You might think this is an odd introduction. Is this some kind of weak metaphor for what mission looks like in the UK? Is it a hilarious anecdote so that this piece doesn’t start off with either a humble brag about being in South Africa last week or a heavy handed intro about poverty and mission? I’d say it’s 50/50.
So yes, last week 68 other youth workers and teenagers and I went to a township in South Africa to build some houses. I’d never built a house before. Obviously. It’s about as far removed from youth work as one could imagine. There’s something immensely satisfying handing over an actual house to another person who previously lived in a shack made out of corrugated iron.
But it wasn’t the poverty that struck me in South Africa. It wasn’t the grateful, loving nature of those in the community. It wasn’t even their odd positioning of recreational facilities. What struck me was just how divided the nation still is. Apartheid is over, black people are, legally, equal with their white counterparts, but it remains a divided country. In the township we worked in we didn’t see another white face for the six days we were there. In the white town, Delmas, where we went to church on the day before work began, we barely saw anyone who wasn’t white. These two communities are a few miles apart. During the Sunday service the pastor alluded to the fact that many of the congregation would have never entered the township before, and would have no plans to ever do so. Throughout our week there white people were telling us of the challenge and provocation that our trip was providing while black people thanked us for showing them that white people do care.
It was pretty comfortable up on my high horse, scoffing at those white Afrikaans who wouldn’t dare travel a few miles down the road.
But then I checked myself. To be honest, going to South Africa to tell kids about Jesus and build houses was, dare I say it, easy. Looking after some teenagers, working hard and bonding with a new group of people landed slap bang in the middle of my extrovert comfort zone. But if I’d been asked to go and do the same on the local council estate… I certainly think I’d have had a tougher group convincing my group of middle class teenagers to join me, and perhaps I wouldn’t have offered it in the first place. Our segregation might not be as obvious as it was in Delmas but it still exists. Sometimes mission is easier on the other side of the world than on the other side of the street. Why is this? Is there something relevant in Jesus’ claim that a prophet is rejected in their home town? Or do we need to go to the other side of the world to let go of our prejudices and preconceptions that colour our everyday lives?
I don’t know what this means. Perhaps I need to move out of my comfort zone on a more local basis. Perhaps we need to push to our young people to do so. Perhaps the Church is being called to the dangerous, shocking side of the football pitch, being called to ignore the possible pain to open up the fullness of the life and mission we’re called to (let it never be said I can’t carry a weak metaphor across an entire blog post). As I say, I don’t know. But I do know that Jesus doesn’t put us in local communities so we can ignore them and swan off to a different continent to fill our mission quota, so I probably ought to do something about that.
Jamie Cutteridge is Youthwork's Journalist
