Seeing the kingdom come
We were mid worship set when the electricity ran out. The guest worship leader didn’t miss a beat, we just switched to a cappella and kept going. Us. Our unlikely community from so many different walks of life, singing as one, full of joy and gratitude. Former gangsters and recovering addicts, women who have survived abuse and trauma, people from other countries, people from other parts of Cape Town, people who originated from the community we meet in. People who are tertiary educated, people who are illiterate. People with snazzy jobs, people who are unemployed. White people, coloured people (a South African demographic), black people, people who are mixed race. English, Afrikaans, Kaaps, Xhosa, German. People who have committed crimes, people who have been the victims of crimes. Those with money, those without. And I realised we were seeing the Kingdom of God before us. What God has built over the past 15 years is a community where people whose paths would not normally cross have chosen to do the hard work of becoming friends across divides and difference, offence, hurts, mistakes and misunderstandings.
You’ve heard me speak and write about withness. The short version is it’s what I call God’s unchanging love, in which our lives are not free from suffering but God’s love is with us unceasingly in the midst of it all. If this is how God loves us, and we are called to love one another how he loves us, then our example is to love with our withness too. Resilience and mental health researchers explain the power of this kind of love. Social connection actually increases our survival rate when sick, it eases the long term affects of traumatic events and enables post-traumatic growth. How beautiful that God’s presence in our lives and our presence in each other’s lives is healing and strengthening.
To me, our wee church, Tree of Life Manenberg, is the epitome of withness. Our weekly gathering starts with ‘good news stories’. These are things that have happened in the week where we experienced God and are thankful for his goodness. The same morning of the electricity incident, our good news ranged from medical scares that ended with hospitalisation and “I’m going to be OK”, to recovering addicts celebrating months and months clean, someone who had started on antidepressants which had changed their lives, someone else acing their barista training course and the leader of a healing home for abused woman reflecting on the culture of love and discipleship that had developed over the years within the house. I knew that in the same room people were struggling with unemployment, a family was remembering the birthday of a child who had passed away and there were people struggling with extreme financial stress. Yet they were celebrating the goodness that others were seeing. My heart was filled with gratitude that I am part of a community where such diverse experiences are present, where our culture is safe enough to be vulnerable, and where everyone is celebrating each other, no matter how much personal suffering people are going through. When you are powerless to change someone’s suffering, realising that you have agency and something to offer by bringing your withness is the most empowering and beautiful thing.
We, I, have made so so many mistakes along the way as we have tried to cultivate this community, and there’s so much I wish I could have done differently. And yet in God’s kindness, he lets us learn from our mistakes and try again. He takes our brokenness and makes something beautiful. And as I sat in that gathering, listening to the preacher preach on the beatitudes to people who could relate to all of the circumstances they presented, I was filled with love and awe. Even though we still get stuff wrong and living across different cultural and economic experiences is bone achingly painful at times, it is worth it. In our muddled way, we are learning to live congruently with the theology of church that we have formed over the years from the scriptures. Within our community we are not only healing divides so destructive in our country, but we are also learning to heal our trauma together, learning from each other. Those with access to resources have pulled them into the grasp of those without, and those who have lived a life of great struggle through oppression and poverty have taught those who have come from relative privilege how to survive and build a resilient faith in the face of suffering. Through reciprocity we have begun to heal. We have by no means ‘made it’. But what we have made, is something. And it’s a something worth celebrating.
And it’s this little motley crew of only about 50 church members, and 12 staff members who are now trying to buy an old building to turn into a healing centre for a community serving about 80,000 people, so that they too may have access to healing, hope and belonging. When you have discovered such deep love and freedom it’s impossible not to want everyone else you know to have it too. It seems an impossible task, to raise the funds to pull it off, but I have never been more convinced of anything in my life. The vision is driven by staff members who are from the community and know what it needs to heal, by people who have walked their own recovery journeys from trauma and discovered diverse, economically accessible ways to heal and by people who have been working in the field of healing, addiction and trauma in a context that is exposed to continual trauma for the last 15 years and have learned what works in this context. In every way, this is the fruit of people who have persevered.
To me, this vision is one of the most beautiful expressions of withness that I can think of. For those living locally, they get to offer withness by sharing their own healing with others, for those with money, they get to offer withness by sowing into a community to empower people to heal and become economically free. And for those who are not sure how to break the cycle of inherited privilege and the painful legacy that Apartheid has left in so many communities, they have an opportunity to offer withness by redistributing that privilege and sow financially as a form of restoration for what has been taken.
Please consider bringing your withness to this big dream. Our small community will give the dream the workforce, but we need the global community to give it a building. Please follow this link to the Tree of Life Crowdfunder, give and share!
