Church on the streets

by swmartin1960

They came from all over, representing unions, churches, and student, political, and civic organizations. Some came simply as concerned individuals, tired of living in a society where your colour determined where you could live, work, play, and even go to the toilet. They were black and white, rich and poor, educated and uneducated. Some held up banners saying, “the people shall govern.” Among the leaders of the march were pastors, rabbis, and imams. They marched to protest yet another election that would exclude the majority of South Africans. But this time things were different. For this march was the culmination of six months of defiance, co-ordinated and led (largely) by churches.

As they marched from the Central Methodist Church and St. George’s Anglican Cathedral to the city centre, they were met by another group. This other group was heavily armed, ensconced behind barricades and accompanied by armoured vehicles. On top of one vehicle was a water cannon. The police ordered the crowd to disperse. The crowd responded by sitting down. Then the cannon fired… purple dye. But one of the demonstrators climbed onto the vehicle and wrestled the cannon away. He turned the spray onto the police, turning them purple as well. In the ensuing struggle, austere government buildings were covered with purple dye. The people cheered. But then tear gas was deployed. Panic ensued. The people scattered. For the rest of the afternoon, anyone discovered in the city centre with purple dye spattered on his or her clothing was arrested.

People ran, coughing, tears streaming, into St. George’s Cathedral, where hundreds took refuge. “Many bore red welts across their bodies and faces,” reports John Allen. The shocked and discouraged crowd was addressed by tiny bishop, also dressed in purple:

Say to yourselves, in your heart, “God loves me.” … I don’t go around and say, “Baas, please give me my freedom.” God loves me. I am of infinite value because God loves me and God created me for freedom, and my freedom is inalienable, God-given. Right! Now straighten up you shoulders… like people who are born for freedom! Lovely, lovely, lovely!

After assuring the now empowered crowd with the words, “Our march to freedom is unstoppable!” the bishop, Desmond Tutu, negotiated with police to allow the protesters in the church to leave. One of the protesters snuck back into the city after dark with a can of purple spray paint. The next day the wall of the Old Town House bore these words: “the purple shall govern.”

The repression increased after the march. In Cape Town 23 people were killed through police action in the run-up to the elections. But within two weeks, 30,000 people converged on the City Hall. Summoning the newly elected State President, F.W. De Klerk, to “come and see” the crowds, their diversity, and their discipline, Tutu bubbled these words:

Come here and see peaceful people! [Then to the crowds] Show Mr. De Klerk your hands. They are empty hands, Mr. De Klerk! [Again, to the crowds] Let’s show Mr. de Klerk that we are a disciplined people. Let’s keep quiet! [The crowds immediately grow silent] Did you hear a pin drop, Mr. De Klerk? [One more time to the crowds] We want to say to Mr. De Klerk, come and see Technicolor! They tried to make us one colour, purple. We say we are the Rainbow People! We are the new people of the new South Africa!

The image of the rainbow is of course also a deeply biblical symbol: it was the symbol given to creation after the judgement on human violence in the Genesis flood, a symbol of new beginnings. After leading the crowds (holding hands) in a litany that repeated the words uttered at the Cathedral under different circumstances, “our march to freedom is unstoppable!” Looking at the jubilant people, Tutu finished saying, “Mr. De Klerk, please come.”

In South Africa “the purple” did govern, and sooner than the watching world expected. The elections of September 1989 were the last to elect an all-white Parliament. Less than five years later, people of all races, colours, and cultures streamed to voting stations for the first non-racial, democratic elections. They chose as President a man who was still a political prisoner during the protests.

It was said by some that that day in April 1994 was the birth of the new South Africa. The world certainly thought so as it viewed, with astonishment, the snaking lineups of voters. The newly minted President Nelson Mandela said as much when he stood not far from the place the purple had been baptized in dye, and the exact spot where Tutu had addressed the crowd in the aftermath. Mandela said in his speech that here, at the southern tip of Africa, a fateful convergence 300 years ago between Africa, Europe, and Asia had gone horribly wrong. The “rainbow”—now a synonym for the new South Africa—carried the promise of that narrative being rewritten, with justice established.

I was privileged to be there on that day, standing with a crowd not of 30,000 but hundreds of thousands. But others, including some of my colleagues at the University of Cape Town, claimed that the rainbow nation had been born much earlier, on the streets of Cape Town and other places of gathering to perform a new society. While some hailed the release of political prisoners and the unbanning of the liberation parties as the turning point, others insisted that the people had unbanned themselves long before, simply by refusing to live by the rules laid down by the regime. They were living the liberating future even in the midst of the oppressive present.

Those who joined in the protests became more than the sum of their individualities: they became a people. Their coming together was not simply to express an idea they all agreed on or to put forth an agenda they all shared. It wants to offer their bodies to a cause. And sometimes that offering meant suffering detention and abuse at the hands of the regime. In occupying the streets of Cape Town, in joyously defying unjust laws and refusing to recognize illegitimate authority, they transformed public space, making it a stage for the performance of a different story: not a story of people divided by their differences but a people united, like the colours of the rainbow.

The Work of a People

The purple protest saw a multitude representing all races and cultures, classes and creeds, gathered to perform a story radically different from that of the police and the governing authorities. As this gathered people peacefully offered their bodies as living sacrifices they represented a threat more profound to the Apartheid regime than any armed insurrection. I want to suggest that what South Africans and the world saw on those days was liturgy.

We often think of the word “liturgy” as the written instructions handed to us when we walk into a church service. They tell us when to stand and when to sit, what to sing and what to say. Understood this way, the liturgy is like a map for worship, keeping the people on the same road, moving toward the same goal. But liturgy is more than this, as contemporary thinkers have argued. The word leitourgia in ancient times meant the peoples’ work, the peoples’ service, even a public service. Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann suggests that, applied to a community, the term denotes “an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals.” Roman Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh says that liturgy “enacts and maintains community by the ritual remembering or re‐presentation of foundational narratives, thereby helping to construct the perceived reality in which each member of the community lives.” Finally, Reformed philosopher James K.A. Smith defines liturgies as “rituals of ultimate concern, rituals that are formative for identity, that inculcate visions of the good life, and do so in a way that means to trump other ritual formations.”

The word liturgy is closely identified with worship. The English word “worship” means to ascribe the highest “worth” to something—literally “worth-ship”. But the Greek term (latreia) goes beyond mere ascription to collectively bending the body towards something. P.D. Manson reminds us that one of the most common Old Testament terms, ‘eḇeḏ, connotes “service … of every kind, acts of adoration as well as doing the chores.” Thus in the biblical witness, liturgy, worship, and public service are deeply connected. Paul spells this out in Romans 12:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us (Rom 12:1–6, NRSV).

Notice that Paul talks about plural bodies enacting one, living sacrifice of service. “We being many are one body”. And he goes on to talk about that oneness in the sharing of gifts of service, the welcome to strangers, and the refusal to live by the norms of a violent and exclusionary society. “Being transformed” is not simply an individual experience; it is an embodied and visible witness, running counter to the dominant culture.

That is the New Testament’s understanding of worship. It’s not a “holy high” or an “awesome experience”. It’s the creation of a body in service to God and his people, living not according to the dictates of the present, decaying age, but in the transforming “now” of the age to come.

But liturgy and worship are not confined to the church. Just as humans are made for worship—either of the true Creator or an idolatrous substitute, so human beings are homo liturgicus. In sports stadiums and arenas, in theatres and halls, in parliaments and stock exchanges, humans gather to recount “foundational narratives”, to discipline themselves visibly through “rituals of ultimate concern”, to bodily bend themselves toward something considered of high, or the highest good. And as they do this they become more than the sum of their individual parts. This is what the gatherings of South Africans during the final days of apartheid constituted. But theirs was a contestation of the public, “trump[ing] other formations. There were other visible body politics in South Africa.

Liturgy as Politics

Western Christians have bought into the idea that Sunday is a special day, and that happens in churches has to be hermetically sealed from what happens the rest of the week. “Religion” and “politics” are not only different kinds of things, the intrusion of one into the sphere of the other corrupts both. Church is a “holy huddle” that screens out the world, a shelter from the storms. As we “turn our eyes upon Jesus” we find that “the things of earth grow strangely dim.” Among “the things of earth” are messy and contentious matters like politics and economics, and the attendant injustices and degradations of people and place.

But there is no worship without a politics, just as there is no politics without a people. And there is no people without liturgy. That this strikes us as a strange idea demonstrates how acculturated the church has become, and why Christians often turn elsewhere in the quest to be “relevant” to the world. As William Cavanaugh said:

We are often fooled by the seeming solidity of the materials of politics, its armies and offices, into forgetting that these materials are marshalled by acts of the imagination. How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world and kill people he knows nothing about? He must be convinced of the reality of borders, and imagine himself deeply, mystically, united to a wider national community that stops abruptly at those borders.

This farm boy has to be taught, catechized into believing that he is part of an “us” called “America” (and what that means). He has to be taught to sing sacred songs and venerate sacred objects representing the nation. He has to be taught to bend his body in a certain way when he hears the first notes of “The Star Spangled Banner” or when he sees a piece of cloth with stars and stripes stitched on it. This talisman-like cloth is acknowledged everywhere: at school, at football games, in parades. A mystique surrounds it. When he sees it alongside others, with different colours and patterns on them, he comes to see the world as a world of nations, with everyone belonging to one or the other, and with some friendly and others hostile and threatening.

When an imagined reality comes across simply as “the way things are”, liturgy has done its work.

It was this way in South Africa. Before it was government policy, Apartheid (an Afrikaans word meaning “apartness”) was an imagination that taught people to see others primarily as Xhosa or Zulu or Indian or white. The contingency of race became essentialized into “blackness” and “whiteness”. As this imagination took flesh, it remade the landscape in its image and after its likeness, levelling communities that were racially mixed, sorting their people by colour and dumping the blacker ones in one place and the lighter ones in another. When people looked at their society and saw the white people wearing suits (when they weren’t playing or watching rugby), driving nice cars to get from their leafy suburbs, and working behind a desk, and the black people wearing coveralls (when they weren’t playing or watching soccer), using minibus “taxis” to get from their dusty township homes, and cleaning the buildings, imagination corresponded perfectly to “the way things are.”

This embodied imagination, this performance of a racialist script, broke up communities and churches that looked out of place in its light. Indeed, it broke up whole families. It remade the natural world in its image and after its likeness, reserving the best beaches, parks, and farmland for whites. It remade public spaces in its image and after its likeness, with separate beaches, park benches, and public toilets for blacks and whites. It was an imagination enforced by a heavily militarized police force, and a complex state bureaucracy obsessed with classification and separation.

It was also reinforced by church worship. Apartheid South Africa understood itself to be, before anything else, a Christian society. All the shops closed Saturday afternoon till Monday morning, in deference to the Sabbath. Bible study was compulsory in schools. There was no newsstand pornography. It only got television in 1975, and even that was heavily censored. It acknowledged God in its constitution and gave every soldier a copy of the Bible to carry—Bibles that carried a message from the State President: “this is your most powerful weapon”.
While they read from a Bible that contained the words, “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female”, the churches in South Africa by and large were places where people worshipped alongside those of the same colour, used the same language, and shared more or less the same social status and cultural values. The world within the church and the world outside were perfect reflections of each other, just the way God intended it.

The Church on the Streets

It is not a stretch to suppose that many if not most of those who divided the city on that September day, who gave the orders, who fired the tear gas and sprayed the purple dye were Christians convinced they were carrying out God’s will. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission observed numerous applicants for amnesty from the Apartheid police claiming that they enjoyed the blessing of their churches. Every Sunday they sang songs about heaven while the rest of the week inflicting hell on other human beings.

But this is not the whole truth. Some South Africans of privilege saw the world, God, and others differently. They asked the question: where would Jesus live, work, and worship? They listened, and listening they learned what the reality of injustice looked, felt, and smelled like. They deliberately gathered for prayer alongside people who spoke different languages, who lived a very different life than they did. This worship spilled out of the churches and onto the streets. Hymns sang in safe sanctuaries became protest anthems. Prayers uttered in private became public laments (“how long, O Lord”?) and calls for an end to unjust rule. Sermons became calls to social action and summonses to mass mobilization.

All this fostered a different imagination. “The way things were” was more than just wrong: it was blasphemy. Imagination led to formation, and formation gave new knowledge–especially about three things. The members of the church on the streets knew that “the way things are” was actually someone’s idea of the way things are. The system of race classification was as arbitrary as herding together all people with blue eyes to distinguish them from people with brown or hazel eyes, all men to distinguish them from women, all rugby lovers to distinguish them from soccer fans.

They also knew that when powerful people talk about “the way things are” it often means “the way things have to be if our material interests are to be met.” They knew that God-talk could disguise self-interest, and even deceive believers. Even a Constitution that had “God” in its Preamble could be false. Because they were involved in and with those who suffered, they knew that the God the state professed to serve by its policies was not the God revealed in Jesus Christ, but a projection of fear and apprehension. And that the hungry and homeless victims of that system were sacrifices to this monster-god.

Finally, they knew that if the way things are is a product of the imagination, then another way of imagining the world could produce a society more just, more inclusive, more human—in short, more like what Jesus meant when he talked about the reign of God. But this was not just a matter of stating ideas: it was a matter of concretely embodying the alternative.

That’s why Tutu’s words were so profound. As he marvelled at the “technicolour” crowds in front of him, a multitude who had been formed into a people, he could say to the newly elected President F.W. de Klerk (who had begun to talk, cautiously, about negotiating a New South Africa): “come and see. It’s here. Now.”

This I think is the message of contemporary movements like Occupy and Idle No More. It’s not in the common ideas they express (they have no unifying platform except that capitalism and exploitation are wrong) but in practices, the disciplines, the liturgies that contest public space and that embody an alternative imagination.

“This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!”

The Occupy movement was born in a protest against the excesses of Wall Street, bankers getting large government bail-outs, and a growing disparity between the wealthiest 1 percent and everyone else. The protests spread across the world during 2011. Tent cities sprung-up, occupying not only financial districts, but public lands. It was a way of reclaiming space in the name of a people who refused the discipline of corporate overlords.

One such site was St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. As Luke Bretherton observed, the Cathedral grounds was “an ancient meeting place where the citizens of London would gather to decide matters of common concern.” But now this site was in the middle of London’s commercial sector, and the Cathedral, which had just hosted the media spectacle of the wedding of William and Kate, was an important tourist attraction. A standoff happened between the city, the church, and the protesters. During the occupation, the church was closed, leading to the eventual resignation of the Cathedral’s Dean.

Some have argued that the Occupy protests—and more locally the Idle No More movement—are “smoke and mirrors” because there is no coherent agenda or plan of action. But as Bretherton counters this is to miss the point. “Demands are formulated but these are secondary. What matters is the transformative experience of participation.” Like the purple rain protest, the gathering was as much a picture of what a truly inclusive community struggling for justice looked like, especially as it faced forces which represented the status quo—sadly this time including the church. Bretherton continues:

The primary point of the Assemblies (the popular forums within Occupy) is … to give people the experience of a completely different space and time so that they are freed to see the oppressive nature of the current one. As the initial statement by Occupy London put it: ‘This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!’” This experience took place in the involvement of all participants in decisions, the free exchange of ideas, and a social order “free from control by capitalist corporations or state authorities.

Democracy, which in advanced capitalist societies takes the form of wealthy candidates backed by big money pushing through a corporate-friendly agenda on the population through a media similarly controlled, was reimagined as one where everyone had a say. In this way the encampment created a space that “reframed reality in terms other than those defined by the representatives of the state.”
Just as the violent response of the police to the peaceful protesters in Cape Town revealed the truth of the apartheid regime, the response of the London authorities was a revelation of the true lack of democracy within late capitalism. Like the purple rain protests, Christians (including church leaders) were among the participants in the protest. But unlike Cape Town in 1989, where the protest took the form of a march that began at one church—Central Methodist—and ended at another—St. George’s Cathedral—Occupy London set up its encampment on the grounds of a church that found the protests an interference with its life.

The irony pointed out by Bretherton is that a Cathedral is also meant to be “a place where people can come and experience a different time and space,” where, “if only for a moment [people can live] in a vision of a different future and thereby have reality reframed.” Sadly, the cathedral—like the South African churches invested in the status quo—was unable to see that in the motley crew of scruffy humanity on its front lawn was embodied a vision of the future very much like the kingdom of God. It was blinded to the way the City of London looked more like the Babylon of Revelation 18 than the city with the living water flowing from its centre and its gates always open to the nations. It’s concern for the preservative of peace and order missed “a millennial politics” in which the present system stood under judgment.

Conclusion

Popular movements help us see what we cannot (or will not) see within the safe spaces of worship. They may, as in Cape Town, represent a new location for the church—with the people groaning for newness. Or they may, as in London, show the need for the church to repent of its own need for self-preservation and risk losing itself in the performance of the kingdom. Such movements can be understood theologically as parables of the kingdom. They are signs of hope in an enclosed world where options for resistance seem pointless.

But they also are limited as signs. As anyone who knows contemporary South Africa will attest, the Rainbow People as a social imaginary stands in judgement over what the new South Africa has become over the past twenty years. Some of the strongest criticism of South Africa today comes from those whose imagination was formed in the church on the street. And yet, understanding that performance as a “missed (and now lost) opportunity” can (and does) lead to cynicism. For just as the fulness of the Kingdom did not come through “one person, one vote” in 1994, so the fulness of the kingdom can never come through human efforts alone. Even so, the appeal to “come and see” gestures toward a real future. It is a future capture in a vision that gives hope, and guides struggle to make the world a little more like what God has promised it will be.

What about the church, today? What does “the 99 percent” see when they look at the church at worship? What future dRaw footage of the 1989 Cape Town marcho we bend our bodies toward? How does our worship connect to their criticisms of the systems that keep the rich in comfort and the poor in squalor? Dare we point to our assemblies of worship and say, “come and see”? Dare we take those assemblies to the places of conflict and contest, that the world may see, and hope, and believe?