa.  In the booklet Murray referred prominently to the 24-hour prayer watch of the Moravians. It called seriously for new devotion and intensive prayer for missions. Murray powerfully stated that missionary work is the primary task of the Church, and that the pastor should have that as the main goal of his preaching. These sentiments were repeated in a small booklet he called Foreign Missions and the week of Prayer, January 5-12, 1902 - formulating that ‘missions are the supreme end of the church’.  He furthermore suggested that ‘to join in united prayer for God’s Spirit to work in home churches a true interest in, and devotion to missions (is) our first and our most pressing need.’     One of Andrew Murray’s classic statements of the early 20th century was that ‘God is a God of missions.’ He wrote powerfully in his book The Kingdom of God in South Africa (1906): ‘Prayer is the life of missions. Continual, believing prayer is the secret of vitality and fruitfulness in missionary work. The God of missions is the God of prayer’.

            It is surely no mere co-incidence that revivals broke out in different parts of the world in the years hereafter - in such divergent countries as Wales, Norway, India and Chile.[4]

Growing Ecumenism

The Conference on Foreign Missions in October, 1878 in London was in a sense the fore-runner of the international gathering in New York at the turn of that century. The formal name of a special event of 1900 in New York was the Ecumenical Conference on Foreign Missions. Official delegates at this event were numbered at 2,500 (including more than 600 foreign missionaries from fifty countries). This conference was in turn part of the run-up to an even more ecumenical event. This World Missionary Conference of Edinburgh 1910 was an epoch-making occasion to which many different movements of mission and unity trace their roots. The conference in 1910 in the mood of the student movement's watchword of "the evangelisation of the world in this generation" is considered the symbolic starting point of the contemporary ecumenical movement.                                                    There had been earlier major mission conferences, but at Edinburgh, first steps were taken towards an institutionalized cooperation between Protestant mission councils. However there were no Catholic nor Orthodox delegates present. Out of the 1400 participants, 17 came from the global south.

John Raleigh Mott (May 25, 1865 – January 31, 1955) came to the fore as a world leader. He was a long-serving leader of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF). From 1895 until 1920 Mott was the General Secretary of the WSCF. Intimately involved in the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948, that body elected him as a lifelong honorary President. His best-known book, The Evangelization of the World in this Generation, became a missionary slogan in the early 20th century. Mott received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for his work in establishing and strengthening international Protestant Christian student organizations that endeavoured to promote peace.

The Azusa Street Revival

The Azusa Street Revival took place in Los Angeles, California, and was led by William J. Seymour, an Afro-American preacher. It began with a meeting on April 14, 1906, and continued until roughly 1915. The revival was characterized by ecstatic spiritual experiences accompanied by speaking in tongues, dramatic worship services, and inter-racial mingling. The participants received criticism from secular media and Christian theologians for behaviour considered to be outrageous and unorthodox. Today, the revival is considered by historians to be the primary catalyst for the spread of Pentecostalism in the 20^th century.

The Azusa Street Revival witnessed the breakdown of barriers that normally divide people from one another: race, class, gender, wealth, language, education, church affiliation, and culture.

The presiding elder - a black preacher, blind in one eye - named William J. Seymour, served by divine appointment rather than political manipulation. The Mission had an integrated leadership and congregation and, although it was decades before the American Civil Rights Movement, had an amazing lack of discrimination.

An available building at 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles which had originally been constructed as an African Methodist Episcopal Church, was rented. The shack church ultimately become the venue where a revival started. The second floor at the now-named Apostolic Faith Mission housed an office and rooms for several residents including Seymour and his new wife, Jennie. It also had a large prayer room to handle the overflow from the altar services below. By mid-May 1906, anywhere from 300 to 1,500 people would attempt to fit into the building. Since horses had very recently been the residents of the building, flies constantly bothered the attendees. People from a diversity of backgrounds came together to worship: men, women, children, Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, rich, poor, illiterate, and educated. People of all ages flocked to Los Angeles with both skepticism and a desire to participate. The intermingling of races and the group's encouragement of women in leadership was remarkable, as 1906 was the height of the 'Jim Crow' era of racial segregation, and fourteen years prior to women receiving suffrage in the United States and thus a beach head for racial equality.

Services and Worship

Worship at 312 Azusa Street was frequent and spontaneous with services going almost around the clock. Among those attracted to the revival were not only members of the Holiness Movement, but Baptists, Mennonites, Quakers, and Presbyterians. An observer at one of the services wrote these words: ‘Proud, well-dressed preachers came to 'investigate'. Soon their high looks were replaced with wonder, then conviction comes, and very often you will find them in a short time wallowing on the dirty floor, asking God to forgive them and make them as little children.’                                                                                                                                   Among first-hand accounts were reports of the blind having their sight restored, diseases cured instantly, and immigrants speaking in German, Yiddish, and Spanish all being spoken to in their native language by uneducated black members, who translated the languages into English by "supernatural ability".                                                                                             The core membership of the Azusa Street Mission was never much more than 50–60 individuals with hundreds and thousands of people visiting or staying temporarily over the years. In due course the Pentecostal message spread around the world. Speaking in tongues is so common that hardly an eyebrow is raised in almost all denominations although the practice in normal church services is still limited, in line with the Pauline instruction that it should edify the body of Christ.

Flawed Dichotomies

Faith and Order was born as a faction within the Ecumenical Movement. Its counter-part was called Life and Work. Faith and Order was supposed to deal with theological-theoretical concerns, while Life and Work was expected to be of purely practical orientation. This dichotomy between ‘faith and works’ - familiar to the Western Church already since the Reformation - was itself questionable and problematic. The formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948 as a merger of these two movements has helped a great deal in overcoming this dichotomy. Yet, the specific identity of Faith and Order was retained even after the formation of the WCC. 

Aftermath of World War II

The bewilderment and devastation caused by the Second World War had another result. Young people became completely estranged from the Church. Youth for Christ was born in the mid-1940s through an impulse from the heart of God that simultaneously touched dozens of leaders in different places with a concern to reach those young people that normal church channels were missing. This led to dynamic young evangelists, using revolutionary methods, conducting lively mass rallies in dozens of cities under the name of Youth for Christ, at first in the USA and thereafter in different countries. With the rapid expansion of the movement there soon became a need for leadership and organization. In 1944 Chicago pastor Torrey Johnson was elected Youth for Christ’s first president, with Billy Graham as its first full-time evangelist.      

            The related flawed dichotomies of reformation versus revival and evangelism versus missions simmered on in spite of great work by people like Dr Francis Schaeffer and Dr. Billy Graham to bridge the respective gaps. The former e.g. taught powerfully how both words reformation and revival are related to the word ‘restore’: Reformation refers to a restoration of pure doctrine and revival refers to a restoration in the Christian’s life. Reformation speaks of the return to the teachings of Scripture; revival speaks of a life brought into proper relationship to the Holy Spirit (Schaeffer, Death in the City, 1969:9f). Through the conferences that he initiated in the 1970s and 1980s Dr Graham demonstrated that evangelism and missions are basically the two sides of the same coin.

Youth with a Mission (YWAM) was conceived by Loren Cunningham in 1956. As a 20-year-old student in an Assemblies of God College, he was travelling in the Bahamas when he had a vision of waves breaking over the Earth. When he looked closer the waves appeared to become young people taking the news of Jesus into all the nations of the world. He envisioned a movement that would send young people out into various nations to share the message of Jesus, and which would involve Christians of all denominations. In late 1960, the name Youth with a Mission (YWAM) was chosen and the group embarked on their first project, a vocational mission trip.

Loren Cunningham married Darlene Scratch in 1963. By this time, the new mission had 20 volunteers stationed in various nations, and the Cunninghams were planning the mission's first "Summer of Service".                                                                                                                           In 1967, Cunningham began to work on his vision for the first school. It became the School of Evangelism, which was held at Chateau-d'Oex (Switzerland) in 1969 with 21 students. A second school which was twice as long, ran from the summer of 1969 through the summer of 1970 just outside Lausanne, Switzerland (in Chalet-A-Gobet). The students' lodging and classes took place in a newly renovated and leased hotel. By the end of the year, YWAM purchased the hotel and made Lausanne its first permanent location.                                                                                                         The School of Evangelism was formed in 1974 in New Jersey as well as Lausanne. With a focus on biblical foundations and character development as well as missions, much of the material from this course is now taught in the present day Discipleship Training School (DTS). A format of three months of lectures followed by two or three months of outreach is still used in most Discipleship Training Schools today.

CRU (known as Campus Crusade for Christ until 2011) is an evangelical Christian organization. It was founded in 1951 as a ministry for university students. Campus Crusade for Christ International (CCC) was founded in 1951 on the campus of University of California, Los Angeles by the then 29 year-old Bill Bright (1921-2003), who at the time was a seminary student at Fuller Theological Seminary. Bright was a successful businessman with an oil company and a specialty food business before attending seminary. Since the agency has expanded its focus to include adult professionals, athletes and high school students. In 2011 Campus Crusade for Christ in the United States changed its name to CRU, to avoid the negative connotation of "crusade" from the historical Crusades (particularly to Muslim communities) and that much of the organization's work was no longer limited to college campuses. The visionary he was, he had been contemplating already in 1956 to make a film on the life of Jesus that would be close to the Bible.                                                        The Jesus Film Project became a reality, translated into all the main languages of the world. This is arguably the most powerful evangelistic tool ever. The claim of the project that the film ‘is the most dynamic way to hear and see the greatest story ever lived’ is not vain.  More than 200 million people have come to Jesus after watching these films.                                                                         Bright’s Four Spiritual Laws booklet – a 4-point outline written by Bill in 1956 on how to establish a personal relationship with Jesus – has been printed in some 200 languages. Bill Bright's booklet has become what is considered to be the most widely-disseminated religious booklet in history, with more than 2.5 billion booklets distributed to date. Bill Bright’s unique blend of Christian commitment and communications insight was at the heart of his success.

World Congress on Evangelism                                                                                                 Major ecumenical assemblies and conferences had been sponsored by the World Council of Churches to discuss church unity, faith and order, and church and society concerns. The World Congress on Evangelism set out to fulfill Christ's great commission to evangelize the earth. It was held in 1966 in West Berlin. This major global gathering was a para-ecumenical effort inspired by the massive campaigns of evangelist Dr Billy Graham, who served as honorary chairman.

The congress drew participants dedicated to evangelism from more than 100 countries, most being nationals carrying evangelistic tasks in ecumenically aligned and independent denominations. Their identification within seventy-six church bodies inside and outside the conciliar movement constituted the Berlin Congress in some ways more ecumenical in scope than the World Council. Participants went back historically as far as the Mar Thoma Church in India. Others came from young churches in Africa and Asia; youngest of all was the Auca church in Latin America that sprung from the witness of five American missionary martyrs in 1956.

Convened by an international group of 142 evangelical leaders under the honorary chairmanship of Dr. Billy Graham, this congress aimed: to proclaim the biblical basis of true evangelism; to relate biblical truth to contemporary issues; to share and strengthen unity and love in Christ; to identify those yet unreached with the Gospel; to learn from each other the patterns of evangelism the Holy Spirit is using; to awaken Christian consciences to the implications of expressing Christ’s love in attitude and action; to develop cooperative strategies toward partnership in the work; to pray together that the congress might notably further world evangelization; and to be God’s people, available for His purposes in the world.                                                                               There were nearly 3,000 official participants from 150 countries. The congress produced the widely acclaimed Lausanne Covenant and set up a continuation committee ’to further the total biblical mission of the Church,’ with special reference to the 2.7 billion of the world’s people yet unreached.

A Cape-born Reconciler at Work

If ever there was someone who took the ministry of reconciliation seriously, it was the Cape-born David du Plessis. He first had to go through the mill himself, leaving his home when his father would not allow him to go to university. Du Plessis was reconciled to his father two years later. The Lord first had to deal with the prayerful young man before he could be used optimally. ‘I began to be sensitive to the Lord’s checking’.

          Even though it was not generally recognized as such, one of Du Plessis’s greatest achievements was in race relations. At a time when Professors Ben Marais and Barend Keet were battling against apartheid in their Dutch Reformed Church in the 1940s, Du Plessis as General Secretary of the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) was responsible for reducing expatriate missionary staff to a minimum, taking the work out of the hands of the North Americans and Europeans and putting it under the jurisdiction of Africans. ‘The local work, we felt, had to be under the control of the nationals’ (Du Plessis, 1977:112).[5] As if that were not radical enough, the AFM had a central conference in which ministers, missionaries and executives of all races met at top level. It appears that this denomination came the nearest to practical non-racialism at a time when apartheid was already practiced far and wide.

          But this was by far not the end of Du Plessis’s ministry of reconciliation. He had to go through the crucible once again. After an accident in the USA, when the car in which he was a passenger, drove into a shunting locomotive, he landed in hospital. Du Plessis later described this time as ‘the most extended period of silent prayer in my life’. He was challenged to forgive Protestants in general. The first test came at the second World Conference of Pentecostals in Paris, which he attended on crutches. God used him to reconcile Pentecostals who were fighting each other. In his typical humble manner, Du Plessis did not gloat over the victory achieved there. Instead, he said ‘I know that if I would have any success at all with what the Lord had directed, if I was to be able to forgive the old main line churches, I had to forgive these Pentecostal brethren.’ God would use him to bring the first Pentecostal denominations into the maligned World Council of Churches.

Into the Vatican

David Du Plessis’ ecumenical work was however not appreciated in his own denomination. Fellowship with independent Pentecostals was to him just as important. He was invited to become the secretary of the world conference in Toronto in 1958. There he was completely cold-shouldered, and all but pushed out of the Pentecostal movement. Du Plessis felt clearly led ‘to resign from every position that I held in any society and to follow Him wherever he may lead.’ Sovereignly God over-ruled. In 1959 he was lecturing in the theological institutions of a wide spectrum of denominations.  The following year he was requested to give a lecture at a meeting in Scotland, in preparation for the WCC plenary occasion that would be held in New Delhi in 1961. This resulted in him being invited to the WCC conference itself. There he met Professor Bernard Leeming from Oxford, who was the personal representative of Pope John XX111. One thing led to another until Du Plessis wrote from New Delhi that he would make a stopover in Rome.

          There he spent many hours in prayer, ‘considering the difficulties that lay ahead for Protestants and Catholics in matters of trust and forgiveness.’ The Lord first had to deal with him through His Word, coming to him through the context of the Lord’s well known prayer. ‘...If you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses’ (Matthew 6:15). He sensed: ‘I am certain the Lord spoke to me about the many burdens of unforgiveness and suspicion’ between Catholics and Protestants for so many centuries. “The souls of Christians will live when all learn to forgive.”

          In Rome Du Plessis met Dr Strandsky, the secretary of Cardinal Bea, who headed a new Roman Catholic secretariat for promoting church unity. Strandsky had a special charge to learn as much as he could about the Holy Spirit and the Pentecostals. Because David du Plessis was now a ‘mere zero’ in the Pentecostal movement, he was ideally placed to share at the Vatican. When Cardinal Bea asked him: ‘Well then David, what do the Pentecostals have to say to Rome?’ He was in a predicament. In honesty he could only hesitantly stutter: ‘I have to say that the Pentecostals have no intention of talking to Rome.’ When Cardinal Bea asked him for his personal opinion, God started to use David du Plessis to minister to millions of Roman Catholics all around the globe. ‘Make the Bible available to every Catholic in the world ... If Catholics will read the Bible, the Holy Spirit will make that book come alive, and that will change their lives. And changed Catholics will be the renewal of the church.’  Cardinal Bea immediately ordered those words to be written down.

          The words of ‘Mr Pentecost’ – as David Du Plessis was nicknamed - turned out to be very prophetic. At the Vatican Council (1962-1965??) it was decided to make the Bible available to every Roman Catholic person in the world. David du Plessis was present at a session of the Vatican Council. His contribution in 1964 introduced the charismatic renewal to the Roman Catholic Church. Du Plessis was also used by the Lord to bring about a thaw in the relationship between Protestants and Roman Catholics worldwide, notably at a meeting in Zürich in June 1972.

A significant Power Encounter

When Ds. Davie Pypers commenced work in 1956 as a minister of the Dutch Reformed St Stephen’s congregation in Bree Street, he discerned the need for increased prayer for the Muslims of the area. Soon he initiated praying for Bo-Kaap and the Muslims living there. Together with two other pastoral colleagues, he interceded every Monday for the area that became even more pronouncedly Islamic in the wake of the envisaged implementation of Group Areas legislation.

          Ds. Pypers appears to have been one of the very few ministers at the Cape of his era who had any notion of spiritual warfare. It was by far not common practice yet.  And satan was definitely not going to release his gains so easily.

          Davie Pypers was called to become the missionary to the Cape Muslims on behalf of the Dutch Reformed Church, linked to the historical Gestig (Sendingkerk) congregation in Long Street. It is the church where once people from different denominations worshipped, the cradle of missionary outreach in South Africa.[6] Ds. Pypers had hardly started with his new ministry when a challenge came from a young imam, Mr Ahmed Deedat, to publicly debate the death of Jesus on the Cross.  As a young dominee David Pypers prepared himself through prayer and fasting in a tent on the mountains at Bain’s Kloof for the event which was due to take place on 13 August 1961 at the Green Point Track.

          Because of publicity in the media, 30 000 people of all races jammed into the Green Point sports venue. The stadium quivered with excitement like at a rugby match. In the keenly contested debate, Imam Deedat started with the assertion that Jesus went to Egypt after the disciples had taken him from the Cross. He thoroughly ridiculed the Christian faith, challenging Pypers to give proof that Jesus died on the Cross. The young dominee rose to the challenge by immediately stating that Jesus is alive and that his Lord could there and then do the very things He had done when He walked the earth.

          Dr David du Plessis, who was nick-named ‘Mr Pentecost’, reported on the event in his autobiography: ‘Taking a deep breath, he (Pypers) spoke loud and clear, ‘Is there anybody in this audience that, according to medical judgement, is completely incurable? Remember, it must be incurable...’ Of course, the stadium was abuzz by now. And then several men came along, carrying Mrs Withuhn, a White Christian lady, with braces all over her body. She was completely paralyzed. Then Pypers went ahead, asking whether there were any doctors present who could examine her and vouch for her condition. ‘Several doctors came forward, including her own physician, and they concurred in pronouncing her affliction incurable.’

          Pypers simply walked to her and without any ado prayed for her briefly and proclaimed: ‘In the name of Jesus, be healed!’ Immediately she dropped her crutches and began to move.

The Green Point Aftermath

The Green Point Track event resulted in a clear victory for the Cross, with Mrs Withuhn being miraculously healed in the name of the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.

          What was perceived as the defeat of Ahmed Deedat, and thus of Islam at Green Point, inspired a call for revenge. Deedat stated publicly that the original motivation for public debates was what he had experienced as his humiliation at the hand of Christians. He was not willing at all to accept defeat lying down. He would challenge many an international speaker to a debate in the decades hereafter. His Islamic Propagation team craftily manipulated the footage of these debates in video productions. He became known world-wide in Muslim countries as a South African, second only to Nelson Mandela! More than any other Muslim, he succeeded to revive Islam from 1961 into an ideological force to be reckoned with.  He suffered a stroke in May 1996 which side-lined him.

          The effect of the Green Point Track miracle was almost nullified by news that came from another part of the world on that same day. The report of the building of the Berlin Wall resounded throughout the world! A new type of battle was cemented - the ‘cold war’ between Soviet Communism and Western Capitalism!

          However, it was nearly just as bad that Pypers was heavily criticized by his denomination for undertaking the confrontation without getting prior synod approval. Furthermore, the leaders of his denomination were still clinging to an untenable interpretation of divine healing – that it belonged to a past age - to the times of the apostles.                                        

Islam linked to Communism?

As the ensuing cold war became the focus, the enemy of souls abused Communism with its atheist basis, attempting to stifle the spreading of the victorious message of the Cross, as it had been proclaimed at the Green Point Track.

Was there a subtle link to Communism

in opposition to the Cross?

I surmise that the event of 13 August 1961 had great importance in the spiritual realm. One wonders whether the Islamic Crescent was not probably subtly linked to Communism in opposition to the Cross at that occasion. (This would happen again in reverse in 1990 after the demise of Communism. Islam took over the mantle from the atheist ideology as a threat to world peace when the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait. That event became the catalyst for many Christians to start praying for an end to the bondage and deception at the base of the ideology of Islam as a destructive spiritual force.) 

          In his denomination, Ds. Pypers was still a lone ranger.  In some quarters he was vilified after the Green Point event, although he had actually been challenged by the literature on faith healing, which had been written by Dr Andrew Murray, a revered hero of his church.  Pypers was out on a limb in the Dutch Reformed Church. At the Kweekskool in Stellenbosch, the theological seminary of the denomination, it was still officially taught that faith healing was a doctrinal tenet which belonged to the days of the apostles.

Chapter 16 Evolving International Prayer for Unity

Down the centuries united prayer has been a divine ‘tool’ par excellence to usher in spiritual renewal and revival. Prayer was the driving force of all evangelistic and missionary efforts ever since the 120 believers gathered in the Upper Room of Jerusalem in the first century that ushered in that marvelous Pentecost thereafter that took the Gospel to the ends of the earth. The 24/7 prayer of the Herrnhut Moravians that started in August 1727 kept them going in pioneering mode with holistic ministry in different parts of the globe for well over a century. In chapter 14 we highlighted how God used the fellowship.

It is regrettable that the prayer for Christian Unity has not yet functioned completely unitedly.

Roots of international united Prayer

The Evangelical Alliance tradition of a Week of Prayer the first full week of January goes back to the year after its launch in 1846. It was one of the agreed initiatives that came out of the founding conference.

The Week of Prayer has been in vogue in many countries in Europe for a very long time. In countries of the former communist world in Europe it was only the Evangelical Alliance issue that stayed alive through the communist era. So, even when people had heard of nothing else about the Evangelical Alliance, they had often heard of the Week of Prayer. 

Pentecostal Prayer Meetings in South Africa

South Africa was the first country where the tradition of prayer services between Ascencion Day and Pentecost went nationwide.

          Ds. G.W.A. van der Lingen of the Dutch Reformed Church in Paarl was divinely used to stem the tide of liberalism that swept over the Cape in the 1850s. It is no surprise that he became God’s instrument for introducing the blessed Pinksterbidure, the tradition of prayer services between Ascencion Day and Pentecost that became such a blessing to the Dutch Reformed Church for over one and a half centuries.

It all started on 6 February 1861 as an overflow of the revival that started in Worcester the previous year. Ds. Van der Lingen of the Strooidak (Straw Roof) congregation in Paarl arranged a special meeting of approximately 100 prayer leaders - including women and children - to discuss their concerns. After experiencing the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit and His quickening power, the congregation was fearful that the divine presence would decrease over time and finally stop. They wanted, therefore, to find ways of preserving and spreading the blessing. They started cell groups. Taking their cue from the Disciples who were unified - with one accord (Greek homothumadon) - in the Upper Room after Ascencion Day (Acts 1:14),  the cells were challenged for communal prayer during the ten days between Ascension Day and Pentecost.

An invitation was published in De Kerkbode for all existing prayer groups in Paarl to participate in corporate prayer between 9 and 19 May, 1861. The believers attempted to follow the example of the believers who had been meeting for prayer while waiting in Jerusalem to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Ds van der Lingen was initially quite reluctant to join these meetings. There was a gradual built-up of expectation during that week, interspersed with cries for mercy. He not only finally relented but he also became God's anointed vessel of blessing on Pentecost Sunday, 1861.

            When this news began to spread to neighbouring congregations, they too decided to follow Paarl's example. Over the next few years more and more congregations joined in. As a direct result, the 1867 Dutch Reformed synod advised all congregations to conduct 10 days of prayer in the run-up to Pentecost every year. The tradition became a major blessing to the nation. The Pinksterbidure would impact Afrikanerdom for many decades. Many Afrikaners look back to some Pentecost prayer season as the time when they were converted or when they recommitted their lives to the Lord.

Other Week of Prayer Attempts

In 1894 Pope Leo XIII  also suggested Pentecost as a symbolic date (the traditional commemoration of the birth of the Church) for the unity of the Church. A different date for a Week of Prayer began in 1908 as the Octave of Christin Unity. The dates of the week were proposed by Rev. Paul Wattson, co-founder of the Graymoor Franciscan Friars. He conceived of the week beginning on the Feast of the Confession of Peter, the Protestant variant of the ancient Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, on 18 January, and concluding with the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul on 25 January. Protestant leaders suggested in 1926 via the Faith and Order movement in the mid-1920s, at that time a Protestant daughter group that developed out of the Edinburgh international conference of 2010, to have an annual octave of prayer for unity amongst Christians, leading up to Pentecost Sunday.

Evolution of the Week of Prayer for Unity

Abbé Paul Couturier of Lyons, France, who has been called ‘the father of spiritual ecumenism’, advocated prayer "for the unity of the Church as Christ wills it, and in accordance with the means he wills". He hoped that other Christians, with differing views to those of the Roman Catholic Church, would join in the prayer. In 1935, he proposed naming the observance Universal Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. In 1941 the Faith and Order Conference, changed the date for observing the week of unity prayer to come in line with that observed by Catholics. In 1948, with the founding of the World Council of Churches, the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity became increasingly recognised by different churches throughout the world. The proposal was finally accepted by the Catholic Church in 1966.

In 1958, the French Catholic group Unité Chrétienne and the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches (a body which includes, among others, most of the world's Orthodox churches as well as many Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Reformed, United and Independent churches) began co-operative preparation of materials for the Week of Prayer. The year 1968 saw the first official use of materials prepared jointly by the Faith and Order Commission and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, representing the entire Catholic Church. Collaboration and cooperation between these two organizations has increased steadily since, resulting in recent years in joint publications in the same format.

Chapter 17 Fighting Discrimination against People

            If we take as a given that the arch enemy will always attempt to cause disunity and strife of any sort, we should not be surprised that God always raised persons to fight on behalf of those who have been oppressed or discriminated against. Colonialism, Imperialism and White domination in the secular world sadly had its mirror equivalents also in the ranks of the Church.
Fighters against Injustice                                                                                                              An interesting fact is that many a fighter against injustice received their inspiration in the US in the 19^th century, where Afro Americans had to bear the brunt of oppression and discrimination. Without exception, all the early 20^th century fighters against injustice who were impacted in this way, received their inspiration within the perimeters of the Church. We look here at a random sample.

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856 – 1915) came from the last generation of American leaders who were born into slavery. He became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-reconstruction Southern states in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Between 1890 and 1915, Booker Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community and an advisor to presidents of the United States.

Booker Washington called for Black progress through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to challenge the Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South directly. Booker Washington mobilized a nationwide coalition of middle-class Blacks, Church leaders and White philanthropists and politicians. His long-term goal was the building of the community's economic strength and pride by a focus on self-help and schooling.

Pixley Seme was born on 1 October 1881 in Natal. He was the son of Isaka Sarah (nee Mseleku) Seme. He obtained his primary school education at the local mission school where the American Congregationalist missionary, Reverend S. C. Pixley, took an interest in him and arranged for him to go the USA. He attended Colombia University in New York where he won the University's highest oratorical honour, the George William Curtis medal. His topic was “The Regeneration of Africa”.

Seme and Alfred Mangena met at the South African Native Convention in London that had come there to monitor the progress of the draft South Africa Act through the British parliament in 1909. Seme returned to South Africa in 1910 and set up a private practice in Johannesburg, later going into partnership with Mangena.

On 8 January 1912 Seme, Mangena and two other lawyers educated abroad, Richard Msimang and George Montsio, called for a convention of Africans in Bloemfontein, the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), which was renamed the African National Congress (ANC) in 1923.

          John Langalibele Dube was a Zulu patriot but an opponent of ‘narrow tribalism’ simultaneously. The rising generation of militant African nationalists came to look upon him as a parochial figure. Looking back in history, we discern that the country had been blessed with a gifted Christian, whose potential could not be fully exploited because of racial prejudice. As a sixteen year old Dube went to America where he also travelled and gave talks on self-help for the Blacks of South Africa. He returned to the USA in 1897, this time to study theology for three years. Ordained in the Congregational church, he was one of the delegation to London in 1909, to lobby against the colour bar in the Act of Union. Unable to attend the founding conference of the South African National Native Congress, he was elected in absentia as its first president.

As a missionary-educated person, who also studied in the US, there was for John Dube conflict between the newly arrived Western education and African traditional society. It is conceivable that Dube would never have been part of the SANC, except that his teaching and discourse on the necessity of unity fitted the political atmosphere.

Assistance in Resistance from Abroad

An interesting feature of the resistance against oppression of every sort was the assistance by foreigners. A move at the Cape supplied the seed for the birth of Pan Africanism on South African soil. F.Z.S. Peregrino was a West African who had an office in Tyne Street, just off Hanover Street in District Six. As a recruiting officer for Jamaicans, he not only looked after their interests, but he also sought to promote broader Africanism. Towards the end of 1900 Peregrino launched an African-controlled newspaper, the South African Spectator.  He said that it was an organ for all ‘the people who are not white’. The paper adopted a high moral tone, carrying no advertisements for alcohol, fortune telling or other activities he though could undermine the morals of the populace. To instil race pride in Blacks, articles were published about their world-wide advancements and achievements.

          The slogan ‘Africa for the Africans’ has often been branded as Black racism.  It is hardly known that a White missionary from New Zealand was actually one of the first protagonists of the principle. Joseph Booth, who was born in Derby, England, wrote a booklet with the title Africa for the Africans in 1897. Booth’s unorthodox approach to mission work and his schemes for African self-help and advancement eventually created friction with colonial authorities.

Paternalism breeds Secession

In the attitude towards people of colour there was a lot of goodwill among Whites at the turn of the century. A problem was that even radical thinkers among them hardly ever consulted people of colour. Proper consultation could possibly have averted many a crisis. From the earliest days at the Cape the ‘natives’ were regarded as inferior, their culture despised. Paternalism was rife.

          This gave rise to the secessionist ‘Ethiopian movement’ in churches. The ‘Ethiopians’ have been typified by the sentence: “We have come to pray for the deliverance of Blacks’ (Cited in Elphick et al, Christianity in South Africa, 1997:212). The ideological link went back to the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8 and the Church, which developed in that country without mediation of Western Churches. The term ‘Ethiopian’ was derived from the concept that the first indigenous church on African soil started in Ethiopia. The ‘Ethiopian’ movement started in different parts of South Africa as breakaway congregations from Methodist churches. Disillusioned by the imperfections of colonial society, they withdrew from White-dominated structures to exclusively African organisations. Their policy would throw off the shackles of White domination and reassert their former independence, while retaining at the same time what they considered to be the best elements of European civilisation. The secessionist ‘Ethiopian movement’ really took off when the separatist ideas spread to the Witwatersrand after the discovery of gold. The first ‘Ethiopian’ church was established in Pretoria in 1892 after Black Wesleyan (Methodist) ministers had been excluded from a meeting of White colleagues. In a sense the good teaching of the Methodists backfired when they tried to make the indigenous congregations independent, because the missionaries kept on patronizing their congregants of colour.

          By 1902, Ethiopianism was used for the entire indigenous church movement. For the ‘rebel’ Black churchmen, Ethiopia was the model land where Blacks were ruling their own country. In America a separate denomination had been started among Negroes as the American Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC). It was only natural that the ‘Ethiopian’ Methodists of South Africa would link up with them. Bishop Levi Coppin was sent to the Cape as the first Black bishop. The AMEC headquarters was in Blythe Street, District Six.                                                                                                                           

The missionary Drive slowed down

Secessions affected all denominations (Odendaal, 1984:26). Significant was the missionary drive of the new separatist church. The secessions spawned the desire to bring the Gospel to the rest of the continent, even to the Sudan and Egypt. James Dwane, who was earmarked to be ordained as the first South African bishop of the merged AMEC, reflected on the broad aims of the movement: ‘Africa must not be evangelised by Europeans, not even by American blacks, but by real Africans’ (Cited in Odendaal, 1984:26). A negative facet of Ethiopianism was the tendency to polarise, by blackening everybody who did not join them. Lovedale-trained[7] Elijah Makiwane concluded: ‘Those who refuse to join this movement are now called white men or Britons’ (Cited in Odendaal, 1984:83).

Empowering the Underdogs 

The AMEC played a significant role in the liberation struggle, by enabling South Africans of colour to study in the USA. Among the very prominent ones were the social worker and teacher Charlotte Maxeke. Charlotte Maxeke toured the USA in the 1890s with an African choir. She remained in the States to study at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where she graduated with a B.S. in 1905, the first Black woman from South Africa to earn a bachelor’s degree.[8] After her marriage to a South African overseas and their return to the country, the couple impacted many Blacks. The couple was worldwide surely of one the first instances when indigenous folk opened a Bible School as they did on behalf of the AMEC in 1908. One of these persons influenced at the Cape was Rev. Zaccheus Mahabane, who would become an influential personality in the ANC for many decades. Charlotte Maxeke founded the women’s league of the ANC.

            Cape-born Frances Gow returned from the USA with a doctorate. The AMEC denomination - with its origins among the Negroes of the USA - was a great propagator of the indigenisation of the church at the Cape. Under Dr Gow’s leadership – he only became their bishop in 1956, one of the first western-trained bishops on the continent who was not self-appointed - the church expanded rapidly, at least numerically, with churches in different parts of the Peninsula.

            Another influential figure at the Cape was Henry Sylvester Williams, a Black lawyer who hailed from Trinidad in the West Indies. He came to Cape Town in October 1903, with the intention to build Pan-Africanism and to see British status coming into being for all Black people in the British Empire. When he and Bishop Levi Coppin saw how the ‘Coloureds’ were distancing themselves from the ‘Africans’, they thought that the ‘Coloureds’ might be the next to be segregated residentially (Blacks had been dumped in Ndabeni in 1901). They discerned all the ingredients of divide and rule when John Tobin, one of the early leaders of the African Peoples’ Organization (APO), looked for reconciliation between ‘Coloureds’ and Whites who also spoke Afrikaans. Tobin and his supporters were angered by what they regarded as the betrayal of the British in the run-up to the Anglo-Boer War.

          The next formation of Black people into a coherent socio-political movement would come into being with the Jamaican Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, founded in 1914.

            Probably the first indigenous church planting move at the Cape started in District Six.  A strong element of ‘Coloured’ Nationalism was present when Rev. Joseph J. Forbes started his ‘Volkskerk van Afrika’ on 14 May 1922. This visionary had the courage of his conviction to start a denomination for the upliftment of the poor from the Cape to Cairo. That is the reason why he gave his church a continental name.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer – a Fighter for the Underdog Jews

The name Dietrich Bonhoeffer became known as a martyr for his stand against the Nazi regime. What is not known generally is that he had been impacted in the USA before that. There he heard someone preach the Gospel of Social Justice and became sensitive to not only social injustices experienced by minorities but also the ineptitude of the Church to bring about integration. Bonhoeffer began to see things ‘from below’ - from the perspective of those who suffer oppression. He observed, ‘Here one can truly speak and hear about sin and grace and the love of God...the Black Christ is preached with rapturous passion and vision.’ Later Bonhoeffer referred to his impressions abroad as the point at which he "turned from phraseology to reality." He traveled by car through the United States to Mexico, where he had been invited to speak on the subject of peace. His early visits to Italy, Libya, Spain, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba opened Bonhoeffer to ecumenism.

Strongly influenced by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric approach appealed to conservative, confession-minded Protestants while his commitment to social justice as a cardinal responsibility of Christianity appealed to liberal Protestants. He was thus an excellent link and bridge between the false alternatives that the Faith and Order and Life and Work factions of the ecumenical movement had created.

Central to Bonhoeffer’s theology is Christ, in whom God and the world are reconciled. The manifestation of the suffering God of Bonhoeffer is found in this-worldliness. He believed that the Incarnation of God in flesh made it unacceptable to speak of God and the world "in terms of two spheres," an implicit attack upon Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms. Bonhoeffer stressed personal and collective piety and revived the idea of imitation of Christ. He argued that Christians should not retreat from the world but act within it. He believed that two elements were constitutive of faith: the implementation of justice and the acceptance of divine suffering. He insisted that the Church, like the Christians, had to share in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world if it were to be a true Church of Christ.

Deeply interested in ecumenism, he was appointed by the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the churches (a forerunner of the World Council of Churches) as one of its three European youth secretaries. At this time he seems to have undergone something of a personal conversion from being a theologian primarily attracted to the intellectual side of Christianity to being a dedicated man of faith, resolved to carry out the teaching of Christ as he found it revealed in the Gospels

Church Opposition to the Removal of ‘Coloureds’ from the Common Voters’ Roll

Probably in no other area did the influence of DRC (former) clergymen play such a clear role in South Africa as in the removal of ‘Coloureds’ from the Common Voters’ roll in 1956. (When a similar move happened in 1936 to remove Blacks from the voters’ roll, there had been hardly any church protest - apart from Ds Nicol’s address as officer of the Christian Council of South Africa.) The run-up to the equivalent move in 1955 not only led to a temporary and uneasy union of all ‘Coloured’ groups, but it also caused quite a stir among Whites.

            In fact, a clear result of the actions of the Cape clergymen Botha and Morkel, was that they heightened the political consciousness of Afrikaners, after the new National Party government had used vicious manipulation to achieve their goals. This was doubly tragic because the Prime Minister. Dr D.F. Malan, who was a former dominee, had once been a supporter of the ‘Coloured’ franchise. His political summersault on this issue may be explained by the need for Afrikaner unity and the slim majority which his party had achieved in the 1948 elections. He realized how strong the Afrikaners of the Northern provinces felt about ‘Coloured’ voting rights. Furthermore, his majority in parliament could easily be overturned in a future election in Cape seats with a substantial ‘Coloured’ population. That had to be forestalled at all costs, especially after the 1949 provincial elections where the United Party took the constituencies of Paarl and Bredasdorp – both of which they had won the year before in the national elections. The Nationalists ascribed their defeat in Paarl to the registration of hundreds of new voters since the general election. Therefore the initiative to remove the ‘Coloureds’ to a separate voters’ roll, was vicious and pre-meditated to secure future electoral success.

            That the Nationalists were trying to settle an old score against the English-speakers on this issue was an added factor.

White Dutch Reformed Opposition against Apartheid

Already in 1950 Professor Ben Marais wrote a controversial book Kleurkrisis in die Weste (Colour crisis in the West). The resulting controversy caused the popular preacher to be effectively silenced by the tactics of the secretive Afrikaner Broederbond. Church councils had to make sure that he would not be invited to preach in Dutch Reformed Churches. In 1956 the Stellenbosch academic Professor Barend Keet raised the question in his book Whither South Africa whether apartheid or the better sounding term ‘separate development’ could be applied in a just manner as claimed by his denomination. Five years later – thus a year after Sharpeville - he and eight other Afrikaner theologians answered the question with a resounding NO! in their book Delayed Action! They spelled out clearly that apartheid implied discrimination.

          One of the leading Dutch Reformed ministers, the gifted Ds Beyers Naudé, was seriously challenged. In Wellington, the first congregation that he served as a hulpprediker (assistant pastor), he immediately became uneasy when he saw that the training was inferior at the Sendinginstituut, where ministers were trained who would serve at the daughter churches (Ryan, 1990:31).  On a personal level, the heritage of the pioneer missionary Georg Schmidt impacted his life when he met his wife. She was the daughter of Emil Weder, a Moravian missionary in Genadendal. After seeing the degenerate ‘Coloureds’ in the Karoo town of Loxton where he was a pastor subsequently, Beyers Naudé was reminded of the cultured educated people of colour he had encountered for the first time in Genadendal during the time of courting. The question came to him ‘why it was not possible to have this in other parts of the country’ (Ryan, 1990:33). The seed for the multi-racial Christian Institute was sown into the heart of the former Afrikaner Broederbond leader whose father had helped to found the secret organization with lofty ideals for the upliftment of Afrikaners.  

An emerging Church Unity high-jacked

In South Africa the Boer-Brit rift, a traditional animosity was still rife in the 1940s among Whites as a legacy from the Anglo-Boer War at the end the 19th century, especially after the Dutch Reformed Church withdrew from the Christian Council of Churches. The unity in the latter body, which was started in 1936 with Dutch Reformed ministers in leading roles, had however been quite frail all along.

          The sense of unity which had been experienced at the inauguration of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Amsterdam (1948) was still reverberating in many a country. Professor Gerdener, a Stellenbosch University academic, could still write in 1959: ‘With thankfulness we observe signs to come together and work together, also in our own Dutch Reformed Church’. Gerdener rightly saw exclusiveness and isolation as a danger to missionary work. ‘Nowhere is isolation and exclusiveness so deadly and time-consuming than in the fight against the mighty heathendom and nowhere is co-operation and a unitary front so necessary and useful as here.’

          Albert Luthuli, the President of the ANC, was asked to address a predominantly Afrikaner – all White study group in Pretoria in the early months of that year. Soon hereafter, Luthuli was escorted from the Cape Town railway station to ‘an open square packed with people’, pre-figuring the event on the Grand Parade with Nelson Mandela many years later after his release. 

          The enemy of souls succeeded however in high-jacking an emerging unity of believers in South Africa at the end of the 1950s. After Luthuli’s return to his home town Groutville, he was visited by the Special Branch and served with a muzzling banning order, silenced and confined to the town for five years. The link to the apartheid legislators threatened the emerging unity in no uncertain way. The Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960 could have been God’s corrective to get the Church in South Africa at large to change its course. The World Council of Churches (WCC) met their eight member churches in South Africa – ten delegates from every church - at Cottesloe, a suburb of Johannesburg, from 7 December 1960 to discuss the crisis in the country in the wake of the Sharpeville killings and the arrest of Black leaders.

          The body of Christ seemed to be speaking with one voice. A significant segment of the White Dutch Reformed Church was at this time very much part of the ecumenical movement in South Africa in 1960. The Cape and Transvaal Dutch Reformed Dutch Reformed ministers initially agreed to oppose apartheid but the bulk of the leadership was thereafter subtly cajoled into line - after the Prime Minister, Dr H.F. Verwoerd, had exerted pressure on the bulk of the Dutch Reformed delegates.

          Dr Verwoerd was quite successful with demonic scheming to make every move suspect which intended to foster Church unity. The ‘English-speaking churches’ and others sympathetic to the unity of believers across the race divide, were made suspect. The storm sparked by these moves caused the old Boer-Brit resentment to flame up: divide and rule was once again the name of the game.

Battle against Communism

Internationally Richard Wurmbrand (1909 –2001) was one of the first persons in the Communist Block that arose after World War II who dared to say publicly that Communism and Christianity were not compatible. As a Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent he did this already in 1948, having become a Christian 10 years before. As a result, he experienced imprisonment and torture by the then Communist regime of Romania for his beliefs. After serving five years (1959-1964) of a second prison sentence, he was ransomed for $10,000. His colleagues in Romania urged him to leave the country and work for religious freedom from a location less personally dangerous. After spending time in Norway and England, he and his wife Sabina, who had also been imprisoned, emigrated to America and dedicated the rest of their lives to publicizing and helping Christians who are persecuted for their beliefs. He wrote many books, the most widely known being Tortured for Christ. Richard Wurmbrand founded the international organization Voice of the Martyrs, which continues to aid Christians around the world who are persecuted for their faith.

Brother Andrew and Open Doors                                                                                           Brother Andrew, the founder of Open Doors, was born in Holland as Anne van der Bijl (born 11 May 1928). He has arguably done more than anybody else to bring down the Communist Wall. In July 1955, he visited communist Poland, "to see how my brothers are doing", referring to the ‘Underground Church’. He signed up to a Communist youth group, which was the only legal way to stay in the country. In that time, he sensed himself called to respond to the Biblical commission ‘Wake up, strengthen what remains and is about to die’ (Revelation 3:2). This was the start of a mission leading him into several Communist-ruled countries where Christians were persecuted - those behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, where religions like Christianity were tolerated but technically illegal.                                                         In 1957, Van der Bijl travelled to the Soviet Union's capital city, Moscow, in a Volkswagen Beetle, which later became the symbol of Open Doors, the organization he founded. An older couple that mentored him had given him their new car, because it could hold several Bibles and spiritual literature. Although Van der Bijl was violating the laws of some of the countries he visited by bringing religious literature, he often placed the material in plain view when stopped at police checkpoints, as a gesture of trust in God's protection.                                                                                                   Van der Bijl also visited China in the 1960s, after the Cultural Revolution had created a hostile policy towards Christianity and other religions. It was the time of the so-called Bamboo Curtain. He came to Czechoslovakia, when the suppression by Soviet troops of the ‘Prague Spring’ had put an end to relative religious freedom there. He encouraged fellow believers there and gave Bibles to Russian occupying forces.

The Smuggling of Scriptures

The smuggling of sacred writ has a long history. We took note of the phenomenon with William Tyndale who had the English Bible printed in Germany and then smuggled into England in bales of cotton.

The smuggling of Scriptures came only really of age during the 'cold war' era.[9]  It was a major source of spiritual power, dynamite that eventually caused the demise of the Communist ideology. The gift of one million Bibles to the Orthodox Church earmarked for the occasion of their one thousandth year anniversary – together with the seven years of prayer for the Soviet Union from 1984 - spawned the dismantling of the ‘iron curtain’. As a member of the official Dutch delegation at a conference on human rights in the 1980s in the conference centre De Burcht in the Dutch village of Heemstede, Brother Andrew offered to donate one million Bibles to the Russian Orthodox Church on behalf of Open Doors for their coming millennial celebration. Furthermore, the translation of Scripture into indigenous languages not only opened many primitive tribes to modern civilization, but it also gave them dignity.

A special Year                                                                                                                             At GCOWE I in Singapore in January 1989, during the last plenary session on the subject of the fulfillment of the vision, the emerging AD2000 & Beyond Movement was seen as a series of life giving streams flowing into a fast flowing river-- which beautifully pictures the movement that has carried us to this North East Asia AD2000/Joshua Project 2000 Consultation in Seoul.

The International Congress on World Evangelization (11 July 1989 · 20 July 1989), Lausanne II in Manila (Philippines), played a significant role in a movement which stands for completing the task of world evangelization, for cooperation in that cause and for networking between evangelical leaders.

The 10/40 Window is a term coined by Christian missionary strategist Luis Bush in 1990 to refer to those regions of the eastern hemisphere, plus the European and African part of the western hemisphere, located between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator, a geographical area that was purported to have the highest level of socio-economic challenges and least access to the Christian message and Christian resources on the planet.

The 10/40 Window concept highlights three elements (as of data available in 1990): an area of the world with great poverty and low quality of life, combined with lack of access to Christian resources. The Window forms a band encompassing Saharan and Northern Africa, as well as almost all of Asia (West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia and much of Southeast Asia). Roughly two-thirds of the world population live in the 10/40 Window. The 10/40 Window is populated by people who are predominantly Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, animist, Jewish or atheist. Many governments in the 10/40 Window were formally or informally opposed to Christian work of any kind within their borders.

Brother Andrew and the Islamic Edifice                                                                                  After the fall of Communism in Europe, Brother Andrew shifted his focus to the Middle East and has worked to strengthen the Church in the Muslim world. In the ‘70s he visited war-torn Lebanon several times, stating that ‘global conflict in the end times will focus on Israel and its neighboring countries.’           In the '90s, Van der Bijl went to the region several times again. In the book Light Force, Van der Bijl tells about Arab and Lebanese churches in Lebanon, Israel and Israeli Arab areas that express great delight because of the mere visit of a fellow Christian from abroad, because they felt the Church in the Western world at large is ignoring them. Likewise, he visited Hamas and PLO leaders including Ahmed Yassin and Yasser Arafat, handing out Bibles. He got linked to a project called Musalaha, which was founded by the Palestinian Evangelical leader Salim Munayer. Musalaha's name is an Arabic word which translates as ‘reconciliation’, and it attempts to bring closer together Israelis and indigenous Israeli Arabs.

Alpha Courses as a unifying Tool                                                                                            Alpha Courses have been among the most powerful unifying tools among churches from different denominations in recent decades. Simultaneously it was a divine instrument that brought many people all around the Globe to know Christ as their Saviour and get Holy Spirit filled as well.                                 Alpha Courses were started in 1977 at Holy Trinity, Brompton, a Church of England parish of London. In 1990 the Reverend Nicky Gumbel, a curate at Holy Trinity, took over the running of the course. Alpha is organized as a series of sessions over 10 weeks, typically preceded by an ‘Alpha Supper; which often includes the talk "Is there more to life than this?" and with a day or weekend away. Each session starts with a meal, followed by a talk (often a video by Nicky Gumbel) and then discussion in small groups. The talks aim to cover the basic beliefs of the Christian faith.

Chapter 19 Prayer erupts in different Places

         

          In the early 1970s Brian O’Donnell owned the Hippie Market of the city of Cape Town as well as a night club called The Factory. After getting spiritually revived, he decided to conduct an outreach on Monday nights from there and later also at Green Point Stadium. A supernatural intervention occurred when Brian asked Dave Valentine to pray about assisting him in some way at his Hippie Market.

Revival Vibes resound from the Cape 

The Holy Spirit moved mightily among young people, ultimately leading to the Hippie Revival that paved the way for ten new Assemblies of God (AoG) congregations among Whites and five among ‘Coloureds’. With ‘Coloured’ AoG pastors like James Valentine and Eddie Roman working closely alongside their White colleagues, this was a significant contribution to the breaking down of the racial barriers of the apartheid era on grassroots level.

                                      Cape Revival vibes radiated

                                      to the ends of the Earth

          The revival vibes radiated even much further afield. In Grahamstown the ‘charismatic renewal’ as it was called, moved into the Anglican Church where Bishop Bill Burnett was impacted. The Holy Spirit movement flowed via a big national church event with Dr Billy Graham in 1973. Held in Durban in March 1973, the Congress was attended by 630 delegates and observers from 31 different denominations, 36 Christian service groups, and 13 different African and overseas countries. The original idea of the Congress on Mission and Evangelism in Durban came from Michael Cassidy of Africa Enterprise and John Rees, General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC).

          At the Congress on Mission and Evangelism the racial barriers came down in a significant way for the first time in this country. Dr Graham's insistence on the absence of any segregation among the audience played no small role. Durban also was an important forerunner for Lausanne the following year when the evangelical-ecumenical schism was addressed as well as the unbiblical separation of evangelism and compassionate outreach.

Personal Impact of the Hippie Revival                                                                                     My two years of full-time study at the Moravian seminary included a good mix of evangelistic activity and ecumenical activism. Our full-time student colleague Fritz Faro got enflamed by the evangelistic zeal of the Jesus People. We tried to accommodate that issue, but at the same time we deemed it necessary to challenge the apparent Jesus People acceptance of the racist South African way of life. We also sharpened our axes for White liberals who professed to be against apartheid. Thus we decided to challenge the St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Green Point. Outside this church complex a notice board welcomed all races. Reverend Douglas Bax and his St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church passed the test with flying colours. Thereafter he became a close friend of our seminary.  

A Revival among District Six Youth                                                                                                            The flip side of the Islamic resurgence in the wake of the Group areas legislation was a mini-revival among young people of District Six. The use of the bigger Church Hall of Holy Cross displayed that there was a non-denominational flavour of the movement. That this was no superficial 'happy clappy' occasion can be easily discerned. Youth rallies were also held in neutral venues like the Palace Bioscope (Cinema) in the suburb Salt River, which even turned out to be too small.

          Young people turned from drugs and gangsterism to Christ. Some started cottage meetings, others held open air services. From this movement many young people went to night Bible Schools and colleges. Many of them became pastors and leaders in their churches. Around 50 young people from this revival became pastors or pastors' wives subsequently.

Another side of Prayer as a Part of the Process of Change

Prayer was very much part of the process of change. This is demonstrated by times of prayer and fasting in St George’s Cathedral. Its authorities had evidently repented after the negative response to Rev. Bernard Wrankmore in 1971, who thereafter went to go and prayer at a Muslim shrine near to Lion’s Head. Rev. David Russell and Dr Ivan Toms, a young doctor who served at the SACLA-initiated clinic in Crossroads, were two persons who were tolerated to pray there, with some publicity given to their endeavour (King, 1997:67).

          After the West had refused to help them in the battle against the apartheid regime, the ANC turned to the Soviet Communists. The military situation on the country’s borders spawned White Christians of South Africa to form a group called Intercessors for South Africa. This was initiated by Dr Frances Grim, leader of the Hospital Christian Fellowship, which had its national headquarters in the picturesque Capetonian suburb of Pinelands. He was one of very few people at the time to discern the growing moral dangers sufficiently: ‘Most people seem to be too busy making money, enjoying themselves...to notice the dangerous downward trend in the country’s morals’. The unheralded hero and prayer warrior Dr Frances Grim became God's instrument to touch lives in many quarters. Dr Peter Hammond was one of them. He dedicated the autobiographical book The killing Fields of Mozambique to his mentor, saying 'he taught me to pray for world evangelisation – in days of prayer and nights of prayer.'

          During that time a prayer vigil was held at St George’s Cathedral, where various people committed themselves to prayer within 24-hour sessions by name for some student. The reflection of Professor Frances Wilson for 13 February has been printed, including notes on Nyameko Barney Pityana, who went on to become a top academic and administrator of UNISA: ‘For such a man as he to be incarcerated is a judgment not upon Barney but upon the society which has acted so violently against him’ (De Gruchy, 1986:126). All students were finally released without being charged of any crime.         

          Dr Francis Grim initiated a National Day of Prayer, called for 7 January 1976. However, this was not perceived by people of colour as something to join. In fact, few people from those ranks knew about the day of prayer. The all-White organizers had still not recognized the need to draw in people from other racial backgrounds. Yet, this move may have stemmed the tide of Communist-inspired violent revolution, to which the Soweto June 16 upheavals in 1976 could easily have led. Grim gave a challenging title to a booklet that was published by his organisation: Pray or Perish. At any rate, God was already at work.

Worldwide Ripple Effects of the Cape Hippie Revival

The Durban Congress on Mission and Evangelism of 1973 birthed PACLA (Pan African Christian Leadership Assembly) in Nairobi in 1976. The Durban event led to the influential SACLA (South African Christian Leadership Assembly) in Pretoria in 1979 where the German-born Reinhardt Bonnke was divinely touched. In subsequent years Bonnke would take the Gospel to many African countries and even further afield.                                                                    Whereas earlier congresses apparently hardly seemed to impact the Cape, the Durban event did it in no uncertain way. One of the leaders, Professor Nico Smith, was based at Stellenbosch University with its hallowed theological faculty.

A Year of spiritual Confrontation

1977 was a year of a major confrontation of spiritual forces worldwide. In China the tide began to turn as thousands started turning to Christ through the house churches - an answer to the ‘millions of intercessors who travailed in prayer for the long-delayed breakthrough’ (Johnstone, 1992:164). South Africa was ideologically under threat because of the ANC’s close links to the Soviet Union. In the same year the famous prisoner Nelson Mandela started visiting the kramat of Shaykh Mattara, the Islamic shrine on Robben Island, unwittingly bonding him to that religion to some extent. The seed was sown for a link to Islam, a religion which also had a clear political agenda.

          In September 1977 Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader who was secretly touted as future president, was found dead while in police custody. The October 19^th (1977) banning and arrests of church people and church-related organisations simultaneously called forth a spate of Church condemnations of apartheid from around the world, to be followed by sharp criticism from within the Dutch Reformed Church ranks. Thus the meeting of the Lutheran World Federation in Dar-es-Salaam in 1977 declared apartheid a sin and any theological justification thereof a heresy, with the NG Sendingkerk using almost identical terminology the following year at their synod. The judgement was repeated a little stronger by the Association of Black Reformed Christians in South Africa (ABRECSA) in 1981: ‘apartheid is a sin and any theological justification thereof is a travesty of the gospel, a betrayal of the Reformed tradition and a heresy.’ Dr Allan Boesak’s paper there on 26 October included the statement “I indeed believe that Black Christians should formulate a Reformed Confession for our time and situation in our own words (Boesak, 1984:103). All this paved the way for Boesak to be requested to deliver a paper at the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) in Ottawa (Canada). Thereafter he was elected as President of the WARC in August 1982. Along with Professor Dirkie Smit, Boesak played a prominent role in the formulation of the Belhar Confession at the Sendingkerk Synod of October 1982.

         

Farewell to Apartheid

Stellenbosch was the place where segregation ideologists like D.F Malan, Jan Smuts and Hendrik Verwoerd had studied. The university there, however, was also instrumental in the breaking down of the apartheid edifice among Afrikaner academics like no other place of learning in the country. At the university from where Barend Keet once opposed apartheid as a lone voice in the desert, a groundswell of internal opposition to apartheid semantics started to grow in strength. This culminated in one of them, W.P. Esterhuyse, even daring to bid farewell in 1978 to the ideology in his affordable booklet that was translated two years later into English as Apartheid must die. For those in authority there, it was bad enough that kafferboeties[10] like Johan Degenaar, Andre du Toit and Frederik van Zyl Slabbert were teaching at the University. To also have Professor Nico Smith, one of the apartheid critics in the hallowed theological faculty was completely unacceptable to the powers that be. But there was still a hard battle ahead to get the abhorrent ideology of White supremacy dead and buried!

The Run-up to the Koinonia Declaration                                                                                         The banning of the Christian Institute and its leader, Dr Beyers Naudé on 19 October 1977, along with many other organizations that were perceived to be in opposition to apartheid, unleashed unexpected forces against the government.

Dr Nico Smith, Professor of Theology in Stellenbosch at the time, played a significant role in starting Koinonia.  The movement organised inter-racial weekends in different towns and cities. Participants would always lodge with someone from a different race group. Christians of different races started meeting socially so that families could get to know and understand each other. From their ranks the Koinonia Declaration followed in 1977 when three Dutch Reformed Church dominees in the Western Cape reacted significantly against a government ruling, which made agitation against detention without trial unlawful They also called for transparency regarding ‘the handling of matters relating to the security of the state (e.g. the recent series of bannings, detentions and arrests on October 19^th., 1977)’ [Hofmeyr et al, 1991: 294]. The prayerful attitude of these clergymen was revealed in the first sentences of the Koinonia Declaration: ‘…We also believe that the prayers of just men have great power. We therefore urge all Christians to pray without ceasing for those in authority that… they may not be led astray by unbiblical ideologies…’ Its link to the cause of visible expression of the unity of the body of Christ can be easily deduced from some of the statements:

‘… 4. We believe that God is a God of justice, and that his justice is a principle implanted in the hearts and the lives of his children. We believe that God should be obeyed by practicing his justice in all spheres of life, and at this time especially in politics. We believe that Christian love, as defined by God's law, supplies the norm for practicing justice. This means having the opportunity of doing unto others as one would have them do unto oneself. We believe that justice embraces, inter alia, equity. In a sinful world this implies a certain flexibility in the application of the law, which is best guarded by checking and balancing human authorities in order to avoid a concentration of power.
5. We believe that the Body of Christ is one, and this unity includes rich diversity. This principle should be acknowledged and actualized by members of the Body in all spheres of society. On this basis we deem it necessary that particularly within the state, the legitimate interests of each group as well as the common interest of all, should be fully recognized within the framework of a just political dispensation. We dissociate ourselves from all extreme forms of Black and White national consciousness which identify the Gospel with the history of group interests of any one group, excluding all other groups, and we call upon the church of Christ to consciously dissociate itself from an exclusively White as well as an exclusively Black theology which distorts the vital message of Scripture.’

          Hereafter however, Nico Smith was more or less coerced to leave Stellenbosch. Koinonia became part of the run-up to the South African Consultation Leaders Assembly (SACLA) in 1979, an event that would effect racial relations positively in a deep way.

          Professor Nico Smith took his theology students hereafter to the Crossroads ‘squatter’ camp – causing a storm in the Dutch Reformed Church. This was not the first time that theological students were involved in this sort of missionary forays. In fact, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, a prominent politician of the early till mid-1980s, told in his autobiography how they visited Langa just after Sharpeville in 1960 as part of a group of theological students. Nico Smith also initiated regular monthly meetings of believers from different denominations and races in Stellenbosch.

A spiritual Earthquake in Pretoria                                                                                                  Since 1978, Gerda Leithgöb, an Afrikaner believer, had been directing spiritual warfare in Pretoria.  She and her prayer team offered confession at the Voortrekker Monument. Their prayers and confession surely helped to cause a change in the spiritual complexion of the country’s capital that made true democracy possible.  That confessional prayer in the city of Pretoria was the prelude to the South African Christian Leadership Assembly (SACLA) event in the national capital the following year.  This conference was the equivalent of a spiritual earthquake. Professor David Bosch, a giant rebel against apartheid, was its leader.  SACLA influenced the whole country deeply in a positive way and the conference was evidently part of God’s plan to transform the apartheid stronghold and capital of South Africa. Pastor Ed Roebert initiated a gathering of like-minded pastors with the purpose of fellowship and mutual encouragement. Soon he met regularly with Reinhardt Bonnke, Ray McCauley, Fred Roberts, Tim Salmon and Nicky v.d. Westhuizen. In due course many new charismatic churches were established and men with unusually anointed ministries appeared on the scene.

Opposition to Apartheid in District Six and Woodstock

One of the most effective campaigns against apartheid was launched as a result of the Group Areas proclamation of 11 February 1966. It is noteworthy that the first two phases of resistance with regard to District Six was started by a prayer campaign. Four days after the notorious proclamation, a twelve man steering committee proposed a ‘Peninsula-wide prayer period’.  This was possibly the first time a city-wide prayer event was mooted at the Cape. Syd Lotter, a trade unionist, appealed to ‘all the churches and mosques… (to)…call a day of prayer on which our people can give vent to their humiliation and frustration, to the Almighty’  (Cited in Jeppie/Soudien, 1990:148). Of special significance was the response of Muslims to this call. Two weeks after the declaration, several thousand people crowded into the four mosques of District Six and Walmer Estate.  In the Muir Street mosque Alone 3000 persons assembled, with many hundreds spilling into the streets around the mosque.

          The government reaction was a stepping up with the harassment of opponents. ‘Spyker’ van Wyk, the notorious Gestapo-like Special Branch agent, intimidated the movement by visiting all the members of the District Six Defence Committee.

          Significantly, the second phase of resistance with regard to the removal of ‘Coloureds’ from District Six was also started by a prayer campaign. The vehicle to carry the campaign was the District Six Ministers’ Fraternal, an energetic group of clergymen from a few local churches. Father Basil van Rensburg, who was based at the Holy Cross Roman Catholic Church and who came to District Six with advertising skills in September 1978, launched a fund raising initiative, along with the new prayer campaign: ‘our aim is to start in a small way with Holy Cross as a nucleus and gradually to build a forceful campaign of prayer and action until official thinking on District Six changes’ (Cape Argus, 5 September 1978). The parish priest of St. Philip’s Anglican Church expressed some of this commitment as he invited other congregations to join in prayer: ‘May we all by the Power of His Holy Spirit seek nothing else but a miracle from the Lord.’ Lay people were well represented in the Friends of District Six movement, an offspring of the District Six Ministers’ Fraternal. The members came not only from the above-mentioned churches. There were also some from other circles, notably Muslims and Jews. Among those who joined were the Black Sash, the National Council for Women, the Civil Rights League and the Institute of Race Relations. Whites were encouraged to refrain from buying property in the maligned and stained District Six.

No joy for the Government!

The Nationalist Government had little joy from its conquest of District Six. In 1971, plans for a multi-million rand luxury suburb for Whites had to be abandoned because of massive public protest. Two large oil companies had to abandon plans to open service stations there, with reverberations in Holland when protesters cut the petrol hoses of Shell.

            The opposition was very effective. The desolate District Six – after the Group Areas removal of the inhabitants, would be a constant reminder of the injustice perpetrated, pricking the conscience of Whites. For decades marches to Parliament would start from Keizergracht, the former Hanover Street of District Six. On 11 February 1981 Rev Karel August, once a student at the Moravian Seminary of District Six and the last minister of the Moravian Hill congregation before the closing due to the Group Areas legislation, delivered a powerful sermon in the Black Theology mould, which kept the memory of District Six alive. Pointing to the prominent quisling tax collector Zaccheus (Luke 19), Reverend Kallie August challenged the audience, which consisted probably of just as many Muslims as Christians. He highlighted that Jesus was still looking up to the traitor. The audience was thus given a tool to win collaborators like Zaccheus over to the cause of justice for the oppressed in the process!!

A Gale catapults an Evangelist into Prominence                                                                                The destruction by a gale of a gigantic tent in the mid-1980s in which the German-born evangelist Reinhardt Bonnke would hold an evangelistic campaign in the Cape Township of Valhalla Park, created much interest for the event. The organisers were forced to conduct the campaign in the open. Thousands attended who would never have fitted into the gigantic tent. Instead of the planned 15 nights, four extra nightly services were added amid clear skies in mid-June which is known to be part of the Cape rainy season.

                        There was an unprecedented networking

                        of Cape township churches

The networking of township churches in the run-up to this campaign was unprecedented, with a corresponding response at the altar calls. Many Muslims gave an indication that they wanted to become followers of Jesus. However, lack of proper follow-up by the churches prevented a massive spiritual turn-around at the Cape. This lack, combined with a brutal apartheid clampdown at the time, drove many nominal Christians to Islam. To become a Muslim was regarded as part of the ‘struggle’. Marriage swelled the numbers of Cape Muslims when the Christian partner converted to Islam, staying Muslim even after divorce. A sequel of the gale in Valhalla Park and the campaign was that Reinhardt Bonnke became a household name throughout the African continent and beyond.

Bliss Brings Blessings

Under the auspices of Africa Enterprise (AE) David Bliss came to South Africa in 1967 from the USA as a student. The relatively young missions and evangelistic agency AE started by Michael Cassidy in 1962, had such a profound effect on David Bliss that he decided to postpone his return to Princeton University for a year. After his marriage to Deborah (Debby) in 1972, the couple came to South Africa in 1979 as AE workers on the Wits University campus in Johannesburg.  That year the South African Christian Leadership Assembly (SACLA) took place in Pretoria, an event that changed their lives. The Holy Spirit confronted them with the issue of unreached people groups and the possibility of sending South Africans as missionaries.            

The next year the couple participated in the students’ conference in Edinburgh, which ran parallel to the 70^th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the World Council of Churches. The 1980 event brought the use of non-Westerners as missionaries into focus. For Dave and Debby Bliss this was a natural follow-up to SACLA in Pretoria the previous year.

Community Disruption leads to Missions
BABS (Build a Better Society) was a local community organisation of Kewtown, a gangster-ridden Cape Township.  In 1982 the gangs of Kew Town killed seven people in 3 months. After approaching other organisations without success, BABS asked the local Docks Mission Church to do something about the situation. A coffee bar was started specially for the gangsters, led by Rodney Thorne and Freddy Kammies. Every Sunday evening between 60 – 80 of them attended. Many of the gang leaders were challenged to put down the weapons and guns. Soon the crime rate came down. As a denomination the local Docks Mission faithfully prayed for the ministry which continued for quite a long time.                              The ministry sowed seed for missions. Eugene Johnson was the first missionary sent out by Docks Mission in 1978 on one of the Operation Mobilisation (OM) ships already in 1978. He was followed by many others from the Cape ‘Coloured’ community.

A Wave of Prayer starts at UWC                                                                                                        Dr Charles Robertson, a lecturer at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) from 1971-76, became part of the prayer emphasis in 1983. After his father’s death in 1979, he was thrust into a quagmire of spiritual turmoil. Hereafter he broke through into a living faith in Jesus as his Lord.

          Dr Robertson was approached to help fund the hiring of a bus to take participants to a prayer service at the historical Sendingsgestig Museum in the Mother City’s Long Street, which coincided with a Frontiers Missions Conference at UWC.

A national Prayer Awakening erupts                                                                                                The Sendingsgestig Museum itself would become the venue for Concerts of Prayer. That event reverberated throughout the country, ushering in the prayer movement. In 1983 a prayer awakening started in a few congregations all around South Africa. One of these was a small group of intercessors led by Gerda Leithgöb in Pretoria that helped set them on a path previously unexplored in this country. Simultaneously, Bennie Mostert, a Dutch Reformed Church minister, started a newsletter to mobilize prayer in Namibia. Mostert dubbed his newsletter for Namibia Prayer Action Elijah.

          Gerda Leithgöb requested prayer warriors from other countries at a conference in Singapore in 1988 to pray for South Africa, which had been in constant crisis since 1985. Ds. Bennie Mostert founded a national prayer network known as NUPSA (Network for United Prayer in Southern Africa) which became closely linked to the spiritual transformation of the continent. In 1993 the first teams started praying through information gained from serious research. During 1993 South Africa also participated in the Pray through the Window[11] initiative that was launched internationally by the AD 2000 Prayer Track. 

Cape Prayer Endeavours of the early 1990s                                                                                       In the late 1980s the Concerts of Prayer - inspired by David Bryant - drew good crowds to the Sendingsgestig Museum, a fitting commemoration of the inter-denominational work that started there in 1799. Dr Charles Robertson led the Concerts of Prayer hereafter not only at the monthly meetings at that venue, but also later when the event relocated to the Presbyterian Church in Mowbray. It was very fitting that Charles Robertson and his wife Rita would donate the property where the first NUPSA School of Prayer would be erected in 2000, later known as the Jericho Walls premises in Stellenberg.

The Western Cape Missions Commission was quite effective in the early 1990s with strategic people from the Cape mission scene like Jan Hanekom, Martin Heuvel and Bruce van Eeden. One of the events organised in 1993 by the Western Cape Missions Commission was a workshop with John Robb of World Vision. I used the list of participants at this event to organize the Cape Jesus Marches the following year. In this way I updated my contacts for further missional endeavour in the Western Cape.

Local Churches spearheading foreign Missions                                                                                                   The Cape led the country in local church involvement with foreign missions. Until the 1970s it was however only a church here and a church there that was sending out missionaries. A congregation from the Docks Mission in Gleemoor, Athlone, with a strong emphasis on prayer, spearheaded the foreign missionary endeavour.

Coming from the ranks of this ‘Coloured’ denomination, Peter Tarantal became a national leader of OM and Theo Dennis was appointed as the Western Cape regional co-ordinator of the mission agency. Theo’s sister married Dennis Atkins, who was the principal of the Bethel Bible School until his retirement in 2006.  Freddy Kammies, who grew up in the adjacent notorious township of Kewtown, came to the Lord at this church and he was discipled through the ministry of the Gleemoor congregation.

Another Cape congregation that caused a stir in missions is the Rondebosch Dutch Reformed Church.  In the apartheid era that congregation was one of the few White Dutch Reformed churches in the country where people of colour could enter without the real fear that they would be prevented entry (or worse, evicted, as it actually happened in isolated cases). When Dr Ernst van der Walt came to pastor that congregation in 1982, the church was supporting a few ‘children’ from the congregation who were involved in missions. The denomination as such was initially only supporting missionaries linked to the Dutch Reformed synod.

This would change drastically when David Bliss, the OM missionary based at the Andrew Murray Centre in Wellington, visited the church. After his visit, the Prayer Concert concept got off the ground with an early morning meeting every Sunday. When the minister’s son Ernst went to the William Carey School in Pasadena in the USA, it meant an intensification of the church’s involvement in missions. This was even more so when Ernst van der Walt (jr.) became the personal assistant of George Verwer, the international leader of OM.

Back in Cape Town

I was back in Cape Town in January 1992 – this time with my own family, including my wife and our five children. We wanted to bring into practices what we had learned about spiritual warfare during our training as missionaries with Worldwide Evangelization for Christ (WEC). Thus we endeavoured to stimulate non-denominational targeted prayer almost from the outset. Initially we targeted the residential area Bo-Kaap, an Islamic stronghold because of apartheid. With a few other believers we started praying for Bo-Kaap fairly soon. Later we also added Sea Point and the Middle East, praying for Jews and Muslims.[12]

          Starting venues near to Bo-Kaap, the Shepherd's Watch and later at the Koffiekamer underneath the St Stephen's Dutch Reformed Church building, we prayed during the lunch hour on Fridays with individual believers for many years. From this prayer initiative many a blessed ministry evolved such as hospital ministry and outreach to foreigners. From January 1992 until July 2007, Rosemarie and I served as missionaries of Worldwide Evangelization for Christ (WEC) International.

Fighting PAGAD

My participation in the Western Cape Missions Commission became the backdrop of my organizing Jesus Marches in the Western Cape in 1994. This coincided with an attempt to start a regional prayer network for Muslim Evangelism. The most visible result in this period was when I worked alongside various local pastors in the Cape Peace Initiative (CPI). We succeeded with God's help to nullify the PAGAD (People against Gangsterism and Drugs) attempt from 1996 to islamize the Western Cape. A big factor in this regard was the networking with the local Christian radio station Cape Community FM (CCFM). Pivotal in this effort was a testimony programme on Friday evenings called God Changes Lives that I produced, with Pastor Richard Mitchell as my presenter. At this time I was also very much involved with city-wide prayer events, led by Pastor Eddie Edson of Mitchell's Plain. Those city-wide prayer events ultimately became the forerunner of the big Newland Rugby Stadium event on 21 March 2001 and the annual Global Day of Prayer that started in 2005.[13]

Praying at different Venues

With Louis Pasques and the late Pastor Edgar Davids, the pastors at the local Baptist Church and the one in nearby Woodstock, I came together for prayer on a weekly basis. From this base we attempted to get pastors and local believers of the Cape Town City Bowl to operate in unity, but we harvested only limited success.         

          Pastor Richard Mitchell had been praying over the city with Christians from the heights at Rhodes Memorial. We took this cue to start monthly early morning prayer from Signal Hill in 1998, praying for Bo-Kaap, Sea Point and often also for a greater expression of the unity of the body of Christ in the CBD.

Outreach to Foreigners

Our Friday lunch hour prayer meeting became the start of yet another venture in 1996 after a believer from Eerste River, a distant suburb in the north of our city, who had been a regular participant in the beginning of these prayer meetings in 1992, popped in again one day. He challenged us, referring to the many French-speaking Muslim street traders from West Africa, who had been moving into the city: ‘Have you ever considered doing something about bringing the Gospel to them?’

         In the meantime Louis Pasques, who was raised in an Afrikaner environment, had become the senior pastor of the Cape Town Baptist Church in 1996. He had not only become a regular participant at the Friday prayer meeting in the Koffiekamer, but he also speaks French.

         When we started to pray about the possible outreach to foreigners at our Friday lunch-hour meeting, God surely used these occasions to prepare Louis Pasques’s heart. When the destitute Congolese refugee teenager Surgildas (Gildas) Paka pitched up at the church, Louis and his wife Heidi sensed that God was challenging them to take special care of the youngster. One weekend Louis and Heidi had their parents over for a visit. They asked Alan Kay, an elder and the administrator of Cape Town Baptist Church, to provide accommodation to the destitute teenager.  Gildas captivated Alan’s heart. This was the beginning of an extended and unusual adoption process. One thing led to the other until Alan Kay not only finally adopted Gildas, but he also got more and more involved in compassionate care of other refugees. Soon the Cape Town Baptist Church became a home to refugees from many African countries. Gildas and our son Rafael became quite close friends.

                                        A public confession was made

                                    on behalf of Afrikaners for the hurts

                                        meted out to people of colour

When Blacks started attending the fellowship increasingly and because of a brave sermon in which Louis made a confession on behalf of Afrikaners for the hurts meted out to people of colour during the apartheid era, a few White people left the church. This triggered the gradual change of the complexion of people attending the church.

         Allain Ravelo-Hoërson (of TEAM The Evangelical Alliance Mission) played a big part in establishing the ministry among Francophone Africans at the church, along with other missionaries who had been working in countries where French is the lingua franca. Allain ministered there faithfully from 1998 to August 2001, when he and his wife left to study in London. He was supported by Ruth Craill, an SIM missionary, who had ministered in West Africa. She played the piano and took care of providing meals after or before the services.

A positive Change towards Refugees

The attitude of Whites in the Cape Town Baptist Church hereafter gradually changed positively towards refugees. Before long, quite a few refugee-background Africans started attending the churches services, especially when special ones in French were arranged monthly and later twice a month, as an effort to equip the Francophone believers for loving outreach to the Muslim French-speakers from our continent. The word spread quite well, so that in due course also other Cape churches started opening their doors to refugees. In due course the word spread around the country.

            The Koffiekamer, suddenly became a major channel of blessing when an Alpha Course was started there. A special role in the effort towards transformation in the city was accorded to it when many a homeless person was transformed by the power of the Gospel, and prayer meetings for the city started at that venue on every last Wednesday of the month. This is where we had increased contact with Vlok Esterhuyse. He would become one of our stalwart intercessors at the Central Police Station.

Start of the Dorcas Trust      

The need for refugees to get employment was the spawn for the English language classes at the local Baptist church to be revitalized. This inspired the offer of free English lessons to many of these refugees, ultimately leading to the resumption of English language classes at the church as an aid to help refugees find their way in the city. The simultaneous need for a discipling house for Muslim converts and a drug rehabilitation centre gave birth to the Dorcas Trust. I hoped that the city churches could take ownership of these ventures. (That turned out to be easier said than done.)

A Model for Transformation Stadium Events

Cynthia Richards from Africa Enterprise was another instrument in this regard. (I was able to give her the contact details that I still possessed from the Jesus Marches of 1994). She visited the various ministers’ fraternals of the Peninsula, while organising prayer meetings in preparation for an evangelistic campaign at the Newlands Cricket Stadium in April 1997.

          It was really significant for the Cape Town Metropolis when churches across the city and from almost every denomination joined hands for a big Gospel campaign at the Newlands Cricket Stadium with Franklin Graham, the son of the renowned evangelist Billy Graham.  Pastor Walter Ackerman from the Docks Mission Church in Lentegeur and Pastor Elijah Klaassen from a Pentecostal church in Gugulethu/ Crossroads worked tirelessly to enlist people from the ‘Coloured’ and Black churches respectively for this event. Transport from the townships was provided free of charge. This thus became the model for the Transformation stadium events of the new millennium.

Chapter 19 The Road to the Global Day of Prayer

At the sending of prayer teams to different spiritual strongholds in 1997, a team from the Dutch Reformed congregation Suikerbosrand in Heidelberg (Gauteng) followed the nudge of NUPSA to come and pray in the Mother City.

                                                 A team from Heidelberg

                                              (Gauteng) pray in Bo-Kaap

This was spiritually significant because Heidelberg had once been the cradle of the racist and right-wing Afrikaanse Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). That the AWB town Heidelberg was sending a team to pray for Bo-Kaap, might have hit the headlines had it been publicized! But all this was undercover stuff. This was transpiring at a time when PAGAD was still terrorizing the Cape Peninsula. The Bo-Kaap Islamic stronghold was not geographically situated in the 10/40 window, but Bennie Mostert correctly discerned that it was the case ideologically. It had become a Muslim bastion because of apartheid.

Moravian Hill hosts a strategic Meeting                                                                              

In mid-1997 Eben Swart became the co-ordinator of Herald Ministries for the Western Cape. As part of this visit from Gauteng, a prayer meeting of confession was organized for November 1, 1997, in District Six, in front of the Moravian Church. Sally Kirkwood not only had a vision for the desolate District Six to be revived through prayer, but she also informed Richard Mitchell and Mike Winfield about the event. The Cape prayer movement received a major lift.

I had asked Eben Swart of Herald Ministries to lead the occasion. That turned out to be very strategic. Eben Swart’s position as Western Cape Prayer Coordinator of Herald Ministries  was cemented since he was now able to link up with the pastors’ and pastors’ wives prayer meeting led by Eddie Edson.  The event on Moravian Hill in District Six attempted to break the spirit of death and forlornness over the area, so that it would be inhabited again. However, it would take another seven years before that vision started to materialize. 

Prayer on Mountain Tops and Stadiums 

Eben Swart collaborated closely with the Network of United Prayer in Southern Africa (NUPSA), which had appointed Pastor Willy Oyegun, a Nigerian, as their Western Cape coordinator.  Together they did important work in research and spiritual mapping, along with Amanda Buys (Kanaan Ministries), who counselled Christians with psychiatric problems.

            Led by Pastor Mitchell, a Hindu-background Indian, Christians prayed from Signal Hill early on Saturday mornings. After the citywide prayer event on Table Mountain in September 1998, organized by Eben Swart, the vision of praying on the heights was revived.

Citywide Prayer Events

1998 brought significant steps to effect more unity in the body of Christ city-wide through the initiatives of NUPSA and Herald Ministries. Regular prayer meetings at the Mowbray Baptist Church ensued, with believers coming from different parts of the Peninsula and from diverse racial and church backgrounds. The meetings carried a strong message of unity. Nevertheless, the Mowbray exercise brought two racial groups for prayer together, becoming the forerunner of citywide events.

                                               A prayer event on the Grand Parade

                                               almost floundered after a bomb threat

A well-publicized prayer event on the Grand Parade almost floundered after a bomb threat. Prior to this, churches across the Peninsula had initially been requested to cancel their evening services on Sunday, 19 April 1998 and join this service. In sheer zeal, a Christian businessman had thousands of pamphlets printed and distributed.  Unwisely, he did not consult with the organizing committee about its content. The flyer and poster that invited believers to a mass prayer meeting against drug abuse, homosexuality and other moral concerns, unfortunately also referred to Islam in a context that was not respectful enough for some radical Muslims. 

A PAGAD member apparently regarded the flyer as an invitation to disrupt the meeting. He passed on a threat to that effect. The event was subsequently announced as cancelled, but a few courageous believers showed up nevertheless.  These included the late Pastor Danny Pearson, who had been deeply involved with the preparation of the prayer occasion. He believed that we should not give in to the intimidation, and that, if need be, Christians should be willing to die there for the cause of the Gospel. The meeting proceeded on a much smaller scale than originally planned. The service included confession for the sins of omission to the Cape Muslims and to the Jews. And there was no PAGAD disruption of the meeting!

More Prayer Efforts in the City

At one of the Saturday morning prayer times at Signal Hill in 1999, the idea of Cape Town as a spiritual gateway to the continent was shared. The prayers resulted in a surge towards transformation in the country after Richard Mitchell had seen the Transformation video at a pastors’ prayer meeting. 

                                    Within months, the vision of praying

                                     in sports stadiums became a reality

Within a matter of months the vision of praying in sports stadiums became a reality.  There followed significant combined prayer events: at Bellville’s Velodrome on a Sunday morning; at the Athletics stadium of the University of the Western Cape; at the Vygiekraal Stadium and at the Athlone Stadium.

Some churches in the City participated in a forty-day period of prayer and fasting from Easter Sunday to Ascension Day 1998.  Rev. Louis Pasques of the Cape Town Baptist Church spearheaded this endeavour.  A weekly meeting with a prayer emphasis gained ground slowly after the 40-day effort from April to May 1998. Later that year, combined evening services were held once a month in the City Bowl in participating churches, with the venue rotating very time.        

 A corresponding period of prayer and fasting in 1999 - this time for 120 days - was concluded in the Western Cape in the traditional Groote Kerk celebration of the Lord’s Supper when pastors from different denominations officiated. This was a visible sign of a growing church unity. At that Ascension Day event, Dr Robbie Cairncross was divinely brought into the situation.  He came to the Mother City with a vision to see a network of prayer developing in the Peninsula. His prayer for an office for his Christian Coalition/Family Alliance near to Parliament was answered in a special way. He moved into the premises of the Chamber of Commerce (SACB), a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament.

A Link forged with Community Transformation elsewhere

Pastor Eddie Edson of Mitchells Plain organised two all-night citywide prayer events on 25 June and 15 October 1999. By this time White pastors started to attend the monthly pastors' gathering more regularly, even at places like Die Hok in Manenberg, a former drug den.

Rev. Trevor Pearce, an Anglican minister from the township Belhar, started joining these prayer meetings. He was no stranger to the pain and hardship of discrimination and violence, yet his gentle disposition was often used by God to fulfil the role of peacemaker.

Seeds for 24/7 Prayer

The pastors’ and pastors’ wives monthly meetings of the 1990s became the run-up to the city-wide prayer events at the Light House Christian Centre in Parow, on the Grand Parade in the City and at sports stadiums from 1998. These occasions, along with prayer events like the one at Moravian Hill in District Six on 1 November 1997, brought about further correction.

         After a visit to the USA, Rev. Trevor Pearce, who also had some ministry experience on one of the Operation Mobilization(OM) ships, brought back copies of the Transformation video and an audio copy of the book Informed Intercessions by George Otis, This documented account of what happened in Cali (Columbia) also included principles for successful community transformation.

          Trevor Pearce wasted no time in meeting with Pastor Eddie Edson. Soon thereafter the group listened to the recorded voice of George Otis and watched the stories of transformation and redemption. They too felt that deep stirring within their hearts. Drugs, death, and despair had all been part of daily life for the residents of Cali, Columbia, until the Holy Spirit brought transformation through the praying Church. What satan had intended for evil, God was using for good.

          At the city-wide prayer event at the packed out Lighthouse Christian Centre on 15 October 1999 the Transformation video was viewed by the audience.

Moravian Heritage Rekindled

Although the Moravian denomination itself seemed to have dwindled into obscurity, the heritage of the early Moravians was once again at the cradle of a mighty movement of God across the world. A group of intercessors from America visited the East German village of Herrnhut in 1993. The group included a believer from St Thomas, the island to which the first two Moravian missionaries left in 1732. That group experienced a sovereign outpouring of God’s spirit as they prayed in the prayer tower of Herrnhut. This could possibly be regarded as the beginning of the modern wave of prayer that was sweeping around the globe since then. The vision of the 24-hour prayer watch - that kept going in Herrnhut for 120 years - was rekindled in a big way towards the end of 1999. Like wildfire, the concept spread around the world. At the beginning of the year 2000 African leaders - spearheaded by Bennie Mostert from Pretoria and John Mulinde of Uganda - got together to attempt implementing the example of the Moravians in Africa.

Jericho Walls at the Cape

„Sooispit” - the turning of the soil – in preparation for the building of a prayer room in the Western Cape, took place on February 9, 2000.  Charles Robertson, a Cape Christian businessman with a heart for prayer - along with his wife Rita - generously donated resources towards a venue for the work of NUPSA in the Western Cape. The premises in Brackenfell were earmarked to become a 24-hour prayer room for intercessors from the whole continent.

            Daniel and Estelle Brink were called to lead the NUPSA initiative to get a 24-hour Prayer Watch off the ground at the Cape. That this was spiritual warfare of a high degree became evident when Daniel Brink became critically ill shortly after commencing his new function. The Lord touched and healed him in answer to the prayers of many intercessors. In due course the ministry was renamed Jericho Walls, and the Western Cape branch became Global Watch.

The Body of Christ made visible       

The evident spiritual warfare around the World Parliament of Religions turned out to be fuel to set up a half night prayer meeting on the Grand Parade on fairly short notice. Just at this time Cees Vork and Pieter Bos[14] started corresponding about their intentions to come to Cape Town. The unity of the Body of Christ became visible to some extent at a mass half-night of prayer on 18 February 2000 on the Grand Parade. On the same weekend two Dutchmen, Pieter Bos and Cees Vork, representing the prayer movement in Holland, joined local Christians in confession and in praying against anti-Christian spiritual strongholds in the Peninsula.

            Four thousand Christians from a wide spectrum of denominations gathered on the Grand Parade.  Denominationalism, materialism and other evils of South African society in which the church had played a role in the past, were confessed. In a moving moment just before midnight, Pieter Bos and Cees Vork confessed the catastrophic contribution of their forefathers to the evils of Cape society.

A prayer network had developed towards a preliminary culmination in the half-night of prayer on the Grand Parade. Since then, prayer events proliferated countrywide through the 24-hour prayer watches and revival prayer attempts. Here the electronic media played a big role.

          It was clear that God was at work, orchestrating things when Mike Winfield and others were simultaneously busy with ‘Closing the Gates’ meetings, where we were looking at the sinful roots of our society.

          The half night prayer meeting on the Grand Parade on Friday 18 February 2000 was followed during the next days by strategic ‘Closing the Gates’ prayer occasions.  Other meetings like a combined church service on the Bellville Velodrome gave the impression that revival was in the air.

          The moving confession of Pieter Bos because of the Dutch colonial guilt at the shrine of Sheikh Yusuf at Macassar, the pioneer of Cape Islam, moved Nim Rajagukguk, our Indonesian missionary colleague, deeply. It was special that we could gain from Nim as he shared what had been happening in his home country in recent years.

            Hereafter we went to Vergelegen, the farm of Willem Adriaan van der Stel. Nim shared how he harboured hatred towards Dutchmen, because the Dutch had killed his grandfather, breaking down in tears of remorse. This gave the occasion a special touch. There I also met Dr Lovejoy Tiripei, a national of Zimbabwe, who had been a freedom fighter before he came to faith in Jesus as his Lord. He started Grace Fellowship Africa, an agency that would impact our ministry significantly. (God used Nim’s experience in a special way so that he and his wife got into a very close relationship to Maria van Maarseveen, a Dutch colleague in our small team.)

Impact of the Transformations Video

Graham Power, a Cape businessman, who is a member of the board of Directors of the Western Province Rugby Football Union, saw the Transformations documentary video in March 2000. It spawned in him a strong desire to see a prayer event at the headquarters of the Rugby Football Union in Newlands. He promptly approached his co-directors for the use of the big sports stadium. This was approved in August 2000. The Sentinel Group, that included George Otis of the well-known Transformation videos, staged a three-day conference at the Lighthouse Christian Centre in Parow with international speakers from 3 November 2000, followed by a citywide prayer meeting at an Athletics stadium in Bellville on Sunday, 5 November. The meetings in Parow and Bellville were preceded by prayer events that not only coincided with a bout of spiritual warfare against the occult satanist Halloween celebrations, but they were also part of a countrywide 40-day offensive of prayer and fasting for the continent.

Bombs discovered and defused

On Friday 3 November, 2000 two potentially destructive bombs were discovered and defused at a well-known shopping centre in Bellville. The bombs could have caused massive loss of life, had they detonated at the intended time a few Kilometers from the venue of the prayer event in Parow. On the same day of the start of the prayer conference, the main alleged perpetrators of the pipe bomb planting were arrested. Reverend Trevor Pearce, who led the Community Transformation prayer initiative, stated that it could hardly have been co-incidence that the arrest of the surmised culprits happened at the time of the conference. Nor could it have been mere co-incidence that pipe bombs were discovered under a snooker table at a house in the Cape Flats suburb Grassy Park on 6 November, a day after the citywide prayer event in Bellville. For five years not a single PAGAD pipe bomb detonated at the Cape.

Transformation of the Mother City of South Africa received a major push on 3-5 November 2000 through the Lighthouse Centre event and the one in Bellville.

The Newlands Event of 21 March 2001                

The Transformation programme was closely linked to intercession from the outset. It is no surprise that the 24-hour prayer watch was connected to a big prayer occasion scheduled for the Newlands Rugby Stadium on 21 March 2001. In the 21 days prior to the event more than 200 congregations joined in a prayer effort for the stadium meeting on a 24-hour basis. This was totally unprecedented.

                           A satellite connection and

                                   big screens allowed more

                                   people to participate

The 21 March 2001 event was extraordinary in the extreme. Because Newlands was too small for all the people who wanted to attend, several local churches used a satellite connection and big screens to allow more people to participate. Radio CCFM and Radio Tygerberg radio stations also broadcast the unprecedented occasion live. Because it was a public holiday, many followed the prayers at home via radio and TV. 

A prophetic Move in District Six

Murray Bridgman, a Cape Christian advocate, felt God’s leading to perform a prophetic act in District Six. He had previously researched the history of Devil’s Peak. Along with Eben Swart, Bridgman provided some research that encouraged Dr Henry Kirby, a former medical missionary in Mozam-bique, to lobby Parliament to change the name of Devil’s Peak to Dove’s Peak. (Duivenkop had been an earlier name.) Kirby’s role as the prayer coordinator of the African Christian Democratic Party resulted in a motion tabled in the City Council in June 2002. The motion was unsuccessful, fuelling suspicion that satanists also had significant influence in the City Council.

On June 1, 2002 Susan and Ned Hill, an American missionary couple, joined Murray Bridgman and his wife as they poured water on the steps of the Moravian Hill Chapel in District Six, symbolically ushering in the showers of blessing that we prayed would come. Forcefully the message was confirmed that Messianic Jewish believers should be invited to join in the prayers of welcome to the foot of the Cross, to those who intended to return to the former slum-like residential area District Six.

Run-up to a Continental Prayer Convocation

The Koffiekamer, once mooted as the venue for a 24-hour prayer watch, suddenly became a major channel of blessing when an Alpha Course started there. A special role in the transformation of the city was accorded to the Koffiekamer when many a vagrant was transformed by the power of the Gospel. Prayer meetings for the city were subsequently held there every last Wednesday of the month for some time.

          It was furthermore fitting that the prelude to a prayer convocation for the African continent from 1^st to the 5th December 2003 at UWC, Bellville, took place on Robben Island. This was a follow-up of the ‘Cleansing South Africa’ event of September 2001.

Transformation Africa!

Prayer events in the 58 nations and islands which are linked to the continent of Africa were held on 2 May 2004 in some 1100 stadiums. The theme running throughout the afternoon was that the time had come for the Dark Continent to become a light to the nations. In an inspiring message, the Argentine speaker Ed Silvoso led the millions of believers in stadiums across the continent through prayers of repentance, dedication and commitment.

The 7 DAYS Initiative

As a follow-up strategy of Transformation Africa, the 7-Days Initiative was launched. On the verge of the 2004 event in stadiums all over Africa, Daniel Brink of the Jericho Walls Cape Office sent out the following communiqué:‘...From Sunday May 9th thousands of Christians all over South Africa will take part in a national night and day prayer initiative called „7 Days”.  The goal was to see the whole country covered in continuous prayer for one year from 9 May 2004 to 15 May 2005. At relatively short notice, communities in South Africa were challenged to each take 7 days to pray 24 hours a day. The initiative started with the Western Cape taking the first seven weeks. Daniel Brink, the regional organizer, invited believers of the Cape Peninsula to ‘proclaim your trust that, when we pray, God will respond. Declare your trust that if we put an end to oppression and give food to the hungry, the darkness will turn to brightness. Pray that houses of prayer will rise up all over Africa as places where God’s goodness and mercy is celebrated in worship and prayer, even before the answer comes.’

            Global Prayer Watch, the Western Cape arm of Jericho Walls, filled the first 7 days with day and night prayer at the Moravian Church complex in District 6, Cape Town, starting at 9 o’clock in the evening on May 9.  Every two hours around the clock a group of musicians would lead the ‘Harp and Bowl’ intercessory worship, whereby the group would pray around scripture. In another part of the complex intercessors could pray or paste prayer requests in the ‘boiler room’.

What a joy it was for the fervent prayer warrior Hendrina van der Merwe to be present on the 9th May 2004 in the Moravian Church. However, she would neither experience a spiritual breakthrough towards new church planting in Bo-Kaap nor the start of a 24-hour Prayer Watch in the City Bowl. She went to be with her Lord on 31 December 2004.

Jericho Walls challenged ‘millions of believers’ all over the world ‘to seek the face of the Lord and ask him to fill the earth with his glory as the waters cover the seas’ (Habakkuk 2:14) from 6^th to the 15^th May 2005. Young people were encouraged to do a ‘30 second Kneel Down’ on Friday 13 May and to have a whole night of prayer on Saturday 14 May, in the run-up to the Global Day of Prayer dubbed a ‘Whole night for the Whole World.’ On Sunday 15^th May 2005 the first Global Day of Prayer took place. This turned out to be one of the most unifying events of the body of Christ since the first Pentecost event in Jerusalem of Acts 2.

Chapter 20 Challenges at the Cape in Recent Years

It was exciting to see how in different parts of the country, the vision ‘adopt a cop’ - prayer for the police force - took off. Cops for Christ saw themselves as stimulators and co-ordinators for prayer.

Prayer at Die Losie

We were still wondering whether it was feasible to go ahead with plans to have a 24/7 week of prayer in the City Bowl at the beginning of February 2005. Trevor Peters, a former gang leader who was by now a committed intercessor, had been corresponding for some time with leaders of the Moravian Church about the use of the complex in District Six.

            At the monthly prayer for the City on Saturday 8 January (2005), it was decided to press ahead with another week of prayer from 30 January to 6 February as a next step towards the goal of a 24-hour Prayer Watch in the City Bowl.

          One thing led to the other within a week, until it was finalized that the week of prayer would be held at Moravian Hill, to be followed thereafter with a prayer watch at the Buitenkant Street police station. Die Losie, a former Freemason lodge in the police station was put to our disposal. This was a significant step in the spiritual realm. On Sunday 23 January, 2005 the station was anointed and prayed over, signalling the victory of the Lord in the Mother City. (Until about 2003 the command structures of the famous/notorious Caledon Square police station had been firmly in the hand of Freemasons.) In fact, at the beginning of 2005 there was hardly any Cape police station around where there was not a committed Christian in command.

          As we were praying in the third story board room, I suddenly noticed that I had the Tafelberg Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) opposite me. I was reminded that this was the church from which Ds Koot Vorster, a DRC minister, the brother of a Prime Minister and a top Broederbonder, operated. I heard that he was the person responsible for the request to the government in 1948/9 to put the prohibition of racially mixed marriages on the statute books. (At some stage the Lord had to deliver me from resentment when I heard that the denomination dug in their heels when the government under Prime Minister P.W. Botha was ready to repeal the law in the late 1970s. This effectively blocked our possible return to South Africa.) Michael Share, the leader of Cops for Christ, picked my concern up, challenging me. Up there in the blue room of the police station it was my privilege to express forgiveness in a prayer once again which lifted hurts which I discerned, had not been dealt with completely.

In due course Die Losie became a regular venue for prayer and intercession. With the issue of security an increased concern in our country, this became a model. In due course we heard of more police stations as a venue for prayer.

          After the week of prayer at Moravian Hill a few of us followed it up with prayer every Wednesday morning at the Central Police Station. Apparently this gave us credibility with the leadership of the station. A little more than a year later, in May 2006 our request on very short notice to have 10 days of 24-hour prayer in the Losie in the period just prior to the Global Day of Prayer, was granted without any ado.

Start of a 24-hour Prayer Facility

In preparation for the 2006 Global Day of Prayer, prayer drives were organised.  The prayer drives converged at the Central Police Station in Buitenkant Street. God used this event to touch at least one person in a special way. Wim Ferreira had been invited to work with the Deputy Mayor of the metropolis.

            When all the groups had arrived at Die Losie, Daniel Brink, the co-ordinator of the event, asked me to share in a few words how God had changed things at the police station. I became too emotional. However, at this moment, Wim Ferreira was deeply moved. He promptly requested a room for prayer in the metropolitan Civic Centre where he had just started to work. This was another divinely orchestrated move. After a few months, Pastor Barry Isaacs and I joined Wim for a regular weekly Friday prayer time in a board room of the Civic Centre.  The Lord put the unity of the Body of Christ on our prayer agenda once again. We continued with efforts to get Capetonian believers to pray together.  This was to us an important step towards the revival we were yearning for.

Before long, a trickle of workers from all walks of life was coming to faith in Jesus. On Wednesdays at lunch time believers from different denominational backgrounds gathered there to pray and intercede for the city. The Lord also challenged Wim Ferreira to start a 24-hour prayer facility at the Civic Centre premises. Soon a prayer room near to the parking area on the ground floor was frequented by many people throughout the day. The foundation stone towards 24/7 prayer in the CBD of the metropolis was laid.

Pastor Barry Isaacs became the new co-ordinator of Transformation Africa. As a result of their deliberations, prayer meetings started in October 2007 at the Uni-City Council Chambers on one Saturday morning of every month at 5.30 a.m. (This was later changed to 6 a.m.). Wonderful answers to prayer were subsequently experienced month after month. At one of these occasions, the lack of the availability of the Civic Centre Banqueting Hall for a combined prayer event on Ascension Day touched Peter Williams, the secretary of the Provincial Parliament. He promptly extended a provisional invitation to the group to come and pray there as well.

On 31 May 2008 more than 100 believers gathered in the legislative house of the Western Cape for prayer at 6 a.m. Three days later there was a hush – and no mocking - as two Christians shared their biblical convictions at the same venue, as part of normal parliamentary procedure. For Peter Williams this was a direct result of the united prayer at that venue! The implementation of unity on biblical grounds in the spirit of the person and example of Jesus - without doctrinal bickering around issues like baptism and women in the pulpit – started appearing on the horizon.

Kindred Spirits

My wife Rosemarie and I were encouraged by the arrival of Floyd and Sally McClung in October 2006, especially because we detected kindred spirits when we got to read their reasoning for coming to the Cape. When we heard that Floyd and Sally McClung were coming with the vision to ‘establish a training and outreach community in Cape Town that impacts Africa from Cape Town to Cairo’ and the vision ‘for a multi-cultural community that exemplifies the kingdom of God’, we became quite excited. This was more or less what we wanted to see happening, even though our vision was somewhat broader, including countries outside of Africa to be impacted from Cape Town. Getting the vision across to local Christians and pastors was however a very big challenge.

            We endeavoured even more to see a church planting movement established among those foreigners who have come to the Mother City of our country. We longed intensely for the metropolis to become the Father's City at last. With the Mc Clungs, leaders of the relatively new mission agency All Nations International, we had a common experience of seeking God’s will for the next step in our lives.  Floyd and Sally had come to a dead-end in the church in Kansas City (USA) that they had been leading. We expereinced the same thing with our mission agency here in Cape Town in respect of outreach to foreigners.

Equipping and Empowering People from the Nations

One of the new ventures of Friends from Abroad (FFA), long before its official inauguration on 17 February 2007, fortnightly sessions of fellowship, Bible Study and prayer with a hitherto unreached people group in respect of the Gospel, a few Uighur believers from China in Cape Town, as well as a few other Asians. (An aim of FFA is to equip and empower people from the nations to serve their own people, akin to the way I had been impacted while in (in)voluntary exile in Holland.)

              Through Pastor Theo Dennis we linked up with Ds. Richard Verreyne, pastor of the Soter Christelike Gereformeerde Kerk in Parow. Rochelle Malachowski and an American short-term volunteer, are two valued co-workers who assisted in starting up free English lessons for refugees and other foreigners at that church in Parow. It was an added blessing that we had a short-termer from Germany at our disposal to keep the little children of the refugee ladies busy in a good way. This was a forerunner towards a weekly children’s club at the same venue with refugee and local children. A jewellery workshop for refugee ladies, the bulk of them Muslims, to help them earn a few cents and teach English to quite a few of them, was part and parcel of the FFA compassionate outreach to foreigners. 

            In due course we resigned from WEC International, starting Friends from Abroad in February 2007 formally as a ministry of friendship and hospitality towards foreigners that have come to Cape Town. Rosemarie and I also simultaneously started the process to become missionaries linked to All Nations International, led by Floyd McClung.

The 2010 Soccer World Cup and Lausanne III

After the failure of the Church in our country to hone in on an opportunity towards effective networking during the xenophobic mob attacks of May and June 2008, we latched on to the national outreach effort that was launched in the country with the 2010 Soccer World Cup called The Ultimate Goal (TUG). This was a very positive experience but it still only resulted in limited networking when some rivalry surfaced. Due to two strong missionary personalities of Muslim evangelism, two separate camps developed.  The resulting rift took years to heal.

         Both the Global Day of Prayer and the Lausanne III events of 2010 did not live up to our high expectations to foster unity among the Bride of Christ in the city.

          The Church universal still has to acknowledge collective guilt for the doctrinal squabbling that led to the establishment and rise of Islam. The maltreatment and side-lining of Jews by Christians fall in the same category.  If they are not repented of and confessed, these issues may remain hurdles in the way of a collective turn around by Islam or Judaism.

Divine Nudges towards One-ness of Followers of Christ

At the beginning of 2010 I was deeply touched when I discerned that Isaac and Ishmael, the two eldest sons of the Jewish patriarch Abraham of the Bible, had actually buried their father together (Genesis 25:9).  The evident reconciliation was probably preceded by confession and some remorse. Or was there some reconciling agent involved?

On 11 October 2010 the Lord ministered to me from Romans 1:16 when we received the Lausanne Consultation for Jewish Evangelism (LCJE) Quarterly Bulletin. That edition of the LCJE Bulletin highlighted the legacy of Moishe Rosen, the founder of Jews for Jesus. In the paper that Rosen delivered as part of the Jewish Evangelism track at Lausanne II in Manila in 1989, he highlighted 'Jews first' from Romans 1:16. This led to the low-key beginning of Ishmael Isaac Ministries and another attempt at Muslim/Jewish dialogue and reconciliation, an effort to link Messianic Jewish believers and Muslim background believers at the Cape.

         I thought to have discerned another 'missing link' that same month, viz. that revivals were, as a rule, accompanied by deep remorse over personal and national sins. This would then often result in the shedding of 'rivers of tears'. I shared this insight on Signal Hill and at a few other occasions. In the run-up to Lausanne III in October 2010 at the International Convention Centre in our city, I was deeply moved to 'discover' the disobedience and neglect of the Church at large in reaching out 'to the Jews first'.  I was especially moved again how the Jews were side-lined by our Christian ancestors. (In my research I had been discerning anew how our Christian forbears have haughtily stated that the Church replaced the nation of Israel and the Jews.) That the venue of Lausanne III was more or less equidistant to Bo-Kaap and Sea Point, the respective strongholds of Islam and Judaism in the Western Cape, was a special nudge.

An Isaac Ishmael Nudge        

A meeting on the Saturday afternoon of 23 October 2010 at a private address in Milnerton became a defining moment. Believers were invited to meet Pastor Baruch Maayan and his family that had returned from Israel. (He was responding in obedience to a call by the Holy Spirit to come to the Cape.) Baruch shared that he felt like Jonah, to have received a second chance to minister to believers here on that occasion. There I was thoroughly humbled and embarrassed, completely overwhelmed by a sense of guilt towards Jews. Experiencing an extraordinary urge to apologise on behalf of Christians for our disobedience and for the fact that we have been side-lining the Jews, I broke down almost uncontrollably. 

         Baruch shared his conviction that he was sent to Cape Town to challenge believers with the highway message of Isaiah 19. A close link developed between us and the Maayan family.

Cape Jewish-Muslim Relations

On Wednesday afternoon, 27 October 2010, we had a meeting lined up to launch Jewish-Muslim Reconciliation under the banner of the Lamb together with Achmed Kariem and Brett Viviers. It was very special to have the Hindu back-ground Richard Mitchell alongside me. He linked up wonderfully with Brett. We agreed to invite a few followers of Jesus from Jewish and Muslim background to a meeting on Saturday 30 November.

            A week prior to this event, I received an SMS from Baruch Mayaan who invited me to a meeting at a lunch time Gardens meeting, together with Ahmed Kariem.

            Leigh and Rosemarie attended a synagogue service on Friday evening on 3 December, 2010.  Rosemarie was deeply touched to discover that Yeshua occurred so often in the Hebrew transcription of the liturgy used, which means salvation. We pray that the Lord may remove the veil and open Jewish eyes to discern Him, their Messiah on whom so many of them are eagerly waiting.

            For 16 December 2010 we had a 'Reconciliation Braai' scheduled, with believers from Jewish and Muslim background, along with a few others who longed to see 'Following the Lamb' as the route to go forward into 2011. 

            A few days later Brett, Rosemarie and I started attending a prayer meeting at the home of Gay French in Claremont with Baruch and Karen Maayan where the issue of praying for the veil to be removed, was quite central. It was highlighted that there are actually more than one veil. Jews have to discern that Yeshuah is the Messiah. Christians have been deceived to believe that the nation of Israel has been replaced by the Church. Muslims still have to discover that Muhammad was no prophet at all. In all cases it would need divine intervention to change the vision within the various groups.

Start of the Highway Fellowship

Soon after the Milnerton meeting of October 2010, Baruch Maayan approached Brett Viviers and me. At a meeting in the Company Gardens, he announced that he would start with weekly prayer on Monday evenings at the home of Gay French in Claremont. After a few months it was decided to start with Highway meetings every last Saturday of the month at the Sea Point High School. However, our hope and prayer that these Highway events could become a meeting point of believers from different denominations and backgrounds, did not materialise.

         Pastor Light Eze, a Nigerian pastor, who had responded obediently to a divine call to rally the Church at the Cape to repentance and prayer, was at this time fairly closely linked to the group. He had also started a fellowship in Parow, where Maditshaba Moloko became a prominent member. She would also become connected to the Maayan family and the Highway fellowship when the family moved to Pinelands.

A Cape Delegation to Jerusalem

After Baruch challenged all of us in mid-2011 to pray about becoming a part of the South African delegation to the annual Jerusalem prayer convocation, also other Monday evening prayer group regulars were blessed in special ways. On June 27 Baruch, Karen and a few other believers in Claremont prayed fervently that the Lord would confirm clearly whether Rosemarie, my wife, and I should step out in faith to join the Jerusalem convocation.  Knowing that our children wanted to sponsor Rosemarie for her 60^th birthday in July 2011 so that we could fulfil this secret wish, I had to pray now for confirmation before June the 30^th. (They knew of our wish to visit Israel where she had been in 1973, after she had been refused a work permit and visa to come to South Africa. This had been our big dream since we got married in 1975.) But I told them that I wanted separate confirmation.

         The very next day a letter which I received from Germany informed me that I would receive a small monthly pension, retrospective from 1 January 2011. I don't know how the German Social Services got my address. (Possibly the folk retrieved our address via the Moravian Head Office in Germany. There I had been paying into the pension fund in the few years from 1973 to December 1980.) On Thursday morning, the 30^th June, during my quiet time I felt that this was the confirmation to trust the Lord for all the funding necessary for the Jerusalem convocation, even though the situation in Israel was very unsettled and there could be war at that time because of the threats of the Palestinians.

         For Rosemarie it was very special that she could now be a part of the South African delegation. (She went to Israel in 1973 to assist in a children's home after the work permit and tourist visa to come to South Africa had been refused.) Their leader in Israel at that time had expounded from a Bible study during her visit to the Holy Land that nations would in future be going up to Jerusalem.

Some Semi-political Involvement

At this time things started hotting up as the Palestinian Authority stepped forward to declare themselves independent unilaterally.  Archbishop Tutu and Dr Allan Boesak had been making statements which give the impression that South African Christians in general supported this move. I felt constrained to attempt getting involved to set the record straight. I doubted sincerely that the two church leaders had the backing of the bulk of believers in this country.

            Thinking that the Consultation of Christian Churches was the best institution to make an attempt towards an inclusive statement that stays clear from divisive issues like Replacement Theology, I wrote an email to Rev Peter Langerman to this effect. I was under the impression that the Security Council of the UN was set to vote very soon on the Palestinian issue.

            I suggested that the CCC executive send an email to its members with a request for a quick response to a press statement, suggesting something along he following lines:

… Very much aware that the founder of our faith was a Jew, Christians have a natural affinity to Israel and Jews in general. Whilst aware that the Israeli state and military apparatus have not been innocent in past decades in an attempt to enforce their authority, we are also aware that Christian Arabs in general are very contented to live in the country, rather than in any of the neighbouring states. We are satisfied that Israel adheres to democratic principles and that no group is being officially discriminated against as we had it in our country in the sad apartheid era. We note that Arabs are even represented in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament...

I hoped that our government would encourage the counterparts on both sides of the main Middle East tussle to continue vigorously to achieve a negotiated settlement and to refrain from unilateral decisions.

         Subsequently I met with three pastors who were members of the CCC executive, viz. Peter Langerman, Richard Verreyne and Barry Isaacs in a restaurant. There we discussed the matter. However, the brethren had little hope that they could get the CCC member churches to unite in supporting a press statement along those lines.

         I also tried to get an informal appointment with Archbishop Tutu, but this was unsuccessful. That signaled the end of any effort on my side of semi-political involvement for five years to nudge the government to firmer commitment towards a reconciliation effort in the Middle East.

Simple Churches on the Route to Jerusalem

Obedient to Romans 1:16 and Matthew 28:19 and 20, we attempted to get Muslims and Jews saved, discipled and ultimately enlist them in the planting of simple churches everywhere on the route to Jerusalem and to the ends of the earth: the spiritual African Highway from Cape Town to Jerusalem. We believe that there is a special unction on Jews and that they will have an important role to play in the end-time spurt of the Gospel. Rosemarie and I wanted to take this as a focus for the last period of our ministry and service.

          It is our firm belief that reconciliation of Jews and Muslims at the Cape would send powerful signals around the globe. In Cape Town we have the special situation where we have sizeable minorities of Muslims and Jews next to the majority group of Christians. On top of that we have a heritage and history where representatives of the three Abrahamic religions have been living harmoniously next to each other for decades in places like District Six, Bo-Kaap and Green Point until the 1950s. Of course, at that time no one even remotely thought of the possibility of a common movement like the one that we now have in the Middle East called Musalaha where Christians of both Jewish and Arab extraction meet from time to time.

Baruch and his family returned to Israel in 2013. Some wonderful seeds were however sown, notably that an up and coming business woman with the name of Maditshaba Moloko got closely befriended to the Maayan family after they had moved to Pinelands where she lives. Another fruit of that season was a north facing prayer facility at our home that we dubbed the Isaiah 19 prayer room.

Devil's Peak to be renamed?

In 2009 the lack of public demonstrations of the unity of the Body of Christ came quite strongly into my heart once again. I really hoped to see believers uniting with the possible renaming of 'Devil's Peak'. I linked up with Pastor Barry Isaacs and Murray Bridgman, a local advocate, who had been praying with us at different venues over a number of years. A year later Marcel Durler, a local businessman who had just lost all his property, joined us.

          At the beginning of 2011 the possible renaming of 'Devil's Peak' came to the fore once again. I was well aware that the contentious issue came up for discussion in the city council some years ago. I believe that the matter was not handled well in 2002. With municipal elections due later that year, we were wary of repeating the same mistake.  We did not want the issue to become embroiled in the run-up to the elections.

            On Election Day in 2011 our little group, i.e. Pastor Barry Isaacs, Advocate Murray and I deliberated again. We requested Barry Isaacs to take the matter to the executive of the Western Cape Religious Forum for input from that side as well. The provincial Heritage Council was quite favourable initially. We had researched that the peak was known by names like Windberg and Doves’ Peak. The matter turned out to be quite an intricate issue when Table Mountain was declared one of the seven natural wonders of the world. We knew that satanists had vested interests in the retention of the name. Murray Bridgman put some persevering stalwart effort into the process, but only by the end of 2013 there appeared some light at the end of the tunnel. Tess Seymore, an able and energetic missionary colleague, had joined us in Friends from Abroad. Along with a young man from Cape Town Baptist Church, Deon Geldenhuys, who also had a heart for united prayer, the three of us became the nucleus of the Dove’s Peak Prayer Network, networking closely with Daniel Brink of Jericho Walls. Christians in the suburb Woodstock were a strong tower of support. However, the prayer network did not take off.

The Threat of the Rule of Ancestors        

In a counter to the preparations for the ANC centenary celebrations of January 2012 that included a lot of ancestor worship, Pastor Light Eze, a Nigerian pastor, initiated '8 Days of prevailing prophetic prayers ...' The threat of our country to be put under the occult rule of ancestors at the centenary celebrations in Bloemfontein in January 2012 caught the imagination of intercessors. Here at the Cape the Lord used Pastor Light Eze to bring believers together. We linked the ogre of demonic ancestor spirit rule to the effort to change the name of a well-known mountain summit to Doves' Peak. The result was a new season of spiritual warfare including '8 Days of prevailing prophetic prayers...' during which we sang every evening Jesus, we enthrone you!  Fairly spectacular answers to prayer followed and there were also supernatural phenomena which gave us great expectations. Our attempt included a Transformation Africa meeting on 4 February 2012 at Rhode’s Memorial just below the mountain peak.

Satanic Backlashes

We must have angered the arch enemy at least to some extent at this time. Some of the main Cape evangelical role players experienced the one or other form of attack at the beginning of 2012. It seemed to me no co-incidence that it was touch and go or I was eliminated personally in the night of 30/31 January 2012. This happened a few days before the Transformation Africa event that was scheduled for Saturday 4 February at Rhodes Memorial.

          A completely blocked main artery should have taken me out.  But God had fore-stalled this attack on my life. A few days prior to this, He gave to Beverley Stratis, a good friend of us and a faithful intercessor, a picture of me while she was praying. Some darkness and life-threatening confusion surrounded me. That was her clue to pray for had to fervently.

          About two weeks later Erika Schmeisser, an intercessor who attended our Saturday evening fellowship regularly, her experience because she heard that I had a heart attack. At that time she woke up from a massive pain in her chest. She immediately knew that this was from someone else and that she must intercede.

          This highlighted Isaiah 53 to me in a special way because doctors and nurses were so surprised that I had no need for tablets for pain in the chest region. Also the physician who sent me to hospital for an EKG was initially very surprised that I drove to her myself. She had discovered a very low pulse.

          We continued to hope and pray that the Church at the Cape might grasp new chances to get out of its complacency, indifference and lethargy to reach out lovingly to Muslims, Jews and those foreigners from the nations that are already in our midst.

Visit of Pastor Umar Mulinde from Uganda

Umar Mulinde from Uganda, a Muslim background pastor, miraculously survived an assassination attempt on Christmas Eve, 2011. Through a spectacular divine sequence of events he landed in a Tel Aviv hospital where he received the best treatment he could have enjoyed anywhere in the world.  In search of a Muslim background follower of Jesus and speaker with a love for Israel, one possible international speaker after the other declined.  When the Lausanne Consultation for Jewish Evangelism organizers at the Cape surprising invited him in faith, he was still very sick indeed.

            In fact, he had a major operation only 10 days before his arrival in Cape Town. Pastor Mulinde’s schedule was filled with many a meeting despite his brittle health condition.  

Naive Hope

I hoped much too naively that Church leaders would get on board against the government's anti-Israel stance in 2012. I wrote an email to minister colleagues with the following content after a visit by Pastor Umar Mulinde had shared at meetings in August how the Church there countered efforts to introduce Sharia legislation in their country:

… The question is: Must we wait until similar moves also happen here? The point is that there are many a precedent in Africa where countries went into serious economic decline after turning against Israel in recent decades (e.g. DR Congo (Zaire), Malawi).

In a recent radio broadcast Pastor Barry Isaacs gave seven reasons why Christians should support Israel. I asked him to email this to me. Please consider them in the attached document and please comment. Do you agree that it is time that the Church should speak out; that it is time for the silent majority – which we believe is present in South Africa, notably in the Church – should we take a stand in opposition to those in government who express views which will harm all of us in due course?

There was hardly any response.  Also other efforts floundered to get the local churches of the Cape Town City Bowl joining in concerted action.  The World Cup events remain by far the best of the new millennium.

A Role for the Church in corporate Restitution?

Participating in a group of believers which looked at the follow-up of a conference at the Drill Hall in December 2012 as the 5 R's (Repentance, Reconciliation, Restoration, Restitution, Revival) with restitution at its core, the quest was of course also to get some unified action by the Body of Christ. In a response to notes by Hilary-Jane Solomons, I wrote the following lines after attending one of the meetings where I was so excited to hear of biblical research around Sabah and Ramah as the possible ancestors of the first nation of South Africa, the Khoisan:

Confession by the Body of Christ for the gradual increase in the first A.D. Centuries of anti-Semitism of non-Jewish background Christian believers and for the Replacement Theology of theologians, including the Church Fathers – that the Church replaced Israel. General global confession is also needed for the subsequent side-lining of Israel and Jews (notably by the decrees of Emperor Constantine in the early 4th century) and for the general neglect of the Tenach ('OT') as second-rate in respect of the 'New Testament' by the Body of Christ at large.

I believe that a possible subsequent return of the Body of Christ to the Torah in a non-legalist and loving way and/or giving prominence to it could be the result which the Father will honour in a big way….

​Hilary-Jane Solomons became critically sick hereafter. The initiative went dormant although the movement for church-led restitution prodded on perseveringly.

Events to highlight the five-Fold Ministry

Events to highlight the five-fold ministry (Ephesians 4:11)[15] kept the prayer for revival alive. A significant move in the spiritual realm occurred when Maditshaba Moloko, who had been ordained as Pastor, was appointed as the co-ordinator for the annual Jerusalem prayer convocation.in 2014. The gifted intercessor and visionary moved with her business into office space on the 20^th floor of the Thibault Square building in mid-2015. Soon thereafter a monthly prayer meeting for Jerusalem started there. This would become the venue for many strategic city-wide meetings linked to prayer events, such as meetings ahead of a big event at the Lighthouse in July 2015 and a prayer event with Pastor Baruch Maayan at Cape Point on 11 December that was organised on very short notice. That event transpired in the context of intense spiritual warfare.

Rhodes Memorial sets off Sparks                                                                                              On 9 March 2015 a student protest started on the UCT campus, originally directed against a statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) that commemorated Cecil Rhodes. The campaign for the statue's removal led to a wider movement to "de-colonize" education across South Africa. On 9 April 2015, following a UCT Council vote the previous night, the statue was removed.                                     The #Rhodes Must Fall campaign captured national headlines throughout 2015. It divided public opinion sharply. It also inspired the emergence of allied student movements at other universities, both within South Africa and elsewhere in the world. The campaign was followed by the #FeesMustFall which ignited racist overtones. Shortly after a red-carpet visit by leaders from Hamas, the Middle Eastern group known for its destructive views. The #FeesMustFall became quite violent until the government succumbed to the claims.

The Fall and Rise of our Economy within a Matter of Days                                                                 The country was not yet out of the doldrums as a result of these events when President Zuma sacked Mr Nhlanhla Nene, an able Finance Minister, replacing him with the inexperienced Mr Des van Rooyen who was generally perceived as unqualified for this position. The Rand, our monetary currency, nose-dived, sending danger signals in all directions.

In a pun on the historical classic of Edward Gibbon (The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire) the ill judgment of President Zuma ignited the fall and rise of our Economy within a matter of days. The use of modern technology was put to good effect as prayer was solicited far and wide via Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter. Our prayer event at Cape Point that was triggered by an email from Jerusalem was due for Friday 11 December. That 50 intercessors rocked up at the venue for which one had to fork out quite a few bucks, was something akin to a miracle. It is impossible to gauge and compare the impact of the prayer that was rallied. The effect was the most significant since our miracles elections of 1994 where prayer was clearly also the driving force.  Looking back, one can be quite surprised that President Zuma seemed at least to have had the courage to heed the advice given to him at the time. (In 2016 he stubbornly held on to his position in spite of many calls – also from within the ranks of his party – to step down.) He appointed Mr Pravin Gordhan, a former Finance Minister who had a good track record, in a desperate act to salvage the economy of the country. The Rand recovered in resuscitation mode to a level near to where it had been before the appointment of Mr van Rooyen.

South Africa on the Rise                                                                                                               At the beginning of 2016 various Christians felt challenged to oppose the negativity in South Africa. The argument of the South Africa must rise campaign – an initiative of Pastor Errol Naidoo, well known via the Family Policy ministry - was that ‘If everything must fall - then eventually, the nation will fall’.

A groundswell of prayer went around that came out of concern in the wake of student unrest and seeming never-ending corruption in government circles. The "State Capture" report in which the actions of various government officials were exposed brought a significant correction.

In an Isaac Ishmael update on 21 October 2016 I took liberty to remind the recipients that the crisis into which the #Feesmustfall campaign has thrusted our nation, started a few days after Hamas political chief Khaled Mashaal addressed a government-endorsed rally in Cape Town on Wednesday 21 October 2015. I went on to highlight the biblical connection, writing ‘Because we as a nation cursed Israel - via the invitation and high-profile treatment of Israel’s worst enemy last year by our government - we reaped what we saw on our television screens in recent weeks.’

In the same email I noted South Africa voting with 23 the nations to give its preliminary approval to a UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) resolution that ignores Jewish ties to its most holy religious sites: the Temple Mount and the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. 

This ignited correspondence around a possible petition. Furthermore, the Church seemed to be waking up from its dormant state of recent decades because of two new Bills around Hate Speech and general Freedom of religion. Bible-believing Christians are making their voices heard. Whatsapp technology and email petitioning made it quite easy to get onto the worthwhile bandwagon. There has also been an element of hype in this communication, which made it not completely truthful. This was detrimental to the credibility of the message of the Church. 

Unity appearing on the Horizon

The implementation of real unity on biblical grounds in the spirit of the person and example of Jesus - without semantics and doctrinal bickering around issues like baptism and women in the pulpit – merely appeared on the horizon at the Cape here and there. Michael Cassidy effort of a Marriage Alliance in 2006 to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriages is one of the best to date where many churches and clergyman joined. The absence of big denominational support was a weak link of that effort.

         After the failure of the Church in our country to hone in on an opportunity towards effective networking during the xenophobia mob attacks of May and June 2008, I latched on to the national outreach effort that was launched in the country with the 2010 Soccer World Cup called The Ultimate Goal (TUG). This was a very positive experience but it still only resulted in limited networking. In the attempted implementation of this goal, I had a most traumatic experience after trying to mediate between two missionary colleagues in Muslim evangelism who both excelled in rivalry and competition.

          

         However, both the Global Day of Prayer and Lausanne III events of 2010 did not live up to our high expectations to foster unity among the Bride of Christ in the city. The 2011 initiatives of 'Strengthening the Ties' of followers of Jesus and 'Fire Trails' straddled man-made boundaries and barriers, but these events had no significant noticeable impact. The opposition against the occult elements of the ANC centenary of 2012 was possibly effective in curbing its effect on the nation, but nowhere near an effort of the Body of Christ. The #ZumaMustFall campaign ignited some united action towards a march on 27 April 2016, but the absence of local Blacks due to other events that had been already for places like Khayalitsha on the same day, made its effect very limited.

          The Church universal still has to acknowledge collective guilt for the doctrinal squabbling that led to the establishment and rise of Islam. The maltreatment of Jews by Christians down the centuries falls in the same category.  If these issues are not repented of and confessed, they will remain hurdles in the way of a collective turn around by Islam or Judaism in my view. (In the case of Islam, some bewilderment set in because of the radical Islamism propagated by Ayatollah Khomeini after 1989, twelve years later after the September 11 Twin Towers Al Qaeda-orchestrated event of 2001 and in recent years because of the atrocities perpetrated by extremists like ISIS, Al Shabbab and Boko Haram.)  

          

Appendix 1 - Jews First!

       

     For centuries a scriptural exposition of Romans 1:16, that argues for a ‘missional priority’ for Jewish evangelism, has been almost non-existent. Evangelical Christianity has been using the first part of the verse quite a lot. That the Gospel is a ‘power of God that brings salvation’ has been emphasized in evangelism and quoted in sermons. In many a Sunday School children memorized ‘For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believes…’ That the verse proceeds with the words ‘to the Jew first, and also to the Greek’, remained fairly unknown.

It can be argued that Messianic Jewry only really came to the fore in 1973 when an organization was founded in Los Angeles by Moishe Rosen (April 12, 1932 – May 19, 2010) that became known – in Jewish circles notoriously – as Jews for Jesus. Mitch Glaser, his Jews for Jesus colleague, brought the message of Jews first in his Covenant Seminary lecture in 1984 trenchantly, giving it the title ‘To the Jew first: the starting Point for the Great Commission’. Another Messianic Jew, David Stern published the Messianic Jewish Manifesto on the 40^th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel on April 21, 1948. Rosen repeated this message forcefully on the global stage at the Lausanne movement event in Manila the following year. However, the penny still did not drop. Outreach to Jews (and Muslims) remained the Cinderella of all missionary work.[16]

On the fringes of mainstream Christianity groups like Messianic Testimony and Messiah’s People prodded on patiently and perseveringly, attempting to reach out lovingly to Jews, but seeing only very little fruit. Francis and Edith Schaeffer broke away from the traditional ministry as Presbyterian missionaries to start the l’Abri community in Switzerland. In her book Christianity is Jewish (1977) Edith (the wife of L'Abri founder, Francis Schaeffer), targeted a Jewish audience in the text of this fascinating work. Exploring the historical and spiritual significance of the Jewish race, this treatment presents the Bible as a unified document in which God has progressively unfolded the plan of salvation.

Concentration on the Jews

With regard to missionary strategy of Jesus it cannot be denied that there was a preponderance on Israel and the Jews perhaps even a concentration. Although the Lord praised the faith of the Gentile Roman centurion of Matthew 8:10 (‘Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith’), the Lord also inferred in His reaction to the request of the Syro-Phoenician woman (Matthew 15:21f) where He saw the priority in His healing ministry: ‘Let the children first be fed, since it isn't good to take bread out of children's mouths and throw it to the dogs!’ In the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus constantly refers to His ministry as fulfilment of prophecy. It seems that our Lord’s concentration on the Jews has hardly been taken seriously by theologians and the Church at large.

         It is not clear why Jesus instructed the twelve disciples to stick to the house of Israel in Matthew 10:5f, omitting this specific instruction to the seventy (Matthew 11:20-24). Or is here also the expansion and spread of the Gospel - ultimately to the ends of the earth - implied?[17] Just as the 12 apostles symbolized the 12 tribes of Israel, the 70 disciples sent were symbolically representative of the Gentile nations. (In Genesis 10, the 70 descendants of Noah were regarded in rabbinical oral tradition as the total number of nations scattered over the earth after the tower of Babel.) One can thus say that 70 were sent on a training mission in preparation for their ultimate mission to the whole world.

It is however very clear that Jesus was focused on the Jews in his ministry as strategy. Paul followed Him in this, by always starting his visits in a new town or city in the synagogue. This could be a pointer to our careful and sensitive use of the Hebrew Scriptures in interaction with Jews. Jesus quoted from the Scriptures time and again. A deduction from our Lord’s last commission could be that the spreading of the Gospel should start in Jerusalem, in the case of the Jews among the Jewry (Acts 1:8, also Luke 24:47), and spread from there to the ends of the earth. This may however not be interpreted in absolute terms, i.e. that evangelistic outreach should occur in a concentric or spiraling way from one’s home town or city. Conceding that some believers got a heart for missions on short term outreach, it nevertheless puts a question mark to a practice whereby Christians who are eager to engage in missionary outreach far from home make no effort to reach out lovingly with the Gospel to their neighbours and in their home town.

But He was also the Son of Man        

It could be argued that our Lord’s involvement with the Jews was not missionary, not border-crossing at all; that He concentrated on his home culture.

Right from his very first public appearance in Nazareth, Jesus however showed the way to the acceptance of the other nations and the mission to them. In fact, this may have been one of the main reasons why the Nazareth congregation rejected Him (Luke 4:29). We note furthermore also that the Gospel of Matthew highlights the Gentile physical lineage of Jesus. The four females mentioned in Matthew 1 are gentile women.

             The title which Jesus used throughout for himself – more than 40 times – was ‘the Son of Man’. Translated back into Hebrew it would become ben Adam or ‘son of mankind’. As the Lamb of God he would ultimately die for the sins of the whole world (John 1:29; 1 John 2:2).

The Gospel to the Jews first

Instead of recognizing the need to minister humbly and respectfully to the ‘apple’ of God's eye (Deuteronomy 32:10; Zechariah 2:8), the Church in general neglected the loving and compassionate outreach to Jews completely. Starting with Justin Martyr in the second century, their rejection was emphasized, overlooking that Paul clearly taught that the  so-called rejection was merely temporarily, that in the completion of God's perfect timing '...all Israel will be saved' (Romans 11:26; Jeremiah 31:1).

         Paul practised what he preached, including the notion that the Gospel should be brought to the Jews, his nation, first. That Paul fought for the right to bring the Good News also to the Gentiles, perhaps clouds this sense of priority to some extent. Paul advised in Romans 11:25 that the Gentiles should not be conceited, reminding the Roman followers of Jesus from Gentile stock that they are merely branches that had been grafted into the true olive, Israel.

A few individuals down the centuries did stress the special eschatological role of the Jews, and the need of the Church to provoke them in a loving and positive way to fulfil their prophetic destiny. Not surprisingly, Count Zinzendorf was prominent in this regard.

… Also to the Gentiles

From the very early beginnings God’s love for the nations is apparent. His so-called favoritism of Jews was clearly intentional, the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent, the Messiah (Genesis 3:15) is also the off-spring of Abraham in whom he wanted to bless the nations of the earth. God had to show Jonah that he even ‘changes his mind’ when the sinner responds with remorse and repentance.

The first disciples initially appeared very reluctant to obey the Great Commission, remaining in Jerusalem (Acts 8:1). The reluctance to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth has been repeated in Church History again and again. One wonders if there is something supernatural about this, and then – is this demonic or has it got a ring of the ‘kairos’, God’s prefect timing, around it! That thousands of Muslims have become followers of Jesus as Messiah in recent decades and hundreds of Jews – also in Israel - seems to support this theory.

A Choice between Jews and Muslims?

A notion has been circling in some Christian circles that if one wants to reach out lovingly to people from the two other Abrahamic religions, then one has to make a choice between Jews and Muslims; that one should either support the Palestinians or the Jews in Israel! That Christians could have a reconciling role to play, does not feature in such thinking. Some Christians are even surprised to hear that the sons of Abraham buried him together (Genesis 25:9). We stress that the widely accepted notion - that the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael have been eternal enemies - has hardly any biblical basis. We regret that many a Church leader have all too often compounded the age-old problem of Israel and Palestine in an unreconciling way, instead of being an agent of reconciliation. While I concede that this is very personal and subjective, I contend that a good base for bringing together Jews and Muslims is when we include those from their ranks who got reconciled with God through faith in the atoning work of His Son. And yet, there are no quick fixes in such reconciliation. A lot of patient waiting on the Lord in prayer is required. Ultimately only God can really change hearts, prejudices and fixed mind-sets. Some dialogue would be perfectly in place, but cheap proselytism is outlawed in this field of outreach.

The Issue of Jews and Race

The issue of Jews and race was terribly abused by Adolph Hitler. It was and is essentially a spiritual issue, not a racial one. Only the twelve tribes stemming from the patriarch Isaac via Jacob are counted in the Bible as ‘proper’ Israelites. Thus one finds the Midianites mentioned as Ishmaelites (Judges 8:24, Genesis 37:28), although Midian was a son of Abraham with Ketura, not a son of Ishmael.  Ishmaelite traders helped saving Joseph from certain death when they bought (Genesis 37:28) and sold him as a slave to Potiphar. Furthermore, Zipporah, the first wife of Moses, was the daughter of Reuel or Jethro, a Midianite priest (Exodus 2:21). To all intents and purposes Moses seems to have had a good relationship to his father-in-law, possibly also learning a thing or two from him. Later he readily accepted advice from Jethro to delegate his responsibility.

Three female ancestors of King David, namely Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, did not stem from one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Genesis 25:18 e.g. refers to hostility of Ishmael's sons to their brothers. However, Isaiah 60:7 mentions Ishmael's two eldest sons positively in a Messianic prophetic context. I propose that we should take that as our cue rather than the negative tradition of strife and enmity.

Major Problems of Judaism and Islam

The above does however not address the major problems of Judaism and Islam, viz. to acknowledge the divinity of Jesus and to accept Him to be regarded as the Son of God. Basically only the Holy Spirit can illuminate the loving Father-heart of God to adherents of these religions. If we practise sensitivity in our dealings with the followers of Judaism and Islam, the Lord could use a loving approach to weaken or even remove some of their prejudice against ‘offensive’ Christian doctrine. To some of them it is only a matter of (mis)understanding. (Many Muslims e.g. still have a literal comprehension of Jesus as the physical son of God.[18]) The sharpness of any hostility could be reduced or even removed by pointing out for instance that the words ‘only begotten’ Son comes from the Greek monogenos. This word is more accurately translated in the context of John 3 as the unique Son. A parallel is found in Genesis 22:1 where Isaac would be sacrificed as such - a unique son. Furthermore, the use of son as a metaphor - in this case for the divine character of Jesus - is not completely unknown. 'Son of the Road' and similar expressions are well known in the Orient. Along the same lines a loving non-confrontational approach could assist to open up Jews (and Muslims) to discover why Yeshuah is indeed Ha Mashiach, the Messiah.

The Church Universal needs the Jews

The Church universal needs the Jews for a proper understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures. In recent decades Messianic Jews have helped tremendously in this regard. Because of the guilt of the Church down the centuries, other Jews had no interest to point to the links to Yeshuah Ha Maschiach. No wonder that it has remained a ‘hidden secret’ for a long time that the words of our Lord in the Bible book of Revelation that he is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, has quite a few forerunners in the Hebrew Scriptures. Various explanations have been given for the combination of aleph and tav as the Hebrew equivalent. An example of how Yeshuah Ha Maschiach occurs fairy clearly – without any need for allegorical explanations – is Zechariah 12:10 ‘They will see him,אּתּ  (the alef tav, the alpha and the omega), whom they have pierced…’

Appendix 2:  Some Autobiographical Background

Ever since my sister Magdalene returned excitedly from an ecumenical week-end youth event at Applethwaite farm in Elgin – in the apple growing district of Grabouw around 1960 - I recognised that the unity of believers across the racial and denominational barriers could be quite important in the spiritual realm. A young White student from Rhodes University had rattled my sister's inculcated and socially conditioned racial mind-set. 

        I came to personal faith in Jesus as my Saviour when I was 15, soon thinking thereafter that the most effective opposition to the heretical apartheid ideology would be to assemble Christians from different racial and denominational backgrounds as often as possible, to demonstrate the unity of followers of Jesus in this way. However, my conviction was more intuitive because my knowledge of the Bible was still very limited.

A turning Point in my Life

A major turning point in my life occurred when two different teenage friends nudged me to attend the evangelistic outreach of the Students’ Christian Association (SCA) at the seaside resort of Harmony Park near Gordon's Bay that was scheduled to start just after Christmas at the end of 1964. There I was not only spiritually revived, but there I also received an urge to network with people from different church backgrounds. Multi-racial work camps at Langgezocht in the mountains of the Moravian Mission station Genadendal from the mid-1960s - to help build a youth camp site there - gave me the rare opportunity to meet students from other racial groups in a natural setting.

          A church-sponsored stint in Germany in 1969 and 1970 included study and practical experience in youth work as well as studies of the biblical languages. Wherever I had the opportunity to address groups in Germany, I highlighted the church disunity, the fragmentation of the Body of Christ in my diagnosis of the einzigartige (unique) problems of South Africa. (The other two problems that I mentioned in these talks were racial discrimination - apartheid was still fairly unknown in Germany - and alcoholism) At that time I would also read everything that I could get hold of what Martin Luther King (jr) had written (This was banned literature in South Africa at that time).

Quest for visible Expression of the Unity in Christ

The importance of the visible expression of the unity of followers of Jesus grew further in my view after my return to my home country in October 1970. However, in a rather overdrawn and misguided anti-apartheid activism, I joined the Christian Institute (CI) soon thereafter, hoping that White CI members would also be willing to expose themselves to the possibility of arrest for breaking petty apartheid laws. (The CI was started by Dr Beyers Naudé to bring Christians from the different races together to study God’s Word. The CI policy at that time would respect the law although the apartheid laws were very immoral and discriminating.)[19] My activism probably estranged the young White friends.

            I met my future wife Rosemarie in May 1970 in an infatuation-at-first-sight encounter in Stuttgart. After my wife-to-be had been refused a work permit and thus entry into South Africa in order to get reclassified as a 'Coloured', the Moravian Church Board assisted me to return to Germany.[20] Rosemarie and I got married in March 1975.

(In)voluntary Exile

In the first few years of my (in)voluntary exile in Germany there was little opportunity to translate my conviction of a clear expression of the unity of the body of Christ practically.  

          During the final part of my theological studies in Bad Boll, near to Stuttgart in Southern Germany, the legacy of Jan Amos Comenius, the 17^thcentury theologian and last bishop of the old Czech Unitas Fratrum (Unity of the Brethren) and Count Zinzendorf, the leader of the Renewed Moravian Church, became very dear to me.  I was ordained as a Moravian minister in September 1975. Thereafter Rosemarie and I left for West Berlin where I co-pastored a Moravian congregation. Two years later we moved to Broederplein in the historical town of Zeist in Holland. There Rosemarie and I served the predominantly Surinamese Moravian congregation of Utrecht.

          I discerned ever more clearly with the passing of time that racial and ecclesiastical divisions were hampering a deep work of the Holy Spirit, notably in South Africa. The need for racial reconciliation and the attempt to help close gaps between ‘ecumenicals’ and ‘evangelicals’, as well as between the rich and the poor, became increasingly important to me as I became aware how much of a micro-cosmos my home country was.                     

          In November 1978 I needed divine healing from my anger towards the apartheid government and my denomination for their indifference towards the gross injustices of the day. This had been highlighted during a six week stint in the country with my wife and our first born son Danny. God used the banned Dr Beyers Naudé - who was basically under house arrest - to make me very determined to toil towards reconciliation between the population groups and races.

          I hereafter entered into intense correspondence with various agencies in what I perceived as a calling to achieve racial reconciliation in my divided home country. To this end I started collating the documents and correspondence pertaining to our struggle with the authorities in South Africa and giving the manuscript the title Honger na Geregtigheid (Hunger for Justice - as a matter of ethical principle I wanted the work published in Afrikaans first.)[21] Rather naively I recognised later, I hoped to win the apartheid rulers over. God used Hein Postma, a Dutch believer after I had gone overboard in my anti-apartheid activism. He challenged me when I was still very much a disgruntled and embittered exile in Holland. Hein Postma pointed out to me that the manuscript ‘Honger na Geregtigheid’ was too critical, not loving enough. Hein opined that the manuscript could be compared to an overdose of medication to a sick patient. I had to face the fact that the manuscript was possibly not completely helpful to Afrikaners. Hein furthermore noted that he missed forgiveness, love and compassion in the manuscript.

            Hereafter I attempted to diminish the possible shock effect for Afrikaners, simultaneously hoping that this could facilitate my return to South Africa. I toned the manuscript down, planning three smaller booklets, of which the first one concentrated on issues around a South African law, The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. I gave it the title ‘Wat God saamgevoeg het.’[22] (‘What God joined together’).

I experienced an intense challenge to oppose the demonic tenets of church rivalry and competition, by stressing the unity of the Body of Christ, as well as fighting the diabolical economic disparity and structural injustice in a low-key manner.  I hoped and prayed that South Africa might give an example to the world at large, not only in respect of racial reconciliation, but also in the voluntary sharing of resources.  I possibly went overboard, estranging some of my Moravian pastoral colleagues to some extent.

Blessing of united Prayer

Linked to this was also the blessing of united prayer, which was repeatedly confirmed with experiences during a six-month stint in South Africa.[23] We were very much encouraged by a multi-racial group of believers from different denominations in Stellenbosch. The group had been started by Professor Nico Smith and a few pastors as a sequel to the South African Church Leaders’ Assembly (SACLA) event in Pretoria in 1979. At that special occasion church leaders across the board broke ecclesiastic and racial barriers unprecedentedly.

         Another networking initiative with local ministers of other churches got me deeply embroiled in the Crossroads saga of May 1981, taking big risks and linking closely with Rev. Douglas Bax, who had been a friend of our Moravian theological seminary in District Six. The plight and determination of the women of KTC, Nyanga and Crossroads probably played a role in another sense. Churches now started to take a clearer stand in opposition to apartheid laws. Rev. Rob Robertson and our friend Rev. Douglas Bax played a crucial role in the political stand of the Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa as a denomination (PCSA). We were very thankful to hear later that two pivotal apartheid laws were ultimately removed from the statute books – via influx control for Blacks, which led to the establishment of Khayalitsha, and the prohibition of racially mixed marriages. What a special privilege it was that we could contribute to some extent, networking with other ministers and Black believers at the Cape, to the repeal of these two pillars of apartheid.

Putting Lessons to good Effect         

In Holland I tried to put the lessons of the unity of the Body of Christ to good effect that I had been learning. A first big nudge came in 1982 from Rens Schalkwijk, a teenager who had returned from Jamaica with his Moravian missionary parents a few years earlier. He suggested that we pray together - in the footsteps of our Moravian ancestors - early in the morning in the nearby Zeist forest.

          Soon thereafter Rosemarie and I were leading the Goed Nieuws Karavaan (GNK) initiative of Zeist and its surrounds. This we did from the end of 1982 until the end of 1991. Our vision to give visibility to the Body of Christ locally was partially realized during this ministry when soon we had about 30 co-workers coming from the full denominational spectrum, from Roman Catholic to Pentecostal. We were blessed with holistic practical fellowship, in which believers from different church backgrounds participated.

Concerts of Prayer

Rens Schalkwijk gave us another nudge in early 1988, this time to start a small prayer group, along with two students of the local Pentecostal Bible School. The US prayer leader Dave Bryant visited Holland to promote Concerts of Prayer. Pieter Bos, a Dutch YWAM leader, initiated regional prayer groups as a sequel to Dave Bryant's visit. In no time our geographic area became the first Regiogebed of the country, attended by Christians from quite diverse denominational backgrounds. The monthly events included prayer for local evangelistic work, praying for missionaries that had been leaving our region to serve in missions and also praying for individual countries. In 1989 we prayed especially for Communist countries, notably for the German Democratic Republic, Hungary and Romania.

            At our ‘regiogebed’meeting of 4 October 1989, I mentioned in passing to someone that I had posted a letter to President F.W. de Klerk, the new presidential incumbent, later that day. In the letter I wished him well and also apologised for my arrogant activism. Spontaneously, a teacher from the nearby town of Doorn, who was no regular at our prayer meetings,  overheard me saying this. He promptly suggested that we take more time that evening to pray for South Africa. Nobody objected. The whole prayer meeting was hereafter devoted to praying for my beloved country. That was the only occasion when we prayed so intensely for a single country.                                                  

            Nobody present at the prayer meeting was aware that President De Klerk would meet Archbishop Tutu and Dr Allan Boesak the next week. That strategic prayer event became in a sense a watershed in the politics of the country, the prelude to the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid. Also in other countries - especially in South Africa itself - people had been praying for a change in the suicidal direction of the political system.[24]

            We were not aware that we had been preparing the way for my return to the Cape with my family. From January 1992 we would be putting the lessons of united prayer to good effect for another big hurdle – the Wall of Islam.

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[1] Died in complete rest and peace and in trust in the Lord (Schmidt, 1937:6)

[2] The famous hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ was written by John Newton.

[3] Newton subsequently became a prominent catalyst for the end of the slave trade in 1807. He had been the boyhood hero of William Wilberforce. When the evangelical parliamentarian Wilberforce wanted to resign his seat in parliament to become a clergyman in December 1785, Newton dissuaded him (Pollock, John 1981:175). No two years later, on 22 May 1987, Wilberforce initiated the ‘Society for the Abolition of Slavery’. 

[4]A similar effect has been achieved when the 24 hour prayer watches were revived at the beginning of 2000 CE with Namibia’s Bennie Mostert and John Mulinde from Uganda prominent. 

[5] The Moravians appear to have led the field in 1930 when the indigenous Ernst Dietrich was a member of the Church Board, along with Richard Marx and H Birnbaum, two German missionaries.

[6]The building is the premises at which the SAMS started. Later it was turned into the Missionary Museum.

[7] Lovedale Missionary Institute was a mission station and educational institution in the eastern Cape founded in 1824 by the Glasgow Missionary Society.

[8] The influential Zaccheus Mahabane joined the Congress movement in 1917 after hearing political speeches by Charlotte Maxeke and her husband Marshall Maxeke, a fellow South African whom she met in the USA. Both studied at Wilberforce University.

[9]    The 'Cold War' was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition existing after World War II (1939–1945), primarily between the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, particularly the USA.

[10]  Kafferboetie was the word pejoratively used by Whites for those from Afrikaner ranks who befriended people of colour.

[11]The so-called 10/40 Window denotes a geographical area between 10 and 40 degrees north latitude, where the main unreached people groups with respect to the Gospel can be found.

[12] After substantial research into missionary work to these groups, I deemed it appropriate to dub outreach to Jews and Muslims neglected 'Cinderella's' of evangelism and missionary work.

[13]  A fuller version of how this transpired is recorded in Seeds sown for Revival and in Spiritual Dynamics at the Cape.  Both titles can be accessed on our internet blog >.

[14] I knew him from the start of the Regiogebed in Holland in 1988 and I had also met Cees Vork in Holland.

[15] The four-fold or five-fold ministry is a Charismatic and Evangelical Christian belief that five offices mentioned in Ephesians, namely those of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors (or "shepherds") and teachers, remain active and valid offices in the contemporary Christian church.

[16] After substantial research into missionary work to these groups, I deemed it appropriate to dub outreach to Jews and Muslims neglected 'Cinderella's' of evangelism and missionary work.

[17] We could say that the real border crossing started at Jesus' crucifixion. There one of the murderers and the Roman centurion both discovered something of his divine nature. His crucifixion was in another way a double pointer to the Church. The women who faithfully stood by him until the very end represented the 'old' Jew and the Roman was the new Gentile believer. In this way the crucified one draws people from different backgrounds and nations.

[18] It is still believed and taught in Islamic circles that Christians believe in Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the Mother of God in a physical sense.

[19] That would change later de facto, when Dr Beyers Naudé, our leader, preferred imprisonment to a monitory fine because he would not testify to the biased government-appointed Schlebush commission of enquiry into the funding of the CI.

[20] A fuller version of these experiences in our story is called (In)voluntary Exile, accessible on our internet blog.

[21]The title alludes to one of the biblical Beatitudes, Matthew 5:6. Geregtigheid in Afrikaans has the double meaning of righteousness and justice.

[22]The other two manuscripts, Sonder my kan julle niks doen nie and As God die Huis nie bou nie did not get much further than the collating and commenting stage of documents.

[23] The government of the day allowed us to live in the country for six months as a family of four persons to assist my late sister's family. She had been suffering from leukaemia, passing away in December 1980. During this period I taught at Mount View Senior Secondary School in Hanover Park.

[24] I do not want to minimize the political efforts, e.g. by the moves behind the scenes sponsored by the Swiss government or by Dr van Zyl Slabbert’s IDASA, but I nevertheless assert that it was ultimately the concerted prayer that made the difference.