GENERAL ARTICLES

 

Three little movements in modern "mission" Part I - Incarnation, disclosure, witness, and reconciliation in the SCA cross-cultural missions programme: 1979-1985

 

 

Allen James Goddard

Stellenbosch University. thereisanewcreation@gmail.com

 

 

---

ABSTRACT

René Padilla's invitation to evangelicals worldwide, to take up integral mission, in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and the simultaneous South African invitation to embrace "transforming mission" in cross-cultural ministries closely associated with the work of David Bosch and Klippies Kritzinger, were clarion calls to the global church, to turn back to the source of "mission," which is Jesus, forming in his followers a new eschatological identity that empowers us to be witnesses who embody Christ's good news of reconciliation. Among all who took up this invitation to realize an incarnational and contextual gospel, were evangelists in South Africa's Students' Christian Association, who created the SCA Cross-Cultural Missions' Programme, or SCAMP, in 1979. This article is the first of three, which draw on a repository of memories catalogued through the discipline of oral history research; the writer's own experience of training and teaching in the SCAMP programme; long-time friendships with many SCAMP people of the 1980s; a wide range of gathered archival primary sources; and published missiology and historiography, to construct a preliminary history of SCAMP during the 1980s at the zenith of the apartheid era. The narrative will be periodized into three distinct historical sequences, each of which may offer learnings for the contemporary church in its current understandings of "mission," for a more incarnational, prophetic, and deeply empathic embodiment of Christian witness.

Keywords: witness; mission; SCAMP; modernity; cross-cultural

---

 

 

Something which is known

to have been from the beginning:

this we have heard and seen with our own eyes;

something we have touched

and have carefully watched:

the Word who is life, this we share with you.

 

Three preliminaries

Telling a history of the Students' Christian Association's short-term Cross-Cultural Missions Programme (SCAMP) of the 1980s at the height of South Africa's apartheid era, runs the risk of not seeing a contemporary elephant in the room - the long-time, ongoing burden of whiteness, before and since apartheid, in the history of Christianity.¹ That the Students' Christian Association was an enclave of white Protestants in a Christian Association that had segregated itself, since 1965, along racial lines, is a sobering historical example of whiteness and its burden.² SCA, for the most part, mirrored the historic failure of white Protestant churches in South Africa to participate in the ecumenical struggle to oppose the social injustices of apartheid.³ Thus, when constructing a history of SCAMP, it is important not to overlook the reality that SCAMP's story was dogged by the social, political and economic legacy of whiteness, and the burden whiteness laid on black South Africans,⁴ on whites themselves, and on the very landscape of South Africa, along similar lines to how whiteness has dogged modern "mission," ever since Christopher Columbus' appeal to the Doctrine of Discovery in 1492.⁵

The long history of the ideological pact between white "missionaries" and Empire, deeply calls into question the term "mission," the modern motivations for Christian "mission," and the ways in which "mission" has been theologized in the minority world, since Columbus. Expressions of "mission" that mirror, with integrity, the self-abandoning and cruciform pattern of God's revelation in both Testaments of Scripture, and in Christ, have been rare in modernity.⁶ Too often modern "mission" has failed to embody the incarnational pattern, the eschatological motive, and the deeply integrated identity that Jesus imparts to all of whom he says, "you shall be my witnesses." ⁷ However, even given SCAMP's embeddedness in this imperfect story of modern "mission," the narrative to follow will provide evidence of a counternarrative - of white evangelicals who were prepared to unlearn ideologically aligned models of "mission," to explore a more incarnational theology, to do "mission" with awareness of prophetic contextuality, and to enter the mystery of reconciling apparent binaries in human identity. Thus, in briefly constructing a history of SCAMP's pioneering decade from 1979 to 1988, it will be seen that SCAMP's practice of "cross-cultural mission" under PW Botha's apartheid regime in South Africa, resonates significantly with the contemporary need to reconceptualize "mission," and return to a more authentic understanding and practice of prophetic witness to Christ and the good news of reconciliation.

A second preliminary concerns an understanding of modernity. SCAMP's story began during the decade leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The backdrop to SCAMP's little-known expression of "mission," in a small corner of a relatively small city in the world, was that decisive decade when the idea of inexorable human progress in history, since the Enlightenment thinkers, reached a high-water mark across the world in many unprecedented economic and political experiments - like Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher's "structural adjustment," the first truly global expansion of monopoly capital; Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika, the apogee of internationalism after a century of communism; P.W. Botha's Tricameral parliament which renamed yet retained apartheid; and Yitzhak Shamir's "iron fist" version of Zionism, which led to the First Intifada in 1986. During the 1980s, as SCAMP began its work, these crass metanarratives and their associated social and economic systems of hegemony showed their first signs of overreach, not least in their ecological unsustainability, and took new faltering trajectories towards disintegration. In this essay therefore, modernity refers to this period of hubris blind to its own entropy, that began with revolutionary wars and continues in co-dependency with industrialized warfare into the present - pointing the world towards ecological, social and political catastrophe.⁸

A third preliminary concerns eschatological identity - a way of life characterized by hope in God's ultimate transposition of history into the eternal continuities of the eschaton, and by living out the good news of reconciliation in the present. This identity is shaped by the behaviour of God's ekklesia, God's community of "covenanted selves," called apart to be bound intimately to God and to one another through an eternal promise, through Christ's blood, and through baptismal water.⁹ This identity is essentially a way of together becoming God's "new creation," created and born in the present through answering the call to follow Christ, but only completed in and after faithful separation from the Empires of war and domination, until the terminus of history, through all that is still to come. This identity, founded and sustained through the peace initiated by Christ, is a source of endless hope and possibility for the world, showing that there is a way of becoming, of together working out, what it means to be God's people, the Holy Spirit's saints or "spirit-ones," and Jesus' witnesses.¹⁰

 

SCAMP as turning point from "Mission" to the source of Christian "witness"

The Students' Christian Association's short-term Missions' Programme (SCAMP) comprised a training and immersion experience in cross-cultural "mission," for students and graduates initially from SCA's Transvaal tertiary institutions after November 1979. The first decade of SCAMP can be periodized into three distinct historical sequences.¹¹ A first pioneering phase to establish SCAMP unfolded from January 1980 up to the tragic death of SCAMP's first Director, Trevor Gow, in April 1985. As will be demonstrated below, Gow's legacy in the SCAMP training would be to foreground Jesus' incarnation, as a historical-theological-missiological model, as much as the living Christ offers present-day resources for ongoing transformation in the doing of "mission."

Part II of this series of essays will present a second pioneering phase in SCAMP, from May of 1985, in the wake of Trevor Gow's suicide, to December 1988, which introduced a more contextual exploration of incarnational mission, as SCAMP's second Director, Sally Welch, and her team, "progressed" the training curriculum and the placement model for SCAMP delegates, so that SCAMP would rigorously explore racial reconciliation at the heart of witness to the living, peace-making Christ.¹²Welch's legacy was to help delegates rediscover "mission" through more rigorous and reflective engagement with Scripture and the realities of the South African crimes against humanity under apartheid, and with robust self and interpersonal disclosure of the costs of a discipleship of true witness. The result, in the second half of the 1980s, was a small, richly integrated, and prophetically subversive expression of integral, "transforming mission," that was uniquely South African in its embodiment of Jesus' call to reconciliation.

A third, more hidden historical sequence in SCAMP's pioneering history, to be presented in Part III of this series, may be recognised in the year leading up to and out of Trevor Gow's suicide in April 1985. This lesser-known story unfolded in Gow's torrid search for acceptance of his homosexuality, and in his unrealized desire to integrate, with faithful integrity, a truly incarnational Christian identity. The tragic result was a missed opportunity in evangelical "mission," where followers of Christ may have given radical expression to Jesus' own empathic humanity in sacrificial love - the kernel of incarnational solidarity at the heart of Jesus' good news of reconciliation.

Each of these three historical sequences in the first decade of SCAMP are worthy of study and reflection, for a richer understanding of the incarnational, the prophetic, and the essentially human dimensions of "mission," which is really witness to the living, reconciling Jesus. Understanding these three movements in the history of SCAMP's first decade, provides a narrative resource for disciples today, who are called to corporately embody Jesus' eschatological identity, as bearers of news that restores a broken world to a loving God. Towards this purpose then, I will undertake a short reconstruction of a history of SCAMP in three separate essays, one focusing on each of these three periods of SCAMP's genesis through the 1980s.

What follows here, is an introduction to SCAMP's earliest history and first curriculum, in the period between 1979 and April 1985 - SCAMP's pioneering years under the leadership of Trevor Gow. My hope in presenting Part I here, and Parts II and III in essays to follow, is that reconstructing and narrating these three periods of integral and transforming mission in SCAMP, as three "little movements in modern mission," may serve contemporary Christians to let go of too water-tight and too tightly-held, late-modern paradigms, creeds, or formally adopted statements of "mission," in order to return to faithfully doing discipleship in prophetic witness to Jesus Christ, in a faithful, radical and costly becoming - that is, to simply be Jesus' witnesses, together, corporately embodying the incarnational, prophetic and essentially human character of God's self-sacrificing, reconciling love.

 

Integral and transforming mission at the origins of SCAMP

The first cohort of SCA students who trained and served on "short-term mission placements" "went on SCAMP" in 1980. So, SCAMP commenced immediately after the December 1979 South African Christian Leadership Assembly, a milestone for the ecumenical movement in South Africa during the 1970s. SACLA in December 1979 marked the end of two decades in which white evangelical churches in South Africa had resisted joining the ecumenical church struggle in South Africa to defy the apartheid regime's state theology. Prominent white evangelical leaders like Nico Smith, Bill Houston and Michael Cassidy had been progressively exposed to a "new evangelicalism" during the 1970s, with a transforming understanding of "mission," at the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne, in July 1974, and again at the Pan African Christian Leadership Assembly in Nairobi, in December 1976.¹³ Presenters at Lausanne and at PACLA included René Padilla, Samuel Escobar and Orlando Costas,¹⁴who, since 1959, had increasingly distanced themselves from the "primacy of evangelism" missiology taught by evangelicals at Fuller Seminary in the United States, and now they practised, taught and published a more politically contextual reading of the Bible and theology, even before the first Liberation theologians were published.¹⁵ African theologians and Anglican Bishops, Festo Kivengere of Uganda and T.B. Dankwa of Nigeria, also presented at PACLA; and conversations with them were especially formative for Bill Houston of SCA, whose contact with African intellectuals had up until then been very limited.¹⁶

PACLA in 1976 was to have direct consequences for the beginnings of SCAMP. It was at PACLA that Houston first encountered David Bosch, whose personal testimony was one of only two plenary presentations at the conference to receive a standing ovation.¹⁷ Soon after PACLA, Houston invited Bosch to speak on the meaning of the Church in SCA. Bosch took up the invitation in 1977 to expound the topic of God's Alternative Society at the SCA National Students' Conference that July.¹⁸ In 1978, Houston enrolled for a missiology course with Bosch at UNISA, which encouraged Houston to pursue new possibilities for engaging with students in SCA more contextually to do mission. Joining Houston on this journey were Beverley Haddad, Lynn Pedersen and Steve Truscott on the SCA staff team in Johannesburg, who facilitated the first of five annual "Vac Missions" with undergraduate students to visit Faure and Rita Louw, who were Dutch Reformed Church missionaries, pastoring the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa congregation in Tshilidzini, Venda.¹⁹ These "mission weeks" were highly immersive for students, including hands-on help in local building projects, site visits to hospitals and pre-schools, community development projects, and searching discussions with the Louws in the evenings. Wide-ranging reflection on the challenge of living Christ's good news in the cruel day-to-day context of the apartheid regime's "Homelands" policy, opened new horizons for everyone involved.²⁰

PACLA in 1976 was also Houston's second opportunity to engage with Padilla and Escobar, on the strength of which Houston invited Padilla to visit SCA for a month in 1978, to present Bible expositions at national and regional student and graduate events, on Knowing God and Making Him [sic] Known, and Contextualization of the Gospel. Padilla's consequential presentations to students and graduates of SCA throughout South Africa in 1978, challenged a post-1976, politically aware generation of white students, as well as the more sceptical and reactionary gate-keeper generation of SCA, to live more intentionally into their eschatological identity as witnesses to Christ's good news, by embracing that life-transforming conversation with Jesus that takes place in-between the sacred text and its different contexts of the ancient world, and, our socio-political context in the now.²¹ These South African conversations with Padilla about the heart of Christian witness as a contextual, existential, prophetically embodied engagement, with both Scripture and current context, were crucial in the genesis of Padilla's later popularized term, "integral mission."²²

During the social conflagration that engulfed South Africa after B. J. Vorster's state-sponsored suppression of Black Consciousness at the 1976 Uprising, the banning of the PAC, and the murder of Steve Biko, a strongly prophetic and contextual witness to Christ's good news was forged in the ecumenical churches, by leaders like Manas Buthelezi, Desmond Tutu, Allan Boesak and Beyers Naudé, who in turn, inspired a deepening prophetic integrity in Christian witness,²³ in the academy, through the work of David Bosch, Albert Geyser, John de Gruchy and Klippies Kritzinger; in churches, through people like Nico Smith, Peter Storey and Rob Robertson; and in rural health and development, by community activists like Faure and Rita Louw, Peter Kerchhoff and Hugh Philpot. These disciples and their spouses bore a sacrificial witness to the good news, which questioned traditional assumptions about "mission," and bore fruit in the form of uniquely South African contextual expressions of integral, transforming "mission" - a prophetic witness to the Christ of peace and reconciliation.²⁴

At the height of the state repression and social upheaval in South Africa after June 1976, the black students in SCA's partner movement, the Students' Christian Movement, wrote The SCM Declaration - a South African text that bears all the marks of a liberation and contextual theology of radical witness to the gospel of reconciliation, and remarkably similar to contemporaneous writings of Latin American evangelicals like Padilla, Escobar and Costas.²⁵ The SCM Cyara Declaration anticipated the content of Padilla's focus on contextuality when he visited South Africa in 1978, but sadly, all too few whites in SCA seriously engaged with the Declaration, and it was quashed by the SCA Council for more than five years, before being edited and endorsed.²⁶ The burden of whiteness was yet again hindering reconciliation, racial unity, and a truly contextual appropriation of the good news for true witness in SCA and in South Africa.

Despite SCA's obvious flaws, the discussion thus far shows that between Lausanne in 1974 and January 1980, when the first SCAMP intake of students to be trained for short-term mission placements occurred, SCA had undertaken a serious amount of new thinking about witness to the good news, in context-transforming ways of doing "mission," and there was excitement and real learning among SCA staff and students to identify and participate in contextual witness. A new generation of white staff in SCA like Beverley Haddad, Steve Truscott, Sally Welch, Keith Matthee, Claire Nye and Bruce Moles, and new student leaders like Wilma Jakobsen, Rory Prest, Martin Oosthuizen, Richard Steele, Stephen Granger, Ian Couper, Aidy Pattersen and Mark Swilling, wanted to live in South Africa's context of spiralling injustice, with prophetic integrity.²⁷ In spite of pushback from SCA's conservative Council members, the openness by many in SCA staff and many students, to question previous assumptions about "mission," and to respond with prophetic integrity to South Africa's apartheid context, encouraged Houston to gather a team of leaders to pioneer a new, shortterm cross-cultural missions programme, training and sending students and graduates in an immersive short-term "mission" experience.

 

Incarnation as pattern and present resource 1979 to April 1985

SCA's plans for formalizing a training curriculum and pilot placement programme in short-term "mission," was first concretely envisioned during the René Padilla SCA national students' conference at Cyara in Hekpoort, July 1978, when Larry Bell, a graduate from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) in Philadelphia, visited the conference with his colleague, Sue Markley, to meet SCA leaders.²⁸ Bell had first-hand experience of IVCF's short-term Students in Mission (STIM) programme and met with Houston, and SCA National Administrator, Trevor Gow, for wide-ranging conversations about possibilities for pioneering a similar short-term student "mission" initiative in SCA. Bell was relocating to work with Scripture Union in Johannesburg. Houston invited Bell to serve on a volunteer leadership team under the leadership of Gow to pioneer the first SCAMP training year in 1980.²⁹ Gow also consulted more than once with Kritzinger at UNISA, and Gerrie Lubbe, a Dutch Reformed minister in Lenasia, about the design of the SCAMP training.³⁰ A key "impulse" in the SCAMP goal, to send students outside of South Africa and thereby counteract the isolation of white South Africans by the Anti-Apartheid Movement's cultural boycott, came from Bill Houston.³¹ The global reach of SCAMP's student placements, as will be shown below, would become a strength of the programme, but it would also perpetuate the burden of whiteness in "mission," by polarizing white and black students and staff in SCA and SCM, with divisive consequences.

The annual training cycle in SCAMP began each year with a church-based and word-of-mouth "search" for prospective SCAMP trainees or delegates, a search that included SCA's presentation of a general interest "Global Missions Weekend" in late February each year, whose theme was "The Whole Gospel to the Whole World."³² Prospective delegates were identified and selected after a rigorous application process. The annual SCAMP training delegation comprised third-year students and graduates of SCA, initially from only the Transvaal province, and ultimately, a six-member leadership team.³³ SCA's partnership in SCAMP with Diamond Atong of SCM and Caesar Molebatsi of Youth Alive in Soweto, provided for mature students or graduates from Youth Alive to also participate as delegates.³⁴

The training curriculum was designed to be holistic, so that students would engage in theology and "mission" praxis within their discipleship, as a seamless whole. The period of training for SCAMP delegates comprised four residential training weekends, originally at the Cyara campsite in Hekpoort, near Magaliesberg, scheduled evenly through the academic year. The four training weekends were followed by the SCAMP delegates' short-term placements to local or overseas mission agencies for a minimum of two or three months, or a maximum of one year, ideally starting each November so that undergraduates could complete their travels before February of the new academic year. SCAMP delegates returning from placements were required to attend a final Evaluation Weekend at Cyara in early March of the new semester following their placements. Delegates were also expected to demonstrate renewed commitment to their local churches around Johannesburg, Soweto and Pretoria, after their return from their placements.³⁵ Throughout the training and placement experience, delegates were given opportunities to formally reflect on their progress and learnings with members of the SCAMP leadership team.³⁶ Delegates were responsible for raising a financial target determined by the cost of travel to their service destination, the duration of their placement, and sustenance costs required to support their time away. The timeframes and the intensity of the residential training, the placements, and the formal evaluation on SCAMP, required a high level of maturity and responsibility among SCAMP delegates, and volunteer leaders alike.

Each of the four training weekends was carefully designed to present an integrated curriculum on one theme per weekend, combining individual, small-group, and plenary learning experiences. Learning activities included ice-breaker discussions, cross-cultural meals, solo manuscript "quiet times," inductive small group Bible searches and discussions, engagement with visiting "missionaries" or theologians, individual and group engagement with written case studies, and whole-group gestalt-simulation games.³⁷ Experiential discovery with regularly scheduled times for debriefing and integration was foregrounded in the training, so that delegates could engage and learn at their own pace and level of commitment.

The themes, objectives and key learning activities for each weekend are immediately apparent if the sequence of the activities scheduled for each training weekend is simply listed chronologically. The following reconstruction of such a list of the "timetabled" activities of the 1983 and 1984 SCAMP training weekends, in their original sequence, provides a clear window into the holistic spirituality that imbued the training design of SCAMP.³⁸ What follows then, is the sequence of activities in the SCAMP training with some brief explanations in footnotes. The names of activities or quotations from the original documents are italicized as follows, as they appear in Trevor Gow's original Leaders' Notes, delegates' roneostatted handouts, or, on the sheets announcing the Weekend Timetable:

Weekend I (Late March) Biblical basis of mission

Objective: Exploring the Bible's theology of mission. Receiving training and support to prepare "support structures" for a short-term placement later in the year.

Key learning experiences:

Friday evening after-supper icebreaker: Mission Synectic;³⁹ Case study: A Contemporary Discovery of Stone Age People; Saturday morning quiet time: Jeremiah. 1:1-12 - a solo manuscript method Bible study before breakfast on the call of Jeremiah, followed after breakfast by short plenary discussion of learnings from the solo time;⁴⁰ Saturday morning guided Bible exploration: Old Testament Biblical Basis - Genesis to Abraham, the Psalms and Prophets, Mission in the Gospels - the Kingdom, Jesus and Peter; Saturday afternoon case study: City of Pésing; Saturday evening: A themed Cross-Cultural Meal, ⁴¹ followed by Nuts and Bolts, an after-supper workshop on the practicalities of SCAMP: How to Give a Testimony, Building a Personal Support Team, Guidelines for SCAMP Fundraising; Assignments Arising out of Weekend I;⁴² Sunday morning manuscript quiet time (QT): The Valley of Dry Bones - Ezekiel 37:1-10; Sunday morning Bible exploration: Paul the Missionary; Sunday 45 minute Worship gathering.⁴³ After lunch: a final anonymous questionnaire: Evaluation - Training Weekend I, filled in to give feedback to the leadership team.

Weekend II (May) trust relationships

Objective: Exploring the centrality of trust in relationships in every aspect of "mission." Receiving training in conflict resolution and fund raising.

Key learning experiences: Friday icebreaker: Trust Learning Exercises; Evening workshop: The Prior Question of Trust - Roger's Dilemma; Saturday morning QT: Genesis 12:1-20: Call of Abraham; Morning guided Bible discussion: Basic Human Personality Needs;⁴⁴ Late morning workshop: Conflict: Making Peace When Christians Disagree; Saturday afternoon case study: Communication: Who Calls the Tune? Late Saturday afternoon: plenary simulation game: Five Square Exercise;⁴⁵ Saturday evening Cross-Cultural Meal; Evening workshop: Nuts and Bolts: training in time management, fund raising and how to administer the SCAMP Pledge Form; Assignments Arising out of Training Weekend II; Sunday morning QT: Exodus 4:1-17: Call of Moses; Morning guided Bible discussion: As the Father Sent me so Send I you and The Great Commissions; Worship, Evaluation Training Weekend II.⁴⁶

Weekend III (July) Culture and world religions

Objective: Exploring relations between culture, worldview, religion, and Christian faith. Receiving training in practical preparations for short-term placements.

Key learning experiences: Friday evening icebreaker: Wire Form You;⁴⁷Workshop: Mission Strategy;⁴⁸ Saturday morning QT: Acts 10: God has no Favourites - Peter in the house of Cornelius;⁴⁹ Late morning workshop:

Worldviews;⁵⁰ Afternoon Case Study: Islam or African Traditional Religions;⁵¹ Cross-Cultural Meal; Evening Nuts and Bolts: Delegates' Goals and Expectations form for placements and Hosts' form detailing job description, living arrangement and expectations; passport, visa and final travel administration; fund raising records;⁵² Sunday Morning QT: 1 Kings 17: Elijah at Zarepath; Sunday morning Guided Bible discussion: Incarnational Mission;⁵³ Worship; Evaluation of Training Weekend III.

Weekend IV (Sept) Culture shock and coping strategies

Objective: Exploring the impact of culture shock and coping strategies. Final practical assistance for personal readiness to depart on placements.

Key learning experiences: Friday Evening Workshop: Bafa - A Cross Cultural Simulation: introducing symptoms and stages of culture shock;⁵⁴Small Group Reflection.⁵⁵ Saturday morning QT: Luke 10:1-17: The sending of the seventy two; Morning case studies in culture shock: The Dyaks of Borneo/The Yall and the Hawaiians; Late morning workshop: The Johari Window;⁵⁶ Afternoon culture shock simulation game/debriefing/training on coping strategies;⁵⁷ Saturday evening: Cross-cultural meal; Nuts and Bolts: Departure Procedures, Air tickets, travel documents, travellers' cheques, Financial Record form, Q&A; Sunday morning QT: Joshua 1:1-1: Call of Joshua; Sunday morning guided discussion: Field Evaluation of a Service Worker; Worship; Evaluation of Training Weekend IV.

Every Friday evening, on arrival at Cyara for training weekends, delegates routinely walked down the 1km dust road to the gate of Cyara and back, just before supper, to begin casual conversation before the formal programme began. Following the first meal there was usually an icebreaker-exercise, followed by a short solo-time but convened in plenary in the meeting room, where each delegate filled in a questionnaire to prompt reflection about their personal preparedness for the coming weekend. This was followed by small breakaway groups for open-ended discussion prompted by the questionnaire, and a brief time of small group prayer. Membership of each group remained the same throughout the year of training, which meant that the level of personal disclosure and transparency quickly deepened, along with trust and confidentiality. To illustrate the mature level of small group disclosure that imbued the training, the questions of this Friday evening questionnaire for Training Weekend II can be cited in full: 1. In what ways has God seemed especially real to you since the last SCAMP orientation weekend? 2. In what ways has God seemed distant or remote? 3. For what would you most value prayer right now? In simple yet probing questions, small groups of delegates and leaders began each training weekend, with an invitation to mutual self-disclosure and to mutually affirm everyone's quintessential humanness in all the challenges of the SCAMP journey.

Each new day of training, on the Saturdays and Sundays of training weekends, began with a formal devotional hour of silence, as delegates and leaders prayed solo, through double-spaced typed "manuscript" of a Scripture passage, linked thematically to topics to be engaged later in the day's curriculum. A pre-breakfast "Walkies" to the Cyara gate, again kicked off the social and conversational part of each new day. After breakfast, a short discussion in plenary, reviewed the devotional time, the focus being not on "what" was learned personally, but on "how" the devotional hour was experienced more generally. At the end of each training or learning exercise in the sequence of the daily programme, similar times for discussion were scheduled in plenary, or, in the small breakaway groups. Delegates were encouraged to verbalize, at the level they chose, what they were learning, or how the training was unfolding for them. A stimulating mix of formal presentation, small group investigation, simulation games, formal cross-cultural mealtimes, and read-and-report back case study, scaffolded the content of each training day and training weekend, with the pivotal balance of two hours of rest, each Saturday, after lunch.

If one were to name the "hidden curriculum" suffusing the formal programme of the SCAMP training weekends, it would necessarily be the incarnational pattern and continuing incarnational presence of the living, human Christ, gently walking alongside each student, graduate, and facilitator, and calling all together, to be transformed in the joys and costs of becoming a community of witnesses. And this journey of becoming, disciples of the incarnate Christ, together, in the ministry of reconciliation, was the heartbeat of the daily programme, the quarterly training weekends, and was anticipated in the short-term placements of SCAMP. The reality of the risen, incarnate, interceding Christ, in the present, was equally sought out, in all aspects of the SCAMP training cycle between 1980 and 1985. This spirituality of SCAMP, grounded in the cruciform pattern of Jesus' incarnation, and encouraging an experience of real trust in the present reality of Jesus' incarnate presence now, speaks to the heart of witness in discipleship, a spirituality that has too often been missing in modern "mission" generally, and in "mission trips" and "mission outreach," particularly.

 

Remembering SCAMP's invitation to disclosure, transformation, and reconciliation

In its first period of development, from 1980 to 1985, SCAMP trained and sent thirty-four student and graduate delegates, from a wide range of academic disciplines in Transvaal tertiary institutions, into short-term placements all around the world.⁵⁸ Placements with evangelical "mission" agencies ranged widely from work with Scripture Union in Sydney, Australia, Durban and Bolivia, to a computer job in African Inland Mission in Nairobi, Kenya and a variety of ministry positions in the Hellenic Missionary Union in Greece, the Overseas Missionary Fellowship in Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and China, and student ministry, in the evangelical student movements of IFES in Zambia, Texas, Brazil, Hawaii, Italy, France and Scotland.

People who trained and who led on SCAMP between 1980 and 1985, keenly recall the experiential learning that anchored and contextualized the theology and missiology taught on SCAMP's training weekends, and the transformation that occurred, which prepared delegates for yet more formative experiences in their short-term "mission" placements. Marie-Louise Ström, who trained in 1983 to serve in 1984 with Groupes Bibliques Universitaires at the Sorbonne in Paris, recalls the tacit learning that took place during her SCAMP training, which then led to deeper transformation:

The training was outstanding. I remember just admiring Trevor so much in the way he had designed it. There are things to this day that I remember from the training that equipped and trained me. The broken squares game. The experiential nature of the training, that Trevor used simulation so effectively. [...] It's the best kind of curriculum design where your programme itself is the curriculum. The experience itself is the major aspect of the learning.

It impacted me immensely. Especially the groupwork - which means not just that you were discussing intellectually in a group, but that you were learning to work in a group. Learning to listen to people with different points of view; learning to wrestle through things together. Learning that there was a plurality of positions; that we all co-exist with those positions in God's church.⁵⁹

Rod and Rowena Barnett, who trained in 1981 and served 10 months with IFES' Aliança Bíblica Universitária do Brasil in São Paulo State in 1982, recall how they so integrated their learning of Brazilian language and culture, that they were able to draw on this newfound experience to enliven and contextualize learning and teaching when they joined the SCAMP volunteer leadership team, in 1983:

Larry and Trevor spoke to us and suggested that we join the team. One of the early things that happened, was that we were asked to do the cross-cultural experience for the next group of training on the programme - around a meal where we served Brazilian food, and also stuck to the Brazilian rules of hospitality, which we had learnt the hard way. (If you don't leave something on your plate, the hostess refills it with a second or third or fourth helping ...)⁶⁰

Sue Stimson trained in 1983 and worked with Scripture Union in Durban on her SCAMP placement in 1984. She most recalls her own transformation in the steady growth in disclosure which characterized the small groups:

After our individual times of reflection, we returned to share insights with the group. Those were profound meetings and had a deep impact. The way in which some of the stories of vulnerability by people who shared in the group, encouraged them to be themselves, was unique. It was an eye opener. It's easier in a way just to be churched, but this was something that was more intimate. It was good to be digging into Scripture like that .⁶¹

Janet Blanckensee trained in 1984 to work with OMF in Japan, and recalls how the incarnational model of "mission" she discovered in SCAMP, transformed her understanding of Christian witness, as good news lived out "on the road," in the everyday rhythms and relationships of life:

The whole theology behind mission was important - which is getting alongside, supporting, and venturing the gospel, while you are walking alongside [...]The training was as important as the SCAMP placement. There were so many incredible lessons in changing the way you think, changing the way you see, changing the way you relate to people.⁶²

This relational, formational, incarnational pulse at the heart of the SCAMP training, extended into life-transforming lessons for delegates as they embarked on short-term placements. Rowena Barnett's pivotal memory of spending a few days with a Jesuit Sister, living in a base community in the heart of one of São Paulo's favelas, while her husband, Rod, stayed with a Jesuit priest, laying sewage pipes in the same community, shows how the SCAMP training grounded delegates in a readiness to reconcile deep, upending, and discomforting transformation, in the day-to-day rhythms of their SCAMP placements:

The men would be laying the pipes and I would be in the house with the women, preparing the lunch. In the evening we spoke with the Jesuit man, talking about poverty, social justice, and the church. I was seeing Christianity in action. It was pivotal for me, because being an evangelical I was raised to see Catholicism at worst, as a completely different religion, and at best as not a good religion, because they weren't "saved."

One could almost see Christ working in this man because his hands were dirty and he was smelling of poo. That was a big event. The whole year was very valuable in learning to understand cultural difference and culture shock - to learn that other cultures are legitimate. What I saw in the evangelical church in Brazil was deeply disappointing - people who were the opposite of the priest in the favela. There was a lot of talk about heaven and some sectors going to hell. The whole polarity. And yet their actions said nothing about a loving God. It was quite interesting being a foreigner looking into the church and seeing the faults. And what happened was that when I went back to Rosebank Union, I could still see that, and my dissatisfaction grew.⁶³

Gentle release from the uniquely South African baggage of racial prejudice, became a transforming moment on his SCAMP placement for Brian Roodnick, who worked with Aida Lum and Intervarsity Fellowship, at the University of Honolulu, in 1984:

One night while playing [basketball] I noticed that I was the only white person there. Then I remembered that I had wanted to explore my own potential racism, and realised that that moment on the basketball court, I was relating to these people just as people and not as people of various races. This was a wonderful experience for me to discover that I could be blind to race and only see people.⁶⁴

My SCAMP placement took place in the summer holidays of 1983 and 1984, facilitating holiday clubs and children's camps in La Paz, at Lake Titicaca, and in Las Yungas, in the Bolivian Andes, with the Bolivian national Scripture Union team led by Dr Pauline Hoggarth. Working in Bolivia with orphaned children and adolescents from a local orphanage and local primary and secondary schools, brought my life journey to a singularly memorable milestone.

Being outside of South Africa as a young adult for the first time, cut me loose from the dragnet of guilt and spiritual oppression that benefitting from life under the apartheid regime as a privileged white South African, entailed. The hard work of preparing, shopping for, and presenting 7 weeklong children's events in nine weeks during the first summer, and much the same during the second; learning Spanish; living with a Bolivian family; travelling into the vast expanse of the Andean Altiplano; and Hoggarth's magnanimous collegiality to enlist and mentor me in learning new contextual hermeneutical skills, co-writing Bible engagement materials for Bolivian children and adolescents, more than widened my life's horizon.⁶⁵

My little successes and failures during those Bolivian summers, returned me reflectively to so many lessons in the SCAMP training: witness to the world as my willingness (and sometimes unwillingness) to be moulded in my deepest self, through Christ, through the good news and through the people to whom I had been sent; the example of the Apostle Peter's upending discovery of this self-same eschatological identity - being set free from ethnic pride, cultural bias and racial prejudice; and the centrality of trust for transforming situations of conflict into a peace breathed by Christ, that restores for the long-haul. The Apostle's painful existential journey now appeared no different than my own, and my SCAMP training to recognise culture shock, commit to self-disclosure, and return to the Prior Question of Trust in relationships, helped me to take little steps out of a largely cerebral ascription to faith in Christ, into the much bigger, existential reality of integral discipleship - what Bosch had called, "A Spirituality of the Road."

The experience of unconditional acceptance by new Bolivian colleagues and the delight of friendship with Hoggarth, shaped by honest mutual self-disclosure,⁶⁶ helped me to live more authentically into Christ and the good news. Searching conversations and roust debates with Hoggarth about the politics of following Jesus under dictatorial military regimes, in Bolivia under Hugo Banzer, and South Africa under P.W. Botha's militant apartheid apparatus, were formative for my growing young adult geopolitical awareness. Through all the mix of learnings during my time in Latin America, it was in Bolivia, at the age of 20 and 21, that I took new little steps towards greater responsibility to own the effects of trauma in my past and my need for Christ to integrate and heal me. I began the adventure of engaging with Scripture contextually. And started on a new way of intentionally working through cultural differences in love, into the joy of freedom from fear and prejudice.

 

Learnings from the broken jar of "mission" in a return to witness

It is important to include in this narrative, that there were shortcomings and failures during the first period of SCAMP's development between 1979 and 1985, in case this short history is found to be more a hagiography. During the first year of SCAMP, in 1980, a significant difference of doctrinal opinion arose between three SCAMP delegates, Susan Valentine, Alistair Rendal and Susan Parnell, from the University of the Witwatersrand, and their SCA staff workers, at Wits and in the Johannesburg national office. Poor handling of this group impasse, including a poor sensitivity to gender, and no appeal to neutral mediation, escalated the matter into a conflict that resulted in a breakdown in relationships between the students and the staff.⁶⁷ In a separate development, Trevor Gow's punctilious style of leadership, together with significantly unequal expectations between Trevor and Youth Alive and SCM, about the role of consultation in the SCAMP training, and financial as well as placement decisions, led SCM and Youth Alive to withdraw their participation and their sponsorship of black students in the training, as from 1980.⁶⁸ The serious loss of this contribution from black South Africans in SCAMP, in its early stage of development, meant one more lost opportunity in white South Africa to engage more contextually and meaningfully with fellow witnesses to the good news of reconciliation, in the decade of South Africa's greatest social polarization under P.W. Botha's ruthless apartheid regime.

In a parallel vein, Rowena Barnett on the SCAMP leadership team, found herself marginalized and hampered from freely offering her gifts, as a woman:

During the training, there were defined roles. Men taught, women did the cooking and may have led the odd group discussion. ... I didn't want to play that game - gender equality had to be across the whole board. . When we . were asked to be on the leadership training team for SCAMP, I felt this was a great honour, however I still felt that it was really Rod's knowledge and understanding that was wanted (I did a lot of cooking) and that I was just tagging along. When we became pregnant in 1984, we were no longer included in the leadership team. This was not handled well. I felt that we were "ghosted" (to use a modern term). It was quite hurtful. I had a huge sense of imposter syndrome in Christian circles. I never felt that I had the knowledge to speak out. I felt very much that it was a man's world.⁶⁹

In each of these failings, what may have eventuated in SCAMP as life-bringing opportunities for witness to the reconciling love of Jesus through the good news, instead perpetuated some of the inherent flaws of modern evangelical "mission." Breakdown in communication along lines of doctrine, race, and gender. The perpetuation of the burden of whiteness in "mission." The ongoing legacy of patriarchy in "mission." As has been shown in my earlier research, these failings in SCAMP had recurred in previous divisions in SCA, along theological, racial and gender lines.

Important learnings from these moral, relational failings in SCAMP's first period of operation, may well arise from the tacit invitation that they represent. The shortcomings in this little movement of modern "mission," invite followers of Christ who would be bearers of Jesus' eschatological identity and ethics - as witnesses - to anticipate and commit ourselves to transcend conflict arising from seemingly irreconcilable differences in personality, doctrine, class, economic background, race and gender, rather than being surprized when conflicts arise, and rather than mirroring the reactionary and divisive spirit of a world that rejects Christ's message of reconciling love.

Needless to conclude, SCAMP's weaknesses were eclipsed by the programme's significantly greater strengths, as has been documented above in the format of SCAMP's experiential learning "curriculum" between 1980 and 1985, and in many SCAMP delegates' memories of it. A strong theme that emerges in all these strengths was how SCAMP's theology, spirituality, and orientation to "mission" in practice, took Christ's incarnation in history, in Scripture and in the present, as SCAMP's dynamic reference point, its model for understanding "mission," and its ongoing resource for a ministry of reconciliation.

Trevor Gow, Larry Bell, Sally Welch, and their volunteer leadership team from Johannesburg and Pretoria, including Kritzinger, the Barnetts, Ström, and Stuart Vaughan of St Luke's Anglican Church in Johannesburg, created and implemented the SCAMP programme to initiate delegates into a theology, spirituality, and exercise of "mission" as one integrated whole, in which a daily, deepening faith in the incarnate Christ was germinal. The intention in SCAMP's curriculum to integrate faith, worship, and social responsibility. seamlessly into "mission," reflects the eschatological integration that Padilla, Escobar and the Latin Americans in IFES were now calling integral mission, and which their dialogue partner in South Africa, David Bosch, was now calling "Transforming Mission."⁷⁰

As has been shown SCAMP training integrated diverse rhythms of a varied daily programme: exploring a Bible narrative, walking together before a meal, revisiting in small groups each delegate's successes or "missteps" in a simulation game, tasting new food and experimenting with new ways to eat it, or debating how and when the "cultural" and "deeply personal" dimensions of existence are essential to the good news. In everything it included, the SCAMP training nurtured a transformative understanding of "mission" in which the messengers in "mission" become vulnerable to being fundamentally changed by Christ, whom they would not only proclaim but also encounter, not just in Scripture, but also in the culture, social context and in the people to whom they are "sent." This Christ, who "plays in ten thousand places,"⁷¹ and is to be encountered at every turn along the road in the "mission" experience, was the focal point in a "mission curriculum" learnt on SCAMP. Delegates discovered and explored "mission" holistically throughout their training and service in short-term placements, as an existentially transforming embodiment of the good news of reconciliation.⁷²

The task of witnessing to the living Christ, and the good news of reconciliation, not as a "great" "commission," but as the costly daily ethical norm of cruciform submission to a crucified Christ, so as to be radically transformed by Christ, for one another, and for the world God loves unconditionally, is how SCAMP began to quietly develop its subversive little counternarrative to modern evangelical "missions." Thus, the first movement of SCAMP's short history, points back to the roots of "mission," in the corporate, cruciform identity and God-grounded rather than self-grounded way-of-being of Christ, and of the earliest witnesses, many of whom were martyrs. Such witness is what SCAMP's first period of development between 1979 and 1985 laboured to model and impart. And to the degree that Trevor Gow, his team, and the SCAMP delegates succeeded, as has been simply reconstructed here, as a first "little movement" in modern "mission," the SCA Missions Programme bore the marks of that ancient witness envisioned by Christ, embodying so much more than just a theological paradigm of modern "missions."

 

Bibliography

Bosch, D.J. 1979. A spirituality of the road. Harrisonburg, Virginia: Herald Press.         [ Links ]

________________. 1982. The Church as alternative community. Institute for Reformational Study, Study Pamphlet no. 170. Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education.

________________. 2006. Witness to the world: The Christian mission in theological perspective. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock.         [ Links ]

________________. 1991. Transforming mission: paradigm shifts in theology of mission, Maryknoll, York: Orbis Books.         [ Links ]

Brueggemann, W. 1999. The Covenanted Self: Explorations in Law and Covenant. Fortress Press. Minneapolis. Ed. Patrick D. Miller.

Chester, T. & Padilla, R.C. 2002. Integral mission and its historical development. In Justice, mercy and humility: The papers of the Micah Network international consultation on integral mission and the poor. Carlisle, UK: Waynesboro, GA.

De Gruchy, J. 2013. The contest for Reformed identity in South Africa during the church struggle against apartheid. NGTT, 54, no. 3& 4: 1-10. DOI:10.5952/54-3-4-384.         [ Links ]

Goddard, A. 2016. Invitations to prophetic integrity in the evangelical spirituality of the Students' Christian Association discipleship tradition: 1965-1979. Doctoral Dissertation. University of KwaZulu-Natal.         [ Links ]

Kirkpatrick, D. 2016. C. René Padilla and the origins of integral mission in post-war Latin America. The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 67(2):351-371. Doi:10.1017/S0022046915001670.         [ Links ]

Lamola, J. 2021. Sowing in tears: A documentary history of the church struggle against apartheid 1960 - 1990. E-Book: African Perspectives Publishing.

Kittel, G. & Friedrich, G. (eds.) 1985. Theological dictionary of the New Testament. Trans. G. Bromley. Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans.         [ Links ]

Kritzinger, J.N.J. & Saayman, W. 2011. David J. Bosch: prophetic integrity, cruciform praxis. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications.         [ Links ]

Luft, J. & Ingham, H. 1955. The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness. Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development. Los Angeles: University of California.         [ Links ]

Norbert, G. Something which is known. Godsongs.net [Online]. Available: https://www.godsongs.net/2016/04/something-which-is-known-to-have-been-from-the-beginning.html [Accessed: 28 March 2023].

Padilla, C.R. 1973. What is the gospel? Christianity Today, xvii 21:24-25.         [ Links ]

________________. 1978. The contextualization of the gospel. JTSA, no. 24:12-30.         [ Links ]

________________. 2022. What is integral mission? Poetice. [Online]. Available: https://poetice.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Rene-Padilla.pdf [Accessed: 9 December 2022].

Pieper, J. 1969. Hope in history. London: Burnes & Oates. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston.         [ Links ]

Paul, H. 2014. The myths that made America: An introduction to American studies. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag.         [ Links ]

Van Wyngaard, C. 2019. In search of repair: Critical white responses to whiteness as a theological problem - a South African contribution. Doctoral Dissertation, VU University, Amsterdam.         [ Links ]

Salinas, D. 2009. Latin American Evangelical theology in the 1970s: The golden decade. Leiden: Brill NV.         [ Links ]

Strawn, B. 2014. The Psalms and the practice of disclosure. In Walter Brueggemann. From whom no secrets are hid: introducing the Psalms. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press. pp. xiii-xxiv.         [ Links ]

 

 

1 The problem of whiteness, the impossibility of salvation for whiteness, and ways towards a more human expression of identity, are deftly explored in the South African context, by Cobus van Wyngaard's In search of repair: Critical white responses to whiteness as a theological problem - a South African contribution (Doctoral Dissertation. Free University of Amsterdam. 2019).
2 A history of the racial schism in SCA and its far-reaching consequences for Christian witness to the gospel of reconciliation among evangelicals during the apartheid era, is researched in my monograph, Invitations to Prophetic Integrity in the Evangelical Spirituality of the Students' Christian Association Discipleship Tradition: 1965-1979 (Doctoral Dissertation. University of KwaZulu-Natal. 2016).
3 John de Gruchy's "The contest for Reformed identity in South Africa during the church struggle against apartheid." NGTT 54, no. 3&4 (2013):1-10, introduces the historiography of this church struggle.
4 Van Wyngaard aptly describes the intractability of this burden, which he says is "not one which any white individual will resolve during a lifetime. Stepping into black space for a sustained period, will remain a requirement while it simultaneously risks reproducing white ontological expansionism." So, van Wyngaard, In Search of Repair. p.112.
5 How the Doctrine of Discovery gave the earliest Christian blessing to colonial conquest and a first sense of manifest destiny to whiteness, throughout the world, is described in Heike Paul's "Christopher Columbus and the 'Myth of 'Discovery'", in his The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies. (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag. 2014), 43-88.
6 David Bosch's keen awareness of compromise in a modern, Western church which courts imperial ideology in the task of theologizing mission, led him to his early conclusions in the late 1970s that missiology dares not rest on Western assumptions about geography, the "saved" and the "unsaved," but rather on the essentially missional character of God's compassion, self-revelation, and work of salvation. So, David Bosch. Witness to the World: The Christian Mission in Theological Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. 2006), 48ff, previously published by John Knox Press in 1980. This book was on the required reading list for SCAMP delegates.
7 In what follows, witness is used in its New Testament sense of embodying a prophetic testimony, as conveyed in the Greek verb, martyréö - "to bear witness," whose noun form, martýs - "witness" - is the etymological root for the English word "martyr" (Jn 15:27; 18:37 cf. Mt 24:14; Acts 22:15 etc.). For further discussion of these prophetic roots of witness to the good news, see Kittel and Friedrich. TNDT, 564-566.
8 My definition of modernity leans heavily on Josef Pieper's periodization and "arguments for the idealistic philosophy of progress," in his Hope and History trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Burns & Oates. 1969), esp. 45-60.
9 Peter, the Apostle, describes this way of being succinctly in 1 Peter 1:3-6.
10 An introduction to eschatological identity from the perspective of its source in the Old Testament, is Walter Brueggemann's The Covenanted Self: Explorations in Law and Covenant, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 1999).
11 The reconstruction of SCAMP's history here, uses the following primary historical sources: oral history interviews with SCA people, conducted previously in my doctoral research, and more recently as Associate Fellow of Systematic Theology in the Faculty of Theology of Stellenbosch University; my memories of participating in SCAMP as a delegate in 1983, a returning delegate in 1984, and on the training team in 1995; documents, letters and training materials of past SCAMP Directors donated by SCAMP's third Director, Margie Gertzen; and archival materials from the Students' Christian Organization Archive (SCO): Archive number BC 1473, lodged in the Special Collections at the University of Cape Town's Jagger Reading Room.
12 Welch drew on her growing experience of the deepening social crisis under P.W. Botha's "securocrat" regime and found rich resources for contextual witness in David Bosch's missiology lectures and publications. So, David Bosch. A Spirituality of the Road (Harrisonburg, Virginia: Herald Press. 1979), and Witness to the World.
13 For more on the literature about the International Congress on World Evangelization and PACLA, and South Africans' engagements with Padilla and Escobar at both, see Goddard, Invitations,131-135 (Lausanne), 184-188 (PACLA).
14 The influence of these Latin American theologians in convening Lausanne I is explained by Daniel Salinas, Latin American Evangelical Theology in the 1970s: The Golden Decade (Leiden: Brill. 2009), 133ff.
15 Interview: C. René Padilla (30 September 2015) - "I had joined the IFES staff in July of 1959, at a time when there was quite a lot of Marxist propaganda in the Latin American universities. Many students were turning to Marxism as the only answer to exploitation in Latin America. Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro had just started the Cuban revolution and had entered La Habana on the 8th of January of that year. Samuel and I were challenged to help the Christian students to respond to the Marxist challenge among their fellow students. A question frequently posed to us was: "What do we say to the Marxist claim for justice in a context of oppression?" We had to articulate a pastoral approach that would help Christian students be relevant in their witness." Houston had first met Padilla and Escobar at Lausanne in 1974. Interview: Houston (9 April 2014).
16 Interview: Houston (26 January 2015).
17 Interview: Houston (11 June 2015).
18 More on this, Bosch's first in-depth exposition of his Church as Alternative Community, can be found in Invitations,.221-224, cf. David Bosch, The Church as Alternative Community. Institute for Reformational Study. Study Pamphlet no. 170 (Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education. 1982).
19 Under apartheid, South African churches failed to lift and discard the burden of whiteness by polarizing and dividing along racial lines. Hence, the Louws being sent from a white denomination to a black denomination, in the same Reformed tradition. For more on the struggle for unity and integrity in the church under apartheid see M. John Lamola's Sowing in Tears: A Documentary History of the Church Struggle Against Apartheid: 1960-1990. E-book (African Perspectives Publishing. 2021).
20 In December 1981, I participated in the last of these formative Vac Mission weeks with 12 Transvaal students, facilitated by Beverley Haddad, Steve Truscott and staff intern, Jane de Kok. We departed from Venda only days before the Louws were deported, with 24 hours' notice, from Tshilidzini, on account of their friendship and solidarity with murdered activist, Tshifhiwa Muofhe, and other imprisoned members of the banned Black Peoples' Convention, like Tshenuwani Farisani.
21 An exposition of Padilla's South African workshops on contextualizing the Gospel is presented in Invitations, 229-235. Padilla's controversial Cape Town workshop on contextual exegesis was later published in South Africa. So, C. René Padilla, "The Contextualization of the Gospel." JTSA. no. 24 (September 1978): 12-30.
22 An overview of the history of integral mission is D. Kirkpatrick's, "C. René Padilla, and the Origins of Integral Mission in Post-War Latin America." The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 67, no. 2 (2016): 351-371. Padilla's first anglophone use of the term "integral discipleship," for example, appears after he and Samuel Escobar led their first IFES student discipleship training course without assistance from IVCF, in Lima, during 1966. So, Kirkpatrick, "C. René Padilla," 364-365. Padilla's first anglophone article emphasizing integration of faith and social responsibility in discipleship was published in his "What is the Gospel?" Christianity Today. XVII, no.21 (1973): 24-25. One of Padilla's latest discussions on the history of integral mission is his chapter with Tim Chester; "Integral Mission and its Historical Development," in Justice, Mercy and Humility: The Papers of the Micah Network International Consultation on Integral Mission and the Poor (Carlisle, UK: Waynesboro, GA. 2001).
23 On prophetic integrity, see J.N.J Kritzinger & W. Saayman. David J. Bosch: Prophetic Integrity, Cruciform Praxis (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications. 2011).
24 Bosch, de Gruchy and Kritzinger's publications in the 70s, 80s and 90s, embody such prophetic integrity in the academy. Rob Robertson's life story and sermons at Mayfair Presbyterian in the mid-1980s helped me to finally decide to object to serving in the S.A.D.F. and apply to the Board for Religious Objectors, at the age of 22, in 1985. For more on Louw, Philpot and Kerchhoff, see Invitations, 201 (Louw), 232 (Philpot and Kerchhoff).
25 For an analysis of and full text of The Cyara Declaration, see Invitations, 164-172; 214-215 cf. pp. 270ff.
26 Ibid.
27 So, Invitations, 200; 228-229 (Jakobsen); 208-210 (Oosthuizen); 213 (Steele, Granger, Begbie, Paterson, Swilling); 227-230 (Couper and Prest).
28 BC 1473 (B4.1.4) Letter from Gow to Jim Stamoolis (July 1978).
29 Interview: Bill Houston (8 December 2021).
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid. The word impulse is Houston's.
32 During my SCAMP training, the leadership regularly made an unofficial change to the SCAMP strapline, to: Taking the whole Gospel to the whole word through whole people.
33 Sally Welch's handover document, A SCAMP Year Cycle, written for Margie Gertzen in 1988, is a valuable primary source documenting the mechanics of the annual SCAMP training cycle.
34 Sally Welch, Guidelines for Missions Director: typed document in Gertzen's handover file, states that there were 12 delegates in 1980, "9 from SCA, 2 from Youth Alive (Ida Molta [sic] and Jerry Nkosi) and 1 from SCM (Sam Shokane)." Bell, Gow and Diamond Atong, formed the first leadership team, with Welch as "both cook-cum-leader and a delegate".
35 Welch, Guidelines, 4.
36 This was my experience as a SCAMP delegate in 1983 and 1984. A brief description of my placement follows in the narrative below.
37 The term "gestalt" was not used in SCAMP but serves here to describe the profound psycho-social impact of SCAMP's simulation games.
38 The list to follow is taken from Margie Gertzen's archive of SCAMP training materials.
39 A brainstorming exercise in small groups to list analogies from animals, plants or machines that help to define mission and communicate how delegates feel about involvement in "mission."
40 Larry Bell learnt this method from Ada Lum in the U.S. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
41 SCAMP training weekends in 1983 and 1984 presented cross-cultural meals from Taiwan (Margie Colson), Thailand (Bessie Hanger), and Brazil (The Barnetts). Babootie, a traditional South African Malay recipe, was prepared for the Fourth Training Weekend. Delegates were required to learn the recipe to prepare this dish for their hosts during their placements.
42 A green sheet itemizing assignments to be undertaken by the delegate before the next training weekend included devotional reading, "missions" reading, and a practical to-do-list to begin preparations for the short-term placement. The Assignments Arising out of Training Weekend II list included: Consolidate your understanding of the biblical basis of giving. ... finalize your fundraising by signing up the minimum number of supporters. It also provided guidelines for communicating with "mission" agencies and advice about preparing for placements' linguistically and culturally.
43 A short service with song, readings, and testimony was prepared and facilitated by delegates and leaders on the weekend - simple, participatory, and celebratory.
44 Gow received permission from All Nations Christian College to use their Pastoral Studies notes in this exploration of Genesis 1. The themes of 'Acceptance,' 'Sustenance,' 'Significance,' and 'Achievement,' with an introduction to "Positive and Negative Scripts" from Transactional Analysis, were explored.
45 This exercise depended on high levels of group co-operation to solve a puzzle.
46 Personal evaluation questions included 1. What insights have you gained this weekend in the area of accepting yourself and accepting others?... 3. Describe a lesson or principle that you feel you need to be praying through during the next month.
47 "The Pipe Cleaner Exercise" was described in the Leaders' Notes as follow: In groups of three or four delegates choose up to six pipe cleaners from a pile, to shape the pipe cleaners ... like their last month has been. Thereafter each participant explains it to the rest of the group, before a time of prayer.
48 Inductive exercise analysing different "mission" agencies' "mission statements" and stories of "mission" praxis.
49 Gow's Leaders' Notes suggested a small group report-back on this manuscript QT, in which the leadership team could underscore Peter's first-time realization of the cultural trappings of his faith in the roots of his racial prejudice.
50 Exploring elements of two worldviews and elements of my own worldview.
51 In the 1983 and 1984 training cycles, Kritzinger came from Pretoria for the afternoon session and facilitated wide-ranging exploration and discussion of Islam.
52 This session anticipated the finalization of short-term placements and assumed that correspondence with hosts for placements would begin imminently.
53 A return to John 1:1-5 and John 20:21, focusing on Jesus' incarnation as model for mission, and looking at incarnational kenosis in passages like Philippians 2:1-10
54 A simulated cultural immersion involving contact between two cultures (Alpha and Beta), followed by an interactive workshop, and grounded in William Smally and Kalervo Oberg's research on culture shock and its psychosomatic impact. Introduction to coping strategies.
55 A short questionnaire in small groups, as an open-ended prompt for meaningful interpersonal ministry and prayer: 1 Describe something which really gave you a "lift" recently, and something which discouraged you. 2 Call to mind a Scripture verse or passage, or event, from which God spoke to you very specifically in the last few weeks and give details. 3 One thing I really need to sort out with God before I depart on my SCAMP placement is ...
56 In Gow's Leaders' Notes, the Johari Window was described as an important training follow-on from the Prior Question of Trust exercise in Training Weekend II. Johari was a self-awareness and group feedback exercise developed by psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, in 1955, to facilitate deepening interpersonal awareness within teams through heuristic group feedback. So, J. Luft & H. Ingham, "The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness," in Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development (Los Angeles: University of California. LA, 1955). SCAMP delegates were given a Johari window diagram to fill in heuristically as an exercise in self-revelation. Then time would be spent in small groups for delegates to be guided by others in what to fill into the quadrant, Known to others but not to self.
57 This simulation required individual delegates to enter a circle of people comprised of the rest of the SCAMP delegation and staff team, to "crack the code" (known to everyone in the room, except the newcomer) in a sequence of displayed flashcards.
58 From an Address List of ex-Scampers in Margie Gertzen's handover file, compiled and updated by Margie Hutton for Trevor Gow and Sally Welch, between 1980 and 1986.
59 Marie-Louise Ström, Skype Interview (4 December 2021).
60 Rod Barnett, Skype Interview (3 November 2021).
61 Sue Mazzoni, Skype Interview (13 December 2022).
62 Janet Roos, Skype Interview (3 December 2021).
63 Rowena Barnett, Skype Interview (20 November 2021).
64 Brian Roodnick, Skype Interview (8 November 2021).
65 Pauline Hoggarth's father, Dr Leslie Hoggarth, and her mother, had worked for more than 30 years with the Evangelical Union of South America, encouraging, and accompanying the indigenous Quechua church, and working on the Cusco Quechua New Testament translation. Pauline was born and raised in the rural hinterland of Cusco, in Peru. Immediately prior to my summers in Bolivia, she had restarted the writing and publishing of Scripture Union's Encuentro con Dios daily Bible reading notes, which were originally published in Argentina. Hoggarth's new writing team was largely Latin American, and she befriended Samuel Escobar and René Padilla, finding much common ground with them, in her commitment to contextual Bible engagement.
66 In the rigours of two hard-working summers, Hoggarth and I recognized our shared love for the Old Testament Psalms, and for the psalmists' spiritualities of radically transparent disclosure. Such transparency in friendship with God and God's people, expressed in the Psalter, has shaped my discipleship ever since. Most recently, I have seen this core of Christian spirituality, succinctly described by Brent Strawn's short essay, "The Psalms and the Practice of Disclosure," in Walter Brueggemann, From Whom no Secrets are Hid: Introducing the Psalms. Louisville (Kentucky: John Knox Press. 2014). Such prayer and shared pilgrimage in the Jesus Way has shaped my friendship with Hoggarth into the present.
67 Little more than this sketch from memory of the impasse has been described to me by SCO friends from different points of view in the disagreement.
68 In attempting to document reasons for the breach, Welch recorded, I would suggest (without meaning to criticize Trevor) that... i) Trevor and Larry wrote all the materials. There was no request for contributions from YA or SCM. When the weekends were run the materials stayed the same, and the leaders were required to facilitate, but not to devise or change the program. ii) One of the YA delegates was prevented from going on his placement. Trevor felt he was not ready. However, according to a conversation I had with Cesar Molebatsi in about 1986, YA was never consulted or explained this decision. iii) Overall, I think that there was inadequate consultation and negotiation by Trevor with YA and SCM, with little joint participation in the decision-making process on any level. [sic] So, Welch, Guidelines.
69 Rowena Barnett, Skype Interview (20 November 2021).
70 Padilla and Escobar's spirited contributions to negate the primacy of evangelism theology in IFES, during IFES Consultations on Simple Lifestyle at Hoddeston in 1980, and on Evangelism and Social Responsibility, at Wheaton, Ilinois, in 1982, finally won greater acceptance in North America for their contextual readings of the gospel, and integral mission was accepted more widely as a result. So, Padilla, Skype Interview (30 September 2015).
71 Gerard Manley Hopkins' line, in his sonnet, "As kingfishers catch fire ..." This poem is in the common domain.
72 By 1984, SCA people like Houston, Sally Welch, Larry Bell, and Rod and Rowena Barnett, were engaging with this incarnational, transformational theology of mission, in regular conversation with David Bosch as students in Bosch's missiology undergraduate course at UNISA - an evolving missiology which would soon be published in 1991, as Bosch's Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission by Orbis Books.