CAUGHT BETWEEN PRAYER AND SKIN COLOUR
In this extract from her book ‘Power and Faith’, Pontsho Pilane describes how she left her church when its leaders pushed her to be part of their ‘colour-blind’ campaign while she was reporting on the #FeesMustFall demonstrations
‘AI started to feel like I was suffocating in the church. The notion that we must be colour-blind, and that race does not matter in the church, has made me very uncomfortable, and it has made me question myself and pray to God for guidance. I am a black woman, so I face certain challenges in this world because I am a black person
re you black, or are you a Christian? Pontsho, I am talking to you. Are you black, or are you a Christian?” I was too dumbstruck to answer. He asked the question again, but I remained silent. “I am a black Christian, Pastor Thabo.” Finally, some words. “I can’t be either — I am both.” The rest of that phone call is a blur.
I was up against a print deadline when Pastor Thabo, the youth pastor I reported to, called. I knew why he was calling, but I expected a call from the church, not him. Pastor Thabo and I were estranged. He had moved from Bloemfontein to Pretoria and Johannesburg to oversee the student structure in which I was a leader. Our relationship had soured after I told two of my church mentors about how he behaved and treated us — and me in particular. This was what I now know to be spiritual abuse.
His placement as the pastor of our Johannesburg youth group ended abruptly after I repeatedly complained about his expectations and demands on my time. Pastor Thabo expected me and another youth group leader not only to travel from Johannesburg to Pretoria every Monday to attend evening meetings, but also to pay our own transport costs. We used taxis and the Gautrain to get to those meetings, which ended late at night. On one occasion, he sent us straight back to Johannesburg because we were a few minutes late for the meeting. On another, the meeting ran late, but he refused to allow us to leave in time to catch the last train back to Johannesburg. There were no more taxis back to Johannesburg at that time of night, so we were stranded in Pretoria.
Pastor Thabo once demanded I travel to his home in Pretoria to wash his car. According to him, this was a sign of submission to his leadership. He also expected couples spending time together to leave the door of the room open as a form of accountability, and to prevent them from “going too far”. He expected me to answer his messages and emails as soon as he sent them, and to carry out whatever instruction he gave me with urgency. I suspect his removal from our youth group was because of what I had told my mentors, who then escalated the matter to other pastors.
Pastor Thabo and I had not spoken since his secondment to our youth group had been so abruptly ended, so his call took me by surprise. His words left me stunned. I was 25 years old, working at one of the most highly respected newspapers in South Africa, covering higher education and general news, and here he was calling to reprimand me for writing a column criticising my soon-tobe former church for its #Colourblind campaign in reaction to the #AfrikaansMustFall protests that erupted at former Afrikaansmedium higher education institutions such as the University of Pretoria (UP), the University of the Free State (UFS), and the Potchefstroom campus of North-West University (NWU). The February 2016 demonstrations were linked to the 2015 student #MustFall movements: #RhodesMustFall, #OpenStellenbosch, #TransformWits and, of course, #FeesMustFall.
It is because of these movements that I was able to extricate myself from my church, The Family, after dedicating the formative years of my adulthood to Jesus. At about the same time, in Bloemfontein, white rugby spectators at the University of the Free State (UFS) left the stands of Shimla Park to attack protesting black students in what a university inquiry would later call a “violent, racist and barbaric” incident.
Enter The Family’s #Colourblind campaign. Black-and-white selfies of racially diverse groups started flooding my Facebook and Twitter feeds. It was clear from the start that this was a co-ordinated campaign, and I quickly discovered that its source was my church. This was the place I called home, and it was also the centre of my spirituality and my life. Media outlets reported that the campaign had been initiated by students, but the level of co-ordination was all too familiar to me. My social media accounts were deluged with church leaders using the hashtag and declaring that God and His love do not see colour. I recently scoured the internet for those posts, but almost all of them have disappeared.
This is not a coincidence. In Pretoria, Pastor Thabo was front and centre of the prayer circles, leading the racially diverse young people before him in fervent prayer to unite the country. I told my editor I wanted to cover the campaign beyond the opinion piece that had got me into so much trouble and led to the pastor’s call. Because I was fearful of bumping into Pastor Thabo in Pretoria, I opted to cover UFS in the aftermath of the racist attack at Shimla Park.
At the UFS main gate, a second-year law student told me she was caught between protest and prayer. She was a devout Christian and a black student who believed transformation at UFS was nonexistent— a project abandoned by the authorities before it had even begun. She also found the colour-blind approach of The Family to be a silencing tactic that erased her intersecting identities, as well as those of so many others.
The crowd at the UFS gate was visibly divided — with students immersed in prayer and worship in one camp, and those singing struggle songs in the other. Between them was a sea of police. “We pray for peace and stability in the universities and the country. We are standing in the gap and asking God [to intervene] during this time,” said one intern pastor leading a prayer circle alongside another minister. He said many of the young people in the church studied at UFS, and that was why they had found it necessary to come to the campus and pray. He tried to convince me the church was not political or affiliated with any political party. They were just there, he said, to call for an end to racism and pray for South Africa’s leaders. But “the gap” the church group claimed it wanted to fill had resulted in a backlash from many students. This fuelled the pastors even more. Nothing gets evangelicals going more than those “opposed” to God’s way. It was on that day that I knew my time at The Family was coming to an end. As painful a realisation as it was, I would later understand that my departure had slowly been drawing closer over the past year. It was fear of my life without The Family and the shame of leaving that kept me in the church for so long. Though my desperation to stay greatly exceeded my will to leave, I nevertheless took to Facebook and Twitter to show I disagreed with the #Colourblind campaign.
Facebook was where most of my church leaders and fellow congregants were active, and it was there I shared multiple posts about how colour-blind logic was in fact racist and unjust. None of them commented on the posts. I knew my fellow congregants and the church leaders were seeing these posts, and I waited to be reprimanded. But the rebuke never came — until that call from Pastor Thabo. “The very basis of my activism is deeply rooted in my faith. To expect me to divorce one from the other is to ask me to be neither,” I said defiantly.
I was overcome with guilt for criticising the church and reporting on the campaign, but I also felt an overwhelming sense of relief after making my views known, because I firmly believed what I was doing and saying was the truth. I didn’t go to church the Sunday after the #Colourblind prayers. My last-ditch attempt to convince myself to stay in the church was to personally engage the senior pastor (and founder of The Family) on the matter, so I sent him an impassioned message via Facebook (edited for clarity):
Good Afternoon Senior Pastor
I write this from the deepest part of my heart, and I hope it is received in the way it is intended.
I have been a member of The Family since September 2009, after I became born again at the church’s branch in Rustenburg. In 2010, I moved to Johannesburg to study at Wits, and my friends and I travelled to The Family in Pretoria. We started
The Family home cells at Wits and got more students to become members of the church. After four years of challenges, we finally became a Wits society with an 80-student membership.
I have served in The Family for years now, and it was not until last year that I found myself unable to serve in the church anymore. The reasons behind this decision were to some extent practical, as I was a full-time student and worked three jobs to pay for my tuition. However, my reasons for quitting were also very personal. I started to feel like I was suffocating in the church.
The notion that we must be colour-blind, and that race does not matter in the church, has made me very uncomfortable, and it has made me question myself and pray to God for guidance. I am a black woman, so I face certain challenges in this world because I am a black person. Accordingly, for me to hear you say race does not matter is something I simply cannot agree with.
I was one of the leading journalists covering the #FeesMustFall protests last year. Every day I prayed God would intervene and open the eyes of people to the struggles black students face at universities. In my time as the overseer of the [campus youth group] at Wits, I counselled many students who were members of The Family or attended our home cells who were being kicked out of [student residences] and university simply because they did not have enough money for fees. These students would eventually not come back to university, and therefore to The Family, because they were not students anymore.
Last year, students who were members of The Family asked me if it was OK for them to join the #FeesMustFall protests. I refused to answer them because I didn’t want to influence their decision. These were all black students, many of whom are living the lives they are living because they are black. To say we must be colour-blind is to ask us to put aside the very real pain we have experienced at university.
Your teachings and being part of The Family have had an immeasurable influence on my life. They are things I thank God for every day. I am grateful [to] you and your wife. Pastor, I am not sending you this to tell you what you should or should not preach about. But I am sending this to you in a bid to make you understand how hurtful talking about race in that way is. Why are we not addressing the issue of race in a more open manner?
Is it possible to have a real conversation about how we as black people have reconciled ourselves with the fact that Christianity and the name of Jesus were used to promote slavery and apartheid? I wonder whether the church can openly talk about what race means in this country. Instead of dismissing the students protesting at UP and UFS, can we not talk about the fact that white and black people do not have the same standard of life in this country? I have spent many nights praying about and asking God for answers to these questions.
Colour-blindness ignores the experiences and the pain of black people. It is dismissive and does not unite us, but rather makes it easier for white people not to think about race, as compared with black people.
I could hardly believe I had sent the senior pastor that message, but it felt right. I prayed and asked God to open his spiritual ears and eyes so that he would truly receive this message and understand the damage and hurt the #Colourblind campaign and sermons were causing. I waited in hope. The senior pastor responded to my message in a matter of hours (edited for clarity):
Hello Pontsho,
Thank you for taking the time to write! I agree with you that we should stand against any form of injustice! However ... we should do this peacefully and not as black or white! Any wrong is wrong and should be confronted! To say Christianity was used to promote apartheid is correct, but the people who did it were not Christians! They distorted the teachings of Christ, which are to love your neighbour as yourself! There is a big difference between religion and Christianity! I believe black and white people must unite and address all forms of injustice, discrimination and [in]equality! We should protest and stand against injustice, but with the spirit of Christ! Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God! I welcome any suggestions that will help young people to unite, engage with and address the issues we are facing!
Much love.
The senior pastor’s response was like a sucker punch. I felt it was dismissive and failed to take into consideration what I was saying. He had weaponised evangelical Christianity by separating it from what he called “religion”, which I found dishonest — especially coming from him. In many sermons he had preached about how he had been delivered from racism and had started a multiracial church, only to receive a blacklash from conservative white Christians. For a long time, and even in this book, I referred to The Family and other multiracial megachurches as “white-led”. Though this is an accurate descriptor, the term still gnaws at me.
As I wrote this book and processed my own experiences of both the church and racial inequality in South Africa, the term “whiteled” felt increasingly inadequate, because it implies the white leadership is the only problem in these megachurches, and that if it were solved things would be fine. Nothing could be further from the truth. These Pentecostal churches don’t just have a white leader problem — they have a “whiteness” problem.
As students revolted and rejected the “invisibilisation” of racial inequity by means of the Fallist movement, white churches chose to be blind, not only to race, culture and ethnicity, but also to racial injustice and inequity. They failed to acknowledge that black people are disadvantaged simply by having been born black, and that, even if they do everything in their power to get out of poverty, they may never succeed in doing that.
✼ This is an edited extract from ‘Power and Faith: How Evangelical Churches are Quietly Shaping our Democracy’ (Tafelberg)