When one sets out to make a difference in the world, one usually expects to come across certain challenges. There are always a few, however, that can completely blindside you. These last few weeks of our NCSA team’s “submerging” posture have held a few of those for me.
First, let me give you a picture of the vision God has given me for ministry here, which came quite unexpectedly and at the last minute. While it weaves together many strands of personal dreams I’ve held for some time, it came with many surprises, too. At the end of the “listening” posture, when I had nearly resigned myself to the thought that it didn’t much matter what I chose for ministry, my fellow teammate Barbara and I were casually talking. In our chat, we stumbled upon the fact that we shared a similar dream: to help tell the stories of the undervalued, the underprivileged, and the otherwise “voiceless.” Since that day, having further clarified that dream into a tangible ministry, we have narrowed down our stories to those of African women, from both the city and the townships.
In the aftermath of the initial “glow” from discovering our mutual vision, we have gradually come face to face with the reality of starting such a project, which brings with it certain setbacks, or, as I’d rather view them, challenges. For one, I have been finding it difficult to create a workable schedule at the particular ministry at which I have chosen to submerge, an inner-city women’s shelter sponsored by Pretoria Community Ministries. Their daily routine is casual to the point that it has become hard to find a time when most of the women are around. Thus, it has been hard for me to “establish” myself “among” them. This is an issue especially because Barbara and I have agreed that our first step must be to establish relationships with the women above all else. I have gathered during my minimal time with the women that whereas a handful of them are forthcoming, outgoing, and open up easily, the bulk of them have walls they’ve built up over years of negative experiences and will not easily (or quickly) take down. One answer I’ve found for each of these challenges is simple and serves as the answer to many things here–the concept of “Africa Time.” In essence, this means that I am more than literally in a different time zone and that quality (as opposed to in the U.S.) is valued over quantity. On a mutual level, Barbara and I have each encountered varying forms of fear and procrastination that seem to come with the territory (but are none-the-less frustrating) in undertaking such an enterprising project.
There is something that is even more frustrating–but ultimately motivating–about being confronted with a challenge that relates more specifically to one’s person. I encountered such a challenge this last week during a conference we visited in Jo’burg with Brian McLaren, a popular American author and speaker on postmodernism and the evangelical Left (a relatively new concept in the last couple of decades). Having heard Brian speak last December in my hometown of Portland, Oregon before I came to South Africa, I was anticipating a similarly inspirational and spiritually challenging few days. While I was certainly again challenged theologically, I found my inspiration mysteriously hindered by the audience by which I was surrounded. Over the course of the three days, I found myself increasingly aware of a couple of things I noticed the first day (but had quickly put out of my mind): 1.) Out of the hundred people attending, there was not one black person present, and 2.) The four female and one male twenty-something NCSA participants were quite outnumbered by predominantly white, mid-to-upper class Afrikaaner men, many of them middle-aged pastors. Of course, maybe we weren’t aware of who this conference was originally intended for, but I noticed that it was the Afrikaaner men who primarily spoke and asked the most questions. And while some of the other young theology students and women present (some of whom were pastors themselves) also asked questions and spoke, they seemed to be treated on the whole with less respect.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed this so much except that I experienced it personally on the second day of the conference. Brian asked us to split into groups of two and listen to each other, each for five minutes, as we expressed what we were feeling and thinking thus far into the conference. It was a lesson in listening. I ended up with one of the Afrikaaner men (a pastor), who spent the bulk of the time asking me what I was doing in South Africa, and then sort of snorting at my replies. I tried to start the “listening” part of the activity by telling him what I was thinking about (which actually related to the current ideas that we hold about women in the church) and he seemed to be listening, but then kept going back to his “interrogation,” even when I tried to make my point a few times. It was rather frustrating, to say the least. One thing I did learn from him was that Pretoria, where I live, is“beyond the boerwors curtain.” The man wouldn’t explain this to me, but I later found it to be a sort of derogatory way of saying “you live where the Afrikaaner hicks live.” It was interesting to me to hear this saying, as I heard it a few times at the conference, and it helped me put into context where we live in relation to the rest of the country.
All that to say, I was appeased later that same day of the conference. At one point, Brian’s wife Grace came over to where us girls were sitting and asked how we were doing so far, and I made a blatant statement about the homogeneous group surroundings. Later at lunch she invited Katie and me over to a table she had gathered just “for the women” where we could talk about some of these issues. At the table that day I learned of many other women’s stories and struggles within the traditional Dutch reformed church as well as the male-dominated Afrikaaner society at large.
How does this relate to my ministry with Barbara, aside from being just a feminist footnote?, you might ask. Well, the conference for me struck at the base of why I feel it is necessary to help tell African women’s stories. It hit a personal chord for me as I realized that the issue of being “without a voice” does not relate only to underprivileged African women, but also to privileged white women like myself (and not only young but old as well). I began to wonder: perhaps this is an issue simply unique to women. My next thought was: How might I go about making a difference in addressing this issue? What is my role, as a young, privileged, white missionary student, in this unique situation?
The most important first step I have come to is that we must first, as women, listen to one another. In the group of women at that lunch at the Brian McLaren conference, and in intimate one-on-one conversations with my fellow female apprentices, I have felt a safe space being created for women to simply, finally, speak up and say what they want to, not in a way in which they think they can gain recognition from males, but in their own way. Recognizing one another’s feelings helps to validate those feelings and create one further step toward opening up the platform for women to speak.
As I have been seeking to further form this vision that I feel God has given me concerning ministry, I have been reminded that shaping my vision is not really my job. I recall Oswald Chambers’ words of what carrying out a vision actually looks like, and sigh in relief as I realize that these challenges I’m facing are not without reason and that, after all, I am in “Africa Time:”
God gives us a vision, and then He takes us down to the valley to batter us into the shape of that vision. It is in the valley that so many of us give up and faint. Every God-given vision will become real if we will only have patience. Just think of the enormous amount of free time God has! He is never in a hurry. Yet we are always in such a frantic hurry. While still in the light of the glory of the vision, we go right out to do things, but the vision is not yet real in us. God has to take us into the valley and put us through fires and floods to batter us into shape, until we get to the point where He can trust us with the reality of the vision.
(From My Utmost for His Highest)
I only pray for the courage to enter into that reality.
