Rev Martin Young: Pioneer of gay rights who fell foul of church leaders
MARTIN “Chunky” Young, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 61, was a hugely popular Presbyterian minister who made the headlines last year when he and a fellow minister were charged with misconduct and violating church doctrine for marrying gay couples.
The charges against Young and theology professor Hansie Wolmarans, his assistant at St Columba’s Presbyterian Church in Parkview, Johannesburg, were dismissed after a disciplinary hearing.
It came just weeks after the Dutch Reformed Church approved same-sex unions, and the irony didn’t escape them.
Young said he found it “amazing that the Dutch Reformed Church, which was the driving force behind the ideology of apartheid, has opened its doors to gay marriages and the rest of us are playing catch-up”.
His willingness to marry gay couples almost certainly cost him the church’s top job in 2014, after he was nominated to be moderator of its general assembly.
Four of his predecessors at St Columba’s, the country’s largest and wealthiest Presbyterian congregation, had been moderators and there was broad agreement that he was eminently qualified to follow them.
He did very well in the first round of voting. But before the second round, in what appeared to be an orchestrated backlash, several ministers took the floor to condemn his “heretical” stance on gay marriage.
He lost the vote and was deeply upset, not only by the attacks but because he badly wanted the post.
Although the charges against him were dropped, he found the experience highly stressful, not least because he suspected, rightly, that his ordeal wasn’t over.
Hours before he collapsed from a brain aneurysm while conducting a wedding last Saturday, he heard that the Presbytery of the Western Cape had passed a resolution to ask the general assembly to investigate a charge of heresy against him.
Young was born in Johannesburg on May 21 1954. After matriculating at Florida High School he studied teaching at the Johannesburg College of Education. He taught at Bryandale Primary School in Sandton for three years before studying for the ministry at Rhodes University.
He was ordained at St Michael’s Presbyterian Church in Springs on the East Rand and was minister there for eight years. He joined St Columba as an assistant minister 22 years ago and in 2006 became the minister.
His was a ministry of inclusion. He had a special place in his heart for people on the margins of society, who were excluded or discriminated against. He never turned down an appeal for help. It was said his house was like a minibus taxi — it always had room for one more.
He was head of the Southern African Presbyterian Church’s schools committee and played an active role in the restoration of the derelict Pholela shool in Himeville, in KwaZulu-Natal, and built a teachers’ training college next to it.
He was involved in the building and welfare of eight schools the church runs in Zimbabwe. He met with the government and created a trust for the schools. He ensured teachers’ salaries were paid, had boreholes sunk and classrooms and dorms renovated.
He completed a PhD in trauma counselling at Princeton Theological Seminary in the US in 2010, and his services were much in demand by victims of crime, among others.
Young had no time for comforting euphemisms when it came to death and dying. Telling relatives of the recently deceased that they’d gone to “a better place” or that it was part of “God’s plan” was not on his playlist.
He practised an energetic religion of relevance and reaching out and putting one’s neck on the line if need be. He once told his parishioners in church why he refused to pay e-tolls.
His last Facebook post was a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who fought Nazism and was executed: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil . . . not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
In his last letter to parishioners he said how “truly delighted” he was by the Constitutional Court judgment on President Jacob Zuma and Nkandla.
His first wife died in 2011. He remarried and is survived by his second wife, Elvina, and two sons. — Chris Barron
His house was like a minibus taxi — it always had room for one more