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Church taken during apartheid handed back 22 years later by NGK
Episcopal News Service
Issue:
Section:
2003-096-4
Posted: Monday, May 05, 2003
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The former members of St. Stephen's Church, in the main street of Paarl in the Cape's wine-growing area, have returned 22 years after they were forced to leave because they were the wrong color during the era of South Africa's racial ideology of apartheid.
Descendants of the congregation forced to move from a white zone to a church in a coloured or mixed-race area attended services at St. Stephen's, the first since the church's hand-over the previous week during celebrations for South Africa's national day.
'For many of us here the last 20 years were years of exile, but today we came home,' said the Rev. Roderick Cox, St. Stephens' new priest. 'The church in which our fathers and their fathers were baptised, married and buried, is back in our hands.'
The church had been taken over by the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK), but on 27 April the original worshipers got their church back at a ceremony attended by both the NGK and the Anglican congregations. The handing over during the week of celebrations for South Africa's 28 April Freedom Day was seen as a symbolic act of rapprochement between the NGK and the Anglican church, which had fought against the racist policies of the government at the time.
Present at the ceremony were Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane and Connie Burger, the moderator of the NGK, which had found justification for apartheid in the past, but has since renounced it. Ndungane, who succeeded Desmond Tutu as leader of South Africa's Anglicans, noted that St. Stephen's as well as the adjacent Dutch Reformed Church were packed for the ceremony, and that the youth of both congregations took part in it.
'This is an indication that we have to deepen the relationship between the Anglican and the Dutch Reformed Church. Our challenge is to find specific projects in which to cooperate,' said Ndungane. Burger agreed: 'May these two congregations give the witness that South Africa will need very much during the next few years.'
St. Stephen's was built in 1879 to serve the mixed-race population at Noorde-Paarl. The congregation was forced to leave in 1981 after the area was declared a white group area. The Anglican church sold the building to the government, which in turn sold it to the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1998 members of the St. Stephen's former congregation applied to authorities for the return of their land. The NGK did not oppose it, and the building was sold to the Anglican Church for 780,000 South African rands (US$105,000). On 27 April the old congregation's first service in the church was one held jointly with the mainly white NGK Noorde-Paarl congregation.
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