Worship at Lamontville
(Sunday, 22nd July 2007)
Text of report letter to Townsend church:
Sanibona, Townsend! This e-mail provides a text description of our visit to Lamontville on Sunday, rather on the long side, so you might want to get a cup of tea or coffee, as you prefer, and settle in for the read … A series of separate messages will provide a few photos from the day. Thanks again for your several letters of greeting which, as you'll see below, were a special part of this really wonderful visit to 'your' church in Lamontville. Best greetings to you all -- Jan and Ruthann.
We’ve visited the Lamontville Congregational Church, UCCSA, with regularity over our years of visiting KZN, both because it’s the home church of our great and good friend, Flo Madlala, and as it was one of the first participant churches in the church-to-church connection effort of ‘Ibandla lami linge lakho / My church is your church.’ It’s always good to be back.
We arrived for this morning’s service in good time, giving us a chance to greet familiar parishioners as they arrived, and to visit briefly with the Sunday school teachers and kids … though the kids weren’t overly interested in us, since they were quickly occupied with taking one of their written exams. Yes, they actually have tests as part of Sunday school; it’s these written tests, we recall, that have led to separate Zulu-language and English-language classes for the kids, all of whom are Zulu, but not all of whom are that comfortable with writing in isiZulu.
Among those waiting for us is Mpumelelo Shangase, the young man who’s the latest coordinating contact person for Lamontville’s relationship with the Townsend Congregational Church. He’s seen us before in earlier visits to the Lamontville church, but while we’ve spoken with him on the phone and exchanged e-mails from the US and most recently looking towards today’s service, it’s the first time we’ve actually met him. He will be leading the service this day, and will be the translator for Jan’s sermon. He has on a fancy decorated vest, a sort of stylized ‘traditional’ vest. We’d had a clue that the dress-up directive had gone out for today’s service, as one of those we saw walking up to the church as we drove in had been Mrs. Cynthia Madlala, who is Flo’s sister-in-law, who was in her full Xhosa traditional regalia (she comes from a different part of South Africa), which we’d first seen a few years ago when the congregation had also come to church in traditional garb in celebration of a special service. They don’t do this every Sunday, by any means, and it’s quite an honor to be involved with a service for which they think this appropriate.
Flo Madlala arrives wearing a very interesting stylized traditional outfit, lots of beads and embroidery. She’s beaming with joy for the day, and is especially pleased, as the day proceeds, with Mpumelelo. He’s very much a protégé of hers through the Sunday school and the youth group at the church. There’s a bittersweet element to this, however, since as we’d heard, he’s leaving in a few weeks’ time to take a new job up near Johannesburg. Mpumelelo is an IT-oriented industrial engineer, involved in production and control systems for manufacturing companies, and has been recruited to a better post with a different company up there in the industrial heartland of the country. He’ll be sorely missed by the church, and especially by the youth group. And, of course, it will require yet another transition for the coordination of the relationship with Townsend.
As the congregation begins to gather, as usual there are a few choruses and hymns that are sung to set the tone and to pass the time. As the time to begin the service approaches, Jan is taken into a vestry room for prayer with Mpumelelo and the deacons, including both Mesdames Madlala, and he is then seated in isolation back behind the pulpit, the other participating deacons and Mpumelelo taking more open seats over by the lectern. Our preference when we’re attending services here is to sit down with the congregation, as that is better for taking pictures during the service, but that’s not to be permitted today. However, they’ve made arrangements for a videographer to record the service this day, and we’re told that it’s their intention to send a video over to the Townsend church, to be sent with us when we leave in a couple of weeks’ time. That puts a bit of pressure on our participation this day!
The service begins with a usual sung invocation, followed by greetings by Mpumelelo, and a hymn. He reminds everyone of the guests for the day, and then there’s a time for people to greet one another – rather like a lively version of ‘passing the peace’ in the Mass churches, but during the singing of a chorus, and with people a bit more willing to roam about to exchange greetings. It is allowed to go on rather longer, as well.
The congregation joins in prayer in the usual manner, in which each person prays aloud, all at the same time, for so long as it takes, at the end of which Flo Madlala begins the sung version – in English, this day – of the Lord’s Prayer. Another hymn follows.
It’s time for the sermon. Because transitions from one thing to another in the service, and especially when someone is rising to speak as part of the service, should involve an appropriate musical reference, we do a round of the ‘i3L Chorus,’ which the congregation here, or most of them, know from earlier visits. Jan then begins speaking with a greeting in isiZulu, a form of general greeting from the Massachusetts churches which was translated last year by Flo Madlala for our use at the regional church’s annual meeting and which has found use since in visits to both the Massachusetts and the KZN churches. This day, because the folks at Townsend have responded so well and generously to our request for their own greetings to be read out to the KZN church – the best response, by far, that we’ve had to this from any of the Mass churches – Jan can bring especial greetings from Townsend and read out the four letters we’d received for Lamontville. So Lorraine Quesada’s greetings, including memorably her mention of feeling close to Flo Madlala when they spoke regularly for the prayer connection between the churches because she could hear Flo’s dog barking over the phone; and former ministers Gail Kendrick’s letter remembering her visit to Lamontville last year, and telling about her new life in Maine; and Melanie Ouellette’s telling about her Habitat for Humanity activities; and interim minister Mark Seifried’s news about the church life at Townsend, including how it does and does not proceed during the summer – all four letters were read out, in full, in the service. It’s something that can be done quite readily in the churches here, where the concept of ‘short’ most often doesn’t enter in to the time allocated for the sermon (Flo Madlala, having been asked earlier whether 20 minutes for the day’s sermon was okay – bearing in mind that Mpumelelo would be translating as well for the benefit of those in the congregation less comfortable with English, which would likely more than double the time – said, ‘no, that’s too short’). We wouldn’t have a proverbial prayer of doing this in a church in Massachusetts. But this day, the letters of greeting from Townsend form the first part of the message for the day, and the wishes from there, for the growth and expansion of the relationships between these churches and the people of the churches, are warmly received. By prior agreement, there’s not a contemporaneous translation of the letters, but Jan delivers copies of the letters to Mpumelelo and to Flo Madlala for their further dissemination.
The necessary musical transition to the sermon itself is the first three verses of 'OJehova, Uyangazi’, Hymn No. 6 in Amagama Okuhlabelela, the Congregational hymnal in the Zulu language. We’d encountered this first at another church, last year, and had been struck by both the tune (which we’d confirmed with Flo was the same one (it isn’t always the case) that they’d use at Lamontville for this text) and especially by the words which are a paraphrase of the 139th Psalm. The third verse, in particular, Uyawaz’ amazwi ami, Nokuzindla kwami konke – ‘You know my words, and all my thoughts’ – has seemed an apt lead-in to a sermon, and we’ve had occasion to use it in that way a couple of times this year. It takes about three beats into the first verse before most of the congregation is joining in, and a rousing rendition of the hymn is underway. After the service, Flo admitted that she’d been a bit concerned when we’d told her that the intention was to do the first three verses only, but that (authentically) Jan would just launch into the hymn, without announcement; how was he going to get them to stop, she’d worried. But we made her proud, she said, because a line or so from the end of the third verse, Jan raised his arm with a fist closed gesture, as we’d learned it was done, and enough folks saw this to alert their neighbors, and yes, we all ended with the third verse; it’s an interesting cross-cultural musical moment in the church.
The sermon this day is a pep talk of sorts about building on the elements of the connection between the two churches that had begun, to make these things known to others in the church, and (especially with the changes necessarily occurring with Carol Berman’s no longer serving as CE director at Townsend, as mentioned in Mark Seifried’s letter, and Mpumelelo’s leaving for Johannesburg) to enlist more people as direct participants.
Why should we do this? Well, first as a response to scripture, to live out the directive that ‘we should love one another,’ made real by seeking to know one another; and also as an honoring of the historic connection that our churches have, through the efforts of the American Board missionaries. But can we do this otherwise than by infrequent visits such as Gail Kendrick’s? Yes, it’s important to realize that the intended relationship is NOT to be defined by those, nor (especially not) by Ruthann’s and Jan’s visits.
But Paul visited the early churches, didn’t he? Are we being instructed to do so as well? Consider why it was that Paul, writing to the Roman church, said that he longed to visit them: so “that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.” We have the opportunity, that Paul did not, to reach out to each other in ways that make us close, to offer that mutual encouragement by conversations about our lives, our churches, our faith, on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. Our reciprocal mission to and with each other is made possible by the modern world that we share; we have a responsibility to make use of it. And so we made an open plea for folks willing to share phone calls, and for those who had access to e-mail, to make themselves known to become involved in the relationship effort.
As we’ve been doing at the churches here that we’ve been able to join for worship (it will have been thirteen of the churches by the time we depart in early August), we mentioned also the story of last year’s visit to Adams Mission, just south of Durban and not far from Lamontville, when the Amabutho members in charge of the service that day based their testimonies on Paul’s words from Ephesians. They’d not been told we were coming that day, but we have carried that so-apt message with us, the message that they highlighted for us through that service, as we have spoken to participating Massachusetts churches since, and so also to KZN churches: that Jesus “came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God …” And so we were welcomed this day at Lamontville, and so it can be, even more so, as the people of the churches speak with and write to each other, that it truly is as a family, and not as strangers, that we seek to interact with one another, that we are not strangers to one another, because we are ‘fellow citizens’ of the one church, across time and across oceans. And so, we should work to know one another.
It was necessary, though a sad reminder, to include as one of the ‘saints of this church,’ with whom we are fellow citizens across time, our and their sister in Christ, Angeline Mbambo. The memory of Angeline when we saw her last in this church, standing where Mpumelelo was this morning, as Angeline led the service at which Gail Kendrick preached that ‘God is good all the time’ … and, yes, the congregation responded also during the reading of Gail’s letter that ‘all the time, God is good.’ The love and concern that people of Townsend showed for Lamontville when informed of the loss of Angeline, was one example of the mutual encouragement that we, as people of the one church, can provide for each other.
Especially with the intermixed translation by Mpumelelo, the sermon went for a good long time, as we’d been instructed it should. It’s often the case that sermons are broken up by allowing for a chorus to be sung, to provide a break for speaker and listeners, and the chance to move about a bit. This day, about halfway through, it was appropriate to mention the sharing of songs between the two churches, and in particular the suggestion that had come up in recent e-mail exchanges between Mpumelelo and Mark Seifried, that perhaps Lamontville would join in Townsend’s ‘Let it Shine’ theme by singing ‘This little light of mine.’ Mpumelelo’s notion that it was unfamiliar here had surprised us, as we’d heard it at least in a Sunday school context in another Durban-area township church; and Flo Madlala had confirmed that yes, of course, they knew it, hadn’t Mpumelelo been paying attention that day at Sunday school? Well, a number of verses of ‘This little light’ provided a well-deserved break for preacher, translator, and especially the congregation, this day, as well as a link to the folks at Townsend.
After the sermon and the translation concluded, a second round of the i3L chorus provided us with a stopping point, and the service was turned back over to Mpumelelo. We were hopeful that there’d be special music as well, and were most happy that the Sunday school had a special song, nicely syncopated and with separate parts, and that a group of young women, including Audrey Chiliza and Zanele (another Sunday school teacher), who are young adults in age but as usual here are members of the youth group, sang a beautiful, more westernized song, very well indeed. This group, Flo Madlala told us afterwards, is actually a newly formed prayer group as well. We’ve got to mention this to the folks at Townsend, as a potential point of contact for young adults at that church interested in exploring the relationship with Lamontville. Jan has taken the opportunity of this music to escape his isolation up by the pulpit, to join Ruthann on the benches.
Then, the offering proceeds to the music of a chorus. Ruthann is asked to give the offertory prayer, and ties in nicely with the wish that these funds will help the church and its people to be a light in their community. Flo Madlala, who’s the Lamontville church elected Secretary as well, reads out the announcements, and calls forward several local visitors for acknowledgment and introduction. There’s a second offering which related to conference attendance expenses for church representatives, also to a chorus, and a number of those coming forward to contribute take the opportunity to greet us as they return to their seats. There’s a brief prayer, and the congregation sings a multi-fold Amen, and the service is concluded. Jan is summoned back to the vestry with the deacons for a closing prayer.
An acquaintance from prior visits to Lamontville comes up to greet Ruthann. This is ‘Emy,’ an octogenarian retired teacher who announces that she’d like to respond to the request for folks interested in participating in the relationship with Townsend to come forward. She’d like a pen pal. We take her information, and promise to pass it on to Townsend with the hope that this might be the beginnings of yet another branch of the overall mutual ministry between the congregations.
As we’re leaving, there’s quite a bit of activity amongst the youth. They’re planning a surprise party, a braai (barbecue), in Mpumelelo’s honor after church the next week. There’s some question as to whether they really want the older folks to know about it.
It’s mid-day when all is concluded.
We debrief from the day’s events over lunch with Flo Madlala at a seaside restaurant a little bit south of the city, in the town of Amanzimtoti. It’s been a very nice morning.