6 June

Dear Friends

On Wednesday, we hosted the second of two events involving the Archbishop of the Anglican Church in Southern Africa, Thabo Makgoba. The title of the lecture was “Troubled Times: Can we be surprised by hope again?”

We’ve spoken about hope quite a bit over the last few months in church, not least when we read through the letter of 1 Peter. On Wednesday, I realised again that we can never stop talking about hope. There is no limit to what we can discover by keeping it on our agenda, not to mention its social, political, spiritual, and moral importance for our time. No wonder people from so many different backgrounds came on Wednesday to listen to a religious leader speak. We need hope now, not as a nice theological concept locked up in thick books gathering dust on the shelf, but in the day-to-day struggle with the realities of our time.

That is also why I so enjoyed the archbishop’s lecture. He reminded us that finding hope is about seeing and testifying to the moving God who continuously grinds out of the hard rocks of evil the visible and tangible signs of goodness that can serve as the solid foundation of hope. Isn’t that a nice image? Grinding. Moulding. Working. We discover hope in the grind, as it were, in the messiness of evil. Hope cannot simply be an abstract expectation. It is a practice, he said. Hope looks like people working towards goodness, engaging in courageous conversations, and adopting what he calls a “theology of generosity”.

On Wednesday, we also launched the publication Voices of Hope, bringing together thirty voices of hope that might serve as inspiration in our troubled times. There will be free copies of this book available in the vestibule on Sunday. Please do not hesitate to take a copy.

If you missed the lecture, you can still find it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/o5RTX0cZgDc?si=cwp33VgOwdQLx9Kr.

Marius Louw