Guest lecturer at St. Augustine's

            ‘You should keep your candles in the refrigerator,’ Florence Bogopa tells me. We have been waiting for the Archbishop of West Africa, Tilewa Johnson, along with our Principal, Fr. James Amanze, the ordinands from St. Augustine’s Theological School, and a few assorted guests, to arrive for dinner. We hear them now, coming up the steps to my flat, when the electricity goes out.

            The Archbishop has arrived early for the 40^th anniversary celebrations of the Diocese of Botswana next Sunday, and Fr. James invites him to speak to our students at the School. He has now just finished giving his lecture on African ecumenism, which he precedes by telling us of the beginnings of Christianity in the Gambia, where he has been bishop for nearly two decades.

The first Christians there came up from Sierra Leone, where the British had been depositing freed slaves at Freetown in the 19^th century. His own ancestors would have come from Nigeria; Tilewa is a Yoruba name. ‘Johnson,’ he adds, ‘is my slave name.’ Our students laugh. He does not. I do not think he means it as a joke.

            Bishop Tilewa takes us back to the early Church, and describes how historic circumstance – notably the rise of Islam – swept away the Church in North Africa, ‘walling in’ Christianity as a white European religion, when in fact it was not our Christian heritage at all. And on he goes to… well, I have to leave to help with the final setup for our dinner.

            The lecture does not break up until nearly eight, and folks are obviously ready to eat. I still take a moment to welcome them all to my home, and especially Bishop Tilewa, for the Gambia has a special spot in my heart. It was my first African experience, fifty years ago next year, as part of a work camp program called Crossroads Africa, while I was an undergraduate at Wake Forest. And it was also my first experience, ever, in an Anglican church, at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Bathurst, now Banjul. I remember it particularly because of how helpful people were in guiding me through the 1662 Book of Common Prayer – a courtesy and welcome I have seen repeated all over the world as persons from other traditions join us – and because before I could leave after the service they brought in a casket and I ended up attending a funeral, whose I do not know.

      We chat after dinner. He tells me Stephen Bahoum, one of my closest friends from

Cross-

roads, has died. The years are passing. May he rest in peace.

            As people show signs that they are getting ready to leave, the power comes back on. The caterer, anxious to go home herself, quickly extinguishes the candles and takes them to the kitchen so she can wash the saucers they are mounted on. The electricity immediately goes out again. ‘She should have waited,’ one says as he descends the steps in the dark.

A Collect for the Protection of Cattle

            I have been teaching about what constitutes a collect in Sacramental theology. That, you will recall, is a particular form of prayer that we use in our liturgy.

A collect has five parts: It ‘addresses’ God; names a quality or action of God’s that seems relevant to the subject of the collect; makes a request of God; names the result that we believe will come if the prayer is ‘answered’; and closes with an ‘ascription,’ such as ‘through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ (Notice these features when you hear the Collect of the Day next Sunday.)

Anyway, I want our ordinands to understand not just what a collect is but to know that they can write their own when special occasions or events in their ministry arise. So, I set them to the task.

Batswana have a deep devotion to their cattle. If we don’t see someone on a Sunday, it is because ‘I have gone to my cattle post.’

I think: Why not? Write a Collect for the Protection of Cattle.

One wrote:

Almighty God our Heavenly Father,

Through you all things were made;

You created cattle according to its kind:

By your power and strength protect our cattle

   from sickness, hunger and thirst,

Bless our land with rain, good vegetation,

  and abundant waters, and

Give sanity and love to those who look after them,

So that our cattle will remain healthy and multiply;

We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ.

I wonder about his use of the word ‘sanity,’ but I haven’t yet asked.

Another’s request is quite specific: Protect our cattle from foot and mouth disease that is threatening to wipe them out.  Fair enough.      

            I especially like the ‘result’ for which one ordinand prayed: So that in your generosity we may continue to have the source of our livelihood in abundance.

            Amen.

On field placements, and vestments

            Two of our students are being introduced to the congregation at St. Peter’s, Mogoditshane. They are placed here for some months as part of their ministerial formation.

            Our students like to be supportive of one another, and a good number have come to Mogoditshane today for the occasion.



Ordinands Octavius Bolelang (left) and Bashie Tsheole
with Fr. Andrew Mudereri



            I preach. The story of Jeremiah’s call works well, I think, to talk about their call to the ordained ministry, and about God’s call to all of us. Fr. Andrew Mudereri then celebrates the Eucharist, after which there are introductions and a Mothers Union lunch. The parish is having its vestry elections, so we St. Augustine folk eat together out on the porch.

            We are cooling off now that we have shed our vestments. It is already in the upper nineties. I sit there as students chat in Setswana, wondering whose idea vestments were anyway. I suspect a layperson, wearied by tiresome sermons, deciding that clergy should suffer too.

St. Augustine Theological School



Seated, Fr, Leon Spencer, Fr. James Amanze, and the
Rev. John Hamathi, faculty,
with ordinands at St. Augustine Theological School

    My time with the St. Augustine Theological School begins when four of our students come down from the north, around Francistown, for a week of intensive study. It has proven difficult for tutors to meet with these students frequently, and now, as the second term begins, they have come to Gaborone.

We meet in a small duplex that houses the School. It consists of a small classroom, an office for the head of the School (where the copier donated by the Diocese of North Carolina lives), another office for the second tutor, James Hamathi, and me, and a small kitchen. Nothing fancy, but it works.

I am teaching three courses: Reformation history, Biblical interpretation, and Sacramental theology. Only the latter have I taught before. I spend the week trying to organize my thoughts, organize the courses, and do a few things in our hours together that may be helpful in these students’ ministerial formation.  All the while we are no doubt sizing up one another – they as to whether I will be able to teach anything relevant to their ministry, me as to what their particular gifts and their academic strengths and weaknesses are.

            At the end of the week they go home – ‘it is time to tend my farm,’ one remarks – and the next week the students from here in the south, around Gaborone, arrive. There are seven of them. They work during the day, then come every weekday evening for classes.

            The next week one student from Lobatse, maybe an hour’s drive away, arrives. He finds it hard to come each evening, even when he is in Lobatse, and presently he is working on a project in the Kalahari, perhaps 700 miles away. When he is home, he comes up to spend several full days with us.

The final student – there are thirteen in all – is doing some theological study through a South African institution. We are evaluating the courses he is taking, and plan to augment them with areas where we see a particular need. Pastoral studies come to mind, Fr. James Amanze, who heads the School (as well as the companion link committee), indicates.

            I am impressed with the investment in time and energy and travel these students make. They have jobs, family demands, and church responsibilities. And yet, they are here, at a new school named for the patron saint of theologians. Their academic levels vary. But it is clear that they are committed, serious about this journey they – and the Diocese of Botswana – have begun.

            There is then something to celebrate here, already. The Diocese of Botswana now has an institution to prepare persons for ordination and lay leadership, something it has sought for literally decades. Earlier postings in this Botswana Diary date from 2010, when I was part of their reflections upon how the Diocese might provide ministerial formation locally, and… how it could support and sustain it. Now, they – we, thanks to encouragement from North Carolina – have begun.

Feast day at Molepolole

Bishop Trevor, censing the altar at St. Paul's, Molepolole.

Today St. Paul’s Church in Molepolole is celebrating the feast day of the Conversion of St. Paul, which was Friday.

I travel to Molepolole, some forty miles west of Gaborone, with Bishop Trevor Mwamba and the new dean of the cathedral, James McKeran. It’s a beautiful, sunny day, already getting hot. The Bishop’s car’s air conditioning works better than mine.

The service is superb, wonderful choruses in Setswana, a fine ‘farewell’ sermon by Bishop Trevor, even special prayers for the paramount chief of the Bakwena, who stands before him.

It is commonplace to ask guests to bring greetings, and I do so, naming the Bishop of North Carolina, Michael Curry. But I also mention that North Carolina just held its annual convention Friday and elected a suffragan bishop, Anne Hodges-Copple, and so I bring greetings from her too. I make sure gender is not lost on the congregation; I mention ‘her election’ and ‘she’ to underscore the point. I trust it is duly translated.

This will not be disturbing to the people in the Diocese of Botswana. They have wanted to be able to ordain women for quite some years, and there has been some complaint that there are no women in our first intake of students at the St. Augustine Theological School. The Diocese is asking once more that the Church of the Province of Central Africa – which includes not just Botswana but also Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia – permit dioceses who wish to do so to ordain women. This has been a successful practice elsewhere; Kenya is a case in point. We’ll see. The provincial synod is in February.

There’s a good meal afterward. The chicken is tender and spicy, with a good dose of vinegar and pepper, like my Mama used to fix.

A Botswana ordination

            Today Sefularo Mogopodi is ordained a priest.

The Cathedral of the Holy Cross here in Gaborone is packed, not least with clergy at the benches ringing the wall at the altar. Mongezi Guma, the former cathedral dean, has traveled up from Johannesburg, and Benjamin Moleko, the former diocesan secretary, from Pretoria. Nick Darby, another former dean, is visiting from the Diocese of Newcastle, in England. And many clergy, familiar faces, from within Botswana join them.

Fr. Sefularo is a Motswana, thus adding to the very short list of priests from Botswana itself. He finished his studies at the College of the Transfiguration in South Africa a year ago. And he is young. His wife is invited forward toward the end of the service, carrying with her their baby girl. The infant is wearing a lacy white dress, and has a small band of white cloth wrapped around her head. She stares out at the congregation with interest, no doubt wondering what this is all about.

Bishop Trevor presides. He is busy preparing to leave Botswana in slightly over a month. This is his last ordination.

‘You stand here today as God’s dear child,’ he begins his charge to Fr. Sefularo. I especially like the words that come later: ‘Remember your own frailty.’ Perhaps that comes after nearly 25 years in the priesthood and 70 years of life.

It is a glorious celebratory service. True, it lasts a bit over three hours, and some of my African friends complain about it. But still….

I wish this young man well. And when he gathers years from now to reaffirm his ordination vows – as we do each year during Holy Week – I hope he will say with as strong a voice as he uses today: ‘I do.’

Welcome home 2013

‘Welcome home.’

            Ben Motlhalamme, the diocesan secretary, greets me with these words as we pass the peace in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Gaborone.

            They are kind, even generous words for him to say. Botswana, of course, is not my ‘home,’ but a message that I am home given by someone whose true home it is is a message to be gratefully received.

            It is perhaps easy to overlook, from the outside, just how international a city Gaborone is, despite its relatively small population for a nation’s capital. The Church reflects it. Naturally most are Batswana in the cathedral congregation, but there are people from Asia, Europe and North America, and from elsewhere in Africa and from many other countries in the region: South Africa, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe especially.

            Are we all ‘at home’ here? Maybe. Maybe not. But Ben Motlhalamme’s greeting reflects a vision, that we all may find a home within the community of faith, within the one Body of Christ, wherever we may be.

            Meanwhile, back at my home in North Carolina, my Bishop, Michael Curry, has been speaking of our Diocese’s going to Galilee, to a diverse, sometimes chaotic world, which is where Jesus told the disciples to go after the resurrection. That complex world, he says, should be seen as we look about us in our congregations.

I also think that when Jesus told his disciples to ‘go to Galilee,’ he was saying to the disciples, ‘let’s go home.’ Home to family, security, and perhaps, safety, after a tumultuous week in Jerusalem. Somehow the dynamic between our churches’ entering and engaging with the diverse community that is our Galilee, on the one hand, and providing ourselves with a continuing sense of being home, on the other, will lead to our realizing the call to have a church where all will find a home.

‘Welcome home.’ Wherever we may be. Whoever we are.