A Journey out of Africa

6th February 2005, Pembroke College Evensong

2 Kings 2:1-2               Elijah and Elisha

Matt 17:9-23                John & Elijah

1.      Grateful to be asked to talk to you about “A Journey out of Africa”.

2.      It is perhaps timely, as we bask in the reflected afterglow of the decision by the G7, to consider, with some urgency, a mechanism to offset some of the iniquitous debts that Africans pay against some of the aid that we frequently promise, and sometimes fail to produce.

3.      One of the perils of living in an intelligent and cosmopolitan city, such as Cambridge, or indeed an intelligent and cosmopolitan college such as Pembroke, is that one can come be believe, almost without noticing, that the truths and experiences present in this place represent that which is normal, obviously right, and are a reasonable representation of the way the world is as a whole.

4.      As it happens, much of what goes on in the world will make very little sense to us unless we realise that the rest of the world is not much like Cambridge, or England or Europe. We are not, in fact, living in an age of advancing secularising liberal multiculturalism. We are living, globally, in an age of faith, and there is not a lot that Richard Dawkins or Philip Pullman can do about it.

5.      The last century saw an explosion in Christian faith, and a radical shift of balance away from the Old World, and indeed the New World. The number of professed Christians around the world is now 1.9 billion, approximately a third of the population of the globe. Christianity has a majority of the population in two-thirds of the world's 238 countries. But the weight and strength is not in the old heartlands of faith, which sponsored and built this chapel and this university.

a.       The Anglican church is, for example, quite strong in Nigeria. The number of Anglicans there is roughly 17.5m. This is more than the Anglican population of USA, NZ, Canada, Australia and the UK put together.

b.      Nor is this simply a matter of something that is far away, and of interest only to the globally minded. There are more black churchgoers than white churchgoers inside the M25, and the Diocese of London is experiencing growth which is, by Church of England standards, staggering.

6.      Statistics are fine, but faith is about people. What are the people like, who are behind this growth in faith? Here are a couple of anecdotes. They are stories of good people. There are others, but they are not for this evening.

7.      The first concerns my very last Sunday in Zimbabwe, a little over 7 years ago.

8.      White building, Galvanised corrugated iron. 500 people. Robed choir of 40. MU. St Veronicas. Wabvuwi. St Peters. Steered around the sanctuary by a MC. Book thrust under my nose, with a finger to indicate whereClergy and particularly visiting European Clergy are very holy and rather stupid.

9.      There because I had been on a visit a few weeks earlier to inspect a student. Stopped after the service for hunks of buttered bread and hot sweet tea. Spoken to Fr Gabriel Mashingaidze. Turned out that he had been asked to go to SA for a conference, and was longing to go, but could not find anyone to cover the service in a couple of weeks time. I said that I would be very happy to. Lit up with happiness and he said “Now I know that God loves me! Sometimes when I think of all the good things, I think I must be the only one God loves!”

10.  Fr Gabriel Probably late 60s when I knew him. Famous as the one priest who has stayed out in the rural areas throughout the liberation struggle. Part of the liberation struggle was a balance of terror, and clergy were a very natural target for both sides.  He had been sure that, like Christ, his place was with his sheep, and he had stayed put.

11.  I learnt something else about him only last year. He accepted no stipend from the Diocese, and came to no agreement about money with his PCC. His particular discipline was one of poverty, which meant that he never asked for anything, but lived on what his parish chose to offer him, food clothing & money, month by month.

12.  Fr Gabriel had looked at Christ’s leadership, and made a conscious decision to model his leadership on Christ’s. He had authority in his church, not because he asserted it, or because of a piece of paper from the Bishop, but because they knew he loved and trusted them enough to risk his life for them, and to put his life and his livelihood in their hands. I cannot judge his success, but the Church was flourishing and at peace with itself.

13.  St Peter’s – the Church built on a rock.

a.       Diocesan Training session

b.      MU making great vats of sadza and relish in the Church compound.

c.       Saturday afternoon and from every direction we could see little puffs of dust as groups for churches round about walked to St Peters to learn more. Led by sub-deacons. Wanting to learn how to preach, and how to lead a Christian community, how to run Sunday Schools and how to prepare people for confirmation. We sat and talked late into the night, and then gathered again for the Sunday morning communion, a shared moment for hundreds, and if you have walked three hours to get to church you want several hours of service, not 45 minutes and out.

14.  Are they important – Fr Gabriel and these little columns of people with their sub-deacons, making their way back through the midday sun to be ready for the next day of subsistence farming?

15.  The Secularisation hypothesis says that they are not. The Secularisation hypothesis is part of the established mental furniture of this University and this society, and I daresay of everyone in this chapel. It states that grown up sophisticated people in grown up sophisticated societies are not really susceptible to faith. As culture advances, religion retreats, and what seems normal and probable in Cambridge is of much more importance to the future than what seems normal and probable in Nyamandhlovu or Seke.

16.  It may be so, and we shall see. I have a hunch that, for better or worse, the future may lie with faith rather than with sophistication.

17.  Think for example of this evening’s readings: I will not retell the story of Elijah and Elisha, or even the story of John. It is enough to say their respective opponents, Ahab the son of Omri, Jezebel the princess of Sidon, and King Herod were, in their different centuries, very much on the side of sophistication. They would be wholly forgotten now if they had not happened to come up against, rather painfully, against some people of faith.

18.  Think, more importantly, of Jesus of Nazareth. We have made a web of words around him, and can trace the main lines of our culture back to him, but he remains a solid, brute and unsophisticated fact. It was not beauty, nuance and worldly wisdom that won 2b followers. It was faith persisting in the face of cynicism and power.

19.  So here is an exercise to go with a Journey out of Africa. Try thinking about the continent not as the Heart of Darkness, nor as a Scar on the conscience of the World”. Think for a moment of Africa as a great reservoir of humanity, where faith is strong, and tens of millions try actively to love God with all their strength and their neighbours as themselves. It may be that the future lies with them, rather than with us.