"What about you?" he asked them, "Who do you say I am?" (Luke 9:20)

In 1972 the South African Council of Churches was declared a black organisation. The then secretary, Mr John Rees, announced this Government decision to the Executive Committee and added that it was a major step forward.

Mr John Rees became General Secretary of the Council in September 1970, following the resignation the previous year of Bishop Bill Burnett. A prominent Methodist layman, he was previously an administrator in the Non-European Affairs Department of the Johannesburg City Council. When the Government took over control of that Department John Rees decided that he must leave for, as he says, "I refused to work for the Government." It was at that same time that the post of General Secretary became available. Mr Rees applied and was appointed.

He was no newcomer to the Council or to the world ecumenical movement. He attended the Upsala World Council of Churches Assembly in 1968 and was a member of the SACC Executive Committee for eighteen months before becoming General Secretary.

"An evangelical with ecumenical concern" is the way KAIROS of August 1970 described John Rees. He brought the enthusiasm of that evangelical outlook and an energetic organisational ability to the Council and used these to the full in his term of service.

It was during his time that the Council expanded to include many new Divisions. It was during his term of service that the Council grew not only in size but in prominence on the local and international scene.

One of his priorities was to bring more black leadership and participation into the affairs of the Council. "I wanted," he says, "to follow the initiative started by Bill Burnett under the theme "Behold I make all things new", which was the theme from Upsala (World Council of Churches Assembly). A movement towards being able to allow blacks take a leadership role because all the other doors were being closed to them. Making those available through the Church."

It is to his credit that less than two years after he, a white South African, took over as General Secretary the Council was declared a black organisation because of the composition of its National Conference and Executive.

At the 1971 National Conference the General Secretary, John Rees, said that blacks must be given a greater say in the life of the Council of Churches. "I have come to realise," he said, "that in a Council in which the predominance of the membership of the Churches belonging to that Council are black, we must increasingly make plans, not only within the Church structures, but also within the structure of the Council itself for the voice of our black brethren to be heard."

His voice at least was heard. That same National Conference elected a black, the Rev A.W. Habelgaarn of the Moravian Church, as its new President and elected an Executive that included ten blacks out of a total of sixteen. This reversed exactly the white/black ratio of the previous Executive, and set the pattern for the years to follow.

In 1968 the CCSA biennial meeting that voted to become the South African Council of Churches was predominantly white with 38 white men, one sole woman representative, also white, and 7 black representatives all of whom were male clerics.

The Churches did, however, seem to see the establishment of the SACC as a time to make their delegates more representative of the total constitution of their respective Churches.

At the first National Conference in 1969 there were 39 white delegates and 25 black. The sole woman delegate of the 1968 Conference received support from two more women among the total number of 64.

By 1972 the ratio had changed with only 23 white delegates as against 33 black. This was a trend that was to continue and ensure that the SACC was an authentic indigenous Christian voice to the people of South Africa and the whole world.

It does seem to have taken longer to get the Churches to send more women and more lay delegates. It was only at the 1992 National Conference that satisfaction was voiced by the women present that at last their numbers and participation were recognised.

To return to the 1971 National Conference, the appointment of two new staff black Directors, Mr Harry Makubire and the Rev Sol Lediga was announced. These appointments caused the well known Methodist minister, the Rev E.E. Mahabane, to congratulate the Council for paying equal salaries to both black and white staff members. "Our Churches can take a leaf out of the Council's book." he said.

It is comments of this nature that help us understand the encouragement that black Churchmen were receiving from the Council within a very short time of its inception. It is comments of this nature, contrasting Council and Church structures, that are further illustrated by Mr John Rees when he speaks of people who voted one way in the Council and another within their own Churches. "Many people were bound by their own Church structures and felt freer to talk in the context of an ecumenical body. And some of the people who voted one way at (the) Hammanskraal (National Conference) voted another way within their own Church bodies when the same issue came up." He continued to say that in the Council "there was often a chance to vote with more feeling."

Mr Rees then goes on to explain that this situation was during the period when many Churches were not "owned" by the indigenous membership. "And so voting one way at Hammanskraal and then complying within the context of the Church" was an understandable behaviour "until such time as they were able to take over the administration of the Church for themselves."

Black Church members, and leaders if we take the important position of the Rev E.E. Mahabane into account, felt freer to speak openly within the Council than in their own Churches. The Council belonged to them and was the place, therefore, for the expression of their particular experience of the faith.

This new ownership of the Council soon validated its establishment in 1968. This ownership caused the Council to become a conduit of black Christian expression. This ownership set the agenda for the Council. This ownership gave relevance to the Council in the eyes of the local community and the world Church; and even among those who would oppose it because it was a serious and significant organisation that could not be ignored.

Behind the ownership there is, of course, a deeply spiritual need that can only find its complete expression through participation in the ordering of Church and Para-Church structures.

The Christian faith can never be lived by proxy. It does not have meaning if it does not have individual personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That statement would be agreed by all from evangelical charismatic to catholic. The aim of Christian mission is to bring people into that relationship with Jesus Christ and into fellowship through Christ with one another.

This was the aim of the early missionaries who came to proclaim "the glorious gospel of the blessed God." It was the aim of the missionaries who created the centres of learning, health, and social welfare. It was the aim of the Christian Council of South Africa in its attempts to ensure more co-operative and effective operation of missionary activity, and to speak to those matters that made life so harsh for the black people of this land.

The problem, it seems, is that the structures of the Churches and Church Organisations remained for too long in the hands of, mainly expatriate, whites. It was the payment made for the long division between mission on the one hand and faith and order on the other. The second step that takes the convert into active participation in the organisation of the fellowship of the Church was missing. Indigenous Church members needed to express their membership in the ordering of the affairs of the institutions into which they had been drawn by faith.

Black Christians did not want only to express the faith among themselves, through their own separated worship and different organisations, but to participate in the overall structures that affected their lives and the lives of all the people with whom they shared the Church ... and the nation.

Barriers to Faith

And the situation also created barriers to faith for some. The structures in themselves and in the way they operated created the impression that true expression of the faith was practised in a specific way, a white western way. When that structure and that operation felt foreign and uncomfortable it often meant that the faith itself was experienced as foreign and uncomfortable.

We can not but be aware of the number of community leaders, who are now in leadership positions in political organisations or who, sadly, died in the struggle for a democratic nation, who were lost to the Church not because of the faith itself but because of the structures that felt foreign and, therefore, inhibiting.

A number of their younger counterparts did find it possible, through the Council, to remain in the Church and serve the community through it.

Take, for example, Tom Manthata, a member of the Committee of Ten of Soweto which led the people of that huge complex of sprawling townships through the turbulent years following 1976, also a "Delmas" trialist, and one who spent during his adult life as many years behind bars as he did in front of them. He was until recently a staff member of the SACC and remains a keen practising Catholic.

Or think of Joe Seremane. He became a member of staff of the Council through the practical application of the faith by the Council. "I had rejected the faith", he says. He then speaks about coming out of imprisonment, for his political beliefs, and finding that the Council had been helping his family with grants through the Dependant's Conference. "Here were people that I rejected looking after my own family," he says. "They were praying with them, praying for me, making me whole again."

Although these examples are from a time still to come, the Council of Churches in the early years of the 1970's began to offer an opportunity for indigenous expression of the faith, a faith that spoke of freedom, liberty, justice, peace and reconciliation.

It was not an isolated and self made movement. It must also be seen against the background of what was happening throughout the country, the Church, and the world.

These were the days of the emergence of black consciousness, and of black theology. The University Christian Movement had been established in 1967 to provide a fellowship for students who had heard the Christian message and needed to work out for themselves what it meant for them as blacks in an apartheid society. One year later it was voicing its concern for a black theology which took into account the experience of the oppressed.

There were, and are, those who ask why it is necessary to have a black theology or Liberation theology, even Contextual theology. There is, they will say, simply theology, the faith, the beliefs, Christian truths for you whoever you are, black or white, brown or yellow. Such thinking, of course takes no account of the fact that ALL theology is contextual, coming out of the way the faith is seen and practised in a particular culture. St Paul, St Augustine, Luther and Calvin were all as much contextual theologians as any South American or African theologian of today.

The missionaries brought the faith, as interpreted and understood in their own culture. Black theology in South Africa was, and remains, necessary to bring the truth, the core, the basis, of that faith into the context of life for the majority of the people. This is what was happening during the early years of the SACC and helped form the SACC's thinking and practice. In 1971, the Rev John de Gruchy called for "an awareness in the Council of this new area of thinking."

The black consciousness movement also had its roots for South Africa in the student milieu, as represented through the move of black students, led by Steve Biko and Barney Pityana, to create the South African Students Organisation (SASO) in 1969 as separate from the white dominated National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). It was the SASO students who, in 1970, stopped referring to themselves "non-white" and elected to call themselves "black."

Part of the Church background to the process going on in the Council, was the WCC's Division of World Mission and Evangelism Conference at Bangkok in January 1973 at which much was said about the need for indigenisation. Missionary Societies came under fire for clinging to western cultural forms of Church order.

This was reflected in South Africa itself in calls for missionaries to go home or to be ready to serve under local leadership. The Rev Bheka Hlophe, a Lutheran Pastor, writing in a Lutheran journal said "If the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa South East Region (ELCSASER) is supposed to be led and financially supported by Africans, foreign missionaries should not delay but leave us to determine our future as the Spirit leads us..." He went on to call for a share in the "administrative and organisational strains and joys for the extension of God's Kingdom."

This type of call received some response when in June 1970 the Berlin Mission terminated its membership of the SACC in accordance with a Home Board policy that "foreign organisations should not claim a say in South African Church Associations." Another German Mission group, the Hermansburg Mission, followed suit for similar reasons one year later. Both of these societies moved out of the Council as the Churches which they had established had become independent and were able to express their own mind on local affairs through the Council.

And, for the Churches, there was another context. That which was mentioned earlier when the SPROCAS project was "overtaken by other events", the Programme to Combat Racism (PCR).