Are you ready to start reforming South Africa?

By Ian Siebörger

Last week Peter Rose and I went to a consultation in Gauteng which might just be remembered as a tipping point in this country’s history: the launch of the National Initiative for Reformation of South Africa (NIRSA). For two days we and 450 other Christian leaders sat and listened to God’s Spirit, his Word and each other speak about the state of our country and how we can change it for the better. All three had plenty to say, and often spoke at once! Trying to think through it all has been bewildering, but I’ve tried my best to give a short-ish highlights package for the blog. So fasten your seatbelts, brothers and sisters!

It all started when our old friend Michael Cassidy from African Enterprise, Moss Ntlha from The Evangelical Alliance of South Africa and some others got thinking about worrying developments in South Africa. So many things threaten to bring this country down: crime just won’t go away, poverty still enslaves many people, the church is sluggish and it’s becoming harder and harder to find people in government who haven’t been involved in corruption. What do Michael and Moss do about this? They call together Christian leaders from every sector of society to come together, repent, pray and seek God for the future of the country. We prayed to God as King Jehoshaphat did:  “O our God…we are powerless… We do not know what to do, but we are looking to you for help.” (2 Chronicles 20:12)

I arrived at the consultation late, having come straight off an overnight bus from Grahamstown. The auditorium was so full that I struggled to find a seat. Michael Cassidy was speaking about how King Jehoshaphat’s prayer had inspired him to lead us in asking God what to do about the problems in South Africa. He ended by looking at the story of Isaiah’s calling. We, like Isaiah, need to confess, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man [or woman] of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” (Isaiah 6:5). Then we need to receive God’s forgiveness and respond to his call: “Lord, I’ll go! Send me.” (Isaiah 6:8).

Next, Catholic Archbishop Buti Tlhagale came up to the podium, and proceeded to recite a list of sins that have been committed in this nation. It was a crushing litany of corruption and moral failure. In a short group session, we tried to answer the question, “How does the Church respond to this?” but could only begin scratching the surface of the answers. We turned to the important work of kneeling in prayer, repenting for not doing our part in preventing and resisting these tragedies. There was much work to be done.

After lunch, four leaders in different spheres of society held a panel discussion about the state of the Church in South Africa. They painted a bleak picture: although almost 80% of South Africans call themselves Christian, the Church is weak and ineffectual in many areas. Greg Smerdon’s presentation about the state of the Church on university campuses was particularly challenging. On most campuses, the number of Christian societies is increasing, but the number of Christians is not. Even on campuses such as ours where there is some degree of unity, societies are often more interested in building a community than in building the kingdom of God in this nation. Christians are not bold enough to stand up and challenge what academics say in a respectful way.

The time had come to focus on solutions, and the first person to help us do this was Landa Cope, who taught on God’s vision for the nations. Landa is an amazing character: a short, grey-haired American academic with an outrageous sense of humour who specialises in studying the template given in the Old Testament for a godly society. She moved to South Africa only a few months ago and says she feels honoured to be living here. She couldn’t help laughing as she broke down some of the misconceptions we South Africans have about the state of our country. We so easily forget the miracle that happened when political freedom came to this country in 1994, and  the bigger picture of gradual improvement in the lives of most South Africans.

That said, Landa identified several areas where South Africa may be in danger. Crime remains a huge problem, as is a growing cynicism about our political system. We have an immoral economy where workers are often not paid a living wage and there are not enough jobs to go around. Sexual permissiveness has led to the spread of HIV/AIDS and abortion in genocidal proportions. We have set up many idols: fear, looking at our own situations and complaining rather than seeing the bigger picture, and looking to other people for solutions rather than trying to fix problems ourselves.

God looks to the church to solve these problems, Landa says. We must rise up to stop violent crime and to end poverty. Every man must take responsibility for his sexual conduct, and Christians must turn from thinking just about the problems and concerns of their own little tribes to see God’s view of reality.

We were sent out to our places to stay for the night in a prayerful attitude. How could we make a commitment to build a nation? This attitude continued through the start of day two of the consultation. The organisers had decided to free up the schedule as much as possible to give time for prayerful contemplation, so we spent most of the morning praying, worshipping and listening to God’s Spirit together. One message coming out of this time was that God wants to pour out a spirit of grace and supplication on our land.

Later in the morning, Moss Ntlha gave a talk daring us to rediscover the relevance of God’s Word. He gave an insightful explanation about why even many Christians in South Africa do not trust the Bible today: God’s Word was abused to justify apartheid, so Christians came into the new South Africa with an inferiority complex and were afraid to stand on God’s Word for fear of being labelled politically incorrect. We need to recover trust in God’s Word by living all of it out in our own lives.

This theme was carried into the next session, dedicated to answering the question “What should a Christian look like, for heaven’s sake?” Three speakers looked at this topic, but what stood out for me was that a Christian is one who spreads the Good News of the Kingdom of God. So often we only talk about the Good News of salvation, that Jesus has come to set people’s spirits free so that they can have a relationship with God and go to heaven. It’s crucial that we do that, but we can easily miss out on the broader Good News of the Kingdom of God: that Jesus came to teach us how to live under God’s Lordship on earth as well as in heaven. That truly is good news for the society we live in.

While we were doing all this talking, the organisers had been busy drawing up a draft NIRSA Declaration of Intent committing us to act on what we had decided to do at the consultation. After lunch, Michael Cassidy read the declaration out and we spent some time thrashing out its different points to make it reflect the convictions of everyone at the consultation. This process is going on, but a final draft of the declaration has been released. Please click this link to read it: The NIRSA Declaration of Intent (Final Draft).

I stepped out of the conference venue and onto my bus back home, my head whirling with what I’d heard and how we could possibly put it into practice at Christians @ Rhodes. After a weekend of thinking through things, I think the message for us is this: Students and academics, start thinking of your subjects in a new light. Read what God’s Word has to say about them, and apply it. If every Christian @ Rhodes is sent out into the workplace or the world of academia with a passion for applying the Good News of God’s Kingdom to all of their lives, this country will be reformed. And the world will see it and glorify our King.