South Africa: prayer for solutions

It’s hard to open a newspaper in South Africa without being saddened by front-page stories about police corruption and brutality, the abuse of women, and the misuse of political power. Yet, almost everyone you meet shows some measure of hope and a determination to help make things better—very often through prayer.

For example, one of the senior ministers in His People Johannesburg church told me when I visited South Africa recently that during their 15 worship services every Sunday they try to be proactive in bringing about a change in values in South Africa. “We constantly marvel at the way Jesus chose ordinary people to change the world through acts of kindness and love,” he said. “We are concerned to promote multiculturalism at the personal level, and cross the barriers of racism, sexism, and ageism, with a special thrust toward young people.”

And young people are getting the message, said a mother of three who runs a horse-riding school in Ballito on the Natal North Coast. She told me she had turned to the Oscar Pistorius murder trial as an opportunity to discuss the culture of celebrity with her children. At all times beware of creating idols, she told them. “Rather put spiritual qualities on pedestals than people. When we elevate humans into Godlike figures we set ourselves—and them—up for disappointment.” As a family, she explained, “we turn to the Bible every day for spiritual intuition in everything we need. We rely on it and trust it.”

Trust has been a key word during several meetings I’ve enjoyed in South Africa over the past 21 years with Michael Cassidy, founder of African Enterprise, an interracial, interdenominational mission and service agency based in Pietermaritzburg. He has spoken frankly and with heartfelt consistency about his feelings for South Africa: “If you could have a country that is renewed and revived spiritually, you would create the kind of climate at every level within which people are ready for a spirit of reconciliation, mutual understanding, and commitment to work for new solutions.”

Having taken time off since I last saw him to write a new book, The Church Jesus Prayed For: A Personal Journey into John 17 (Monarch Books, 2012), Cassidy spoke to me with even greater confidence during my March visit: “I hold on to and claim a mighty Old Testament promise, which also held me deeply in the awful apartheid years: ‘I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for [good] and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope’ (Jeremiah 29:11, Revised Standard Version). This is still my confidence and prayer.”

And a Zimbabwean mother of two boys, who six years ago took refuge in South Africa, shared those sentiments. She’d had to leave her sons, aged two and six, with relatives back home in “Zim,” as she calls it, simply to make enough money to send home to feed them. But nothing, she told me, will ever undermine her trust in God. “Whenever I have a problem, I read my Bible. I just love the Psalms and Jesus’ healings. Often I fall asleep with the arms of the Psalms tightly around me. They bring me great comfort. Only God can work things out for us, especially in Zim, and even here in South Africa.”