Throughout the ages there have been people with unusual spiritual energy and endurance. Hebrews 11 is a Who’s Who of ordinary people whose faith, commitment, and perseverance catapulted them to challenge the impossible.
Two weeks ago Terry Muck and I met four such people. They were black Baptist ministers who pastor churches in the segregated townships immediately surrounding Durban, South Africa; the townships house the migrant labor force that fuels Durban commerce and industry. We met in a comfortably furnished parlor attached to a white, suburban Baptist church. They had graciously agreed to come to us since it was not advisable for us to go to them.
We asked what it is like to be a pastor in black South Africa. Hesitantly, they described the madness, the chaos, and the trauma of their daily lives. The battle lines created by the political and economic inequities between three million whites and twenty-seven million blacks converge in their townships. Heavily armed troops roam the perimeters in armored vehicles, stopping and starting violence in endless cycles. On any given weekend twenty to thirty houses are burned to the ground, leaving the families destitute. Nightly, people are “necklaced” to death: suspected informers are grabbed from their homes, bound, and incinerated by placing a gasoline-filled tire around their necks and setting it afire.
The first to speak, a man of obvious experience and wisdom, told how his congregation is severely divided by generational differences. Every day he struggles to minister to older, illiterate Christians, conditioned by apartheid and horrified by violence, while reaching out to younger Christians, politically and economically alert, who feel the church must pursue justice and liberation regardless of price.
He described the terror that strikes a pastor’s heart when he is approached about using the sanctuary for an illegal political gathering. To agree is to endorse, creating both friends and enemies. To refuse may mark the church and the pastor’s house for fire bombing.
The senior member of the group, a warm, graying man in his sixties, told how he and his wife raised seven children in the faith. He recalled how the oldest son tried to reconcile theology and daily life and became involved in community affairs. Declared a political enemy, he is serving a twenty-three-year prison sentence. The pastor told how his home and church were ransacked by security police looking for information about his son’s activities. He couldn’t talk for choking when he described visiting his imprisoned son and seeing what beating, mutilation, and torture does to someone you love.
The youngest pastor, a trim, taut man in his thirties, showed us a short piece he had written titled, Please Don’t Call Me Pastor. In it he describes the pain of being confronted by an inconsolable mother seeking answers for why her innocent twelve-year-old son was shot dead in the crossfire of a security police raid. As he retold his experiences, he admitted his literary efforts were a cathartic attempt to expunge deep feelings of inadequacy in dealing with the unanswerable questions his people keep bringing to him.
Yet nothing about these pastors’ attitude suggested they had abandoned hope. “How do you keep going?” we asked. With conviction born of deep commitment they answered, “God is at work in our hearts and in our churches. He has called us to this task, and we must be faithful.”
Terry and I prayed with them. We sensed they will survive, they will endure, they will persevere, they will ultimately triumph. Unknown and unheralded, they are the leadership of Christ’s church in South Africa, a church that even now confronts the gates of hell.
The first morning back at my desk, I read the opening chapter of Oswald Chambers’s book, The Place of Help (a chapter we have reprinted in this issue on page 33). In it he describes weary pilgrims trudging onward, though the heat of the day has made the road dusty, the miles long, the feet weak, and the endeavor exhausting. He tells how these pilgrims sing a psalm that asks, “Shall I lift up mine eyes to the hills? From whence should my help come?” And in unison voice they answer, “My help cometh from the Lord who made heaven and earth.”
Then Chambers graphically describes why these pilgrims, and these four pastors, press ahead with energy and endurance: “He will take you up, he will remake you, he will make your soul young and will restore to you the years that the cankerworm hath eaten and place you higher than the loftiest mountain peak, safe in the arms of the Lord himself, secure from all alarms, and with an imperturbable peace that the world cannot take away.”
The chronicles of faithfulness and endurance continue to be written.
Paul D. Robbins is executive vice-president of Christianity Today, Inc.
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