In 1968 a group of Afrikaans believers protested that the Seventh-day
Adventist Church in South Africa had remained foreign to their experience.
They maintained that American leaders had dominated the Church. They also
asserted that their cultural, linguistic and literary needs had not been
adequately catered to, and that the work of evangelization in the Afrikaans speaking
areas had been sadly neglected.
Some headway had been made by the Church in the years prior to 1968 with
translations, firstly, into Dutch and later also into Afrikaans. Advancement
had also been made by evangelists into the Afrikaans-speaking areas of the
Transvaal and the Orange Free-State. The history of the Seventh-day Adventist
Church in this country, however, corroborates many of the grievances
enumerated by the dissatisfied Afrikaans believers. The predominance of
English in the administrative work of the Church and at its educational
institutions had always been a thorny issue, resulting in continuous friction
between the Church leaders and the Dutch and Afrikaans-speaking members.
Problems had also arisen with regard to the use of Afrikaans at the publishing
house of the Church. Positions of leadership in almost every department of the
Church had been filled by non-South Africans. As a result, by the late 1960s,
tensions in the Church had reached a boiling point.
At the end of 1968, at a special business session of the Transvaal Conference,
the objections of the Afrikaans believers met with very strong resistance. No
opportunity was granted to them to air their frustrations and grievances and,
as a result, a number of delegates left this meeting in protest before it had
been officially closed. This unilateral action resulted in the establishment
of an organization called Die Afrikaanse Konferensie van Sewendedag
Adventiste. This new conference was, however, considered to be schismatic and
was never acknowledged by the established Church.
From the outset, the Afrikaanse Konferensie set out to cater to the needs of
Afrikaans-speaking people in very forceful fashion. Many people felt that this
new conference had a legitimate cause and its membership grew very rapidly.
It initiated a welfare society, opened up several geriatric centres, its own
printing press and a correspondence Bible school. It also held, throughout the
ensuing years, numerous evangelistic campaigns. By the middle of 1973,
however, the opposition and incessant pressure applied by the established
Church and the severe problems that had emerged from within the ranks of the
Afrikaanse Konferensie, swiftly contributed to its demise, with most of its
members eventually rejoining the established Church.
At the time of the disintegration of the Afrikaanse Konferensie, the leaders
of the Church resolved to strengthen the evangelistic work directed at
Afrikaans-speaking people. They also determined to have more literature
produced in Afrikaans, and to strongly promote the use of Afrikaans at the
publishing house and at the Church's educational institutions. These
resolutions, however, proved ineffectual , and in the years that followed, the
work of the Church showed no improvement in its approach to the Afrikaans speaking
people.
Twenty-five years have passed since the demise of the Afrikaanse Konferensie
and the Church finds itself, because of both, external and internal factors,
in a position that could be considered decidedly worse than at the time of the
formation of the Afrikaanse Konferensie in 1968. As from 1995, after a protest
march by students on the campus of Helderberg College, instruction in
Afrikaans was no longer provided at a tertiary level. The production of
Afrikaans books and the translation of reading material into Afrikaans is
almost non-existent. As a result, voices of dissent are once again being heard
that the Afrikaans work is being neglected. This predicament in the Church can
neither be ignored nor circumvented and the only way for the Church is to deal
with the crisis in the utmost sincerity without allowing itself to succumb to
it.
The source of the problem appears to lie primarily in Seventh-day Adventist
ecclesiology where a gulf exists between its interpretation of unity, and its
understanding of mission in a multicultural context. Authentic church unity
cannot consist only of an outer dimension whereby unity and mission are
cosmetically combined. It involves a deeper internal dimension, where the
striving for unity becomes a witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, while the
mission of the church simultaneously embodies the obligations to cater to the
cultural and linguistic needs of all of Christ's people. It is this essential
synthesis that has yet to take place in the Seventh-day Adventist Church,
where both these facets are to be fostered as complementary aspects of its
total vocation. It is this fusion of unity and mission which will open the way
for the Church to complete its mission, unhindered either by the polarizing
and divisive effect of religious and cultural diversity, or by any misguided
attempts to impose uniformity.
In their quest for positive resolutions for the challenges facing the Church,
its leaders must ask what it means to be "church" in the social context in
which it finds itself, what precisely is its mission in the pluralistic,
multicultural situation in which it is located and how essential is the Church
to God's mission in this country?
Judging from the nature of the dilemma that the Seventh-day Adventist Church
in South Africa still faces today, it appears that these are questions that
have not been satisfactorily answered. After assessing both the past and
present modes of the Church's operation it becomes essential for the Church
leaders to do some critical rethinking about certain facets of its existing
ecclesiology and its missionary strategies. It is just as important to
systematically abandon the organizational structures that no longer fit the
purpose and mission of the Church and to realign them with new paradigms that
will effectively cater to the spiritual, cultural and linguistic needs of all
the peoples of this country. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1999.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/8685 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Pantalone, Antonio. |
| Contributors | Kitshoff, Mike C. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_ZA |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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