Interview with Mark Stephenson
REV. ANDREW
2015-02-27
MM: this is Martin Mostert, interview with REV. ANDREW, 25th February 2015. First of all, thank you very much for agreeing to answer my questions. Your local church name is REV. ANDREW suburb 1 Methodist, is it?
REV. ANDREW: REV. ANDREW suburb 1 Methodist, ja. 
MM: Thank you
REV. ANDREW: Traditionally known as REV. ANDREW former church title.
MM: REV. ANDREW former church title , yes! I’ve preached at REV. ANDREW former church title
REV. ANDREW: Good Man
MM: When it was REV. ANDREW former church title, long ago
REV. ANDREW: It still is
MM: Tell me about any evangelism, REV. ANDREW, that happens in your local church or that involves your members in any way. And I am deliberately not, like, defining evangelism, leaving it totally open to you. Tell me about what you consider evangelism to be.
REV. ANDREW: OK. Yes, well that was going to be my starting point, requesting how do you interpret “evangelism”? 
MM: No, no – that’s what I am wanting to learn from you
REV. ANDREW: Well…
MM: Please tell me some stories about what evangelism looks like in your church, in and through…
REV. ANDREW: I think you need to define it first
MM: OK?
REV. ANDREW: 0133: And in my terms, evangelism really is space that we give people to express good news. So I suppose most of my ministry is involved in searching for good news stories in the lives of people; and evangelism is for me a connect between faith and life and life and faith. So the good news stories revolve around an assessment of life as it is happening today and what is engaging people on a one-on-one basis. So, for example, when we are at a Bible study we don’t just sit there and hammer the Word, we actually spend quite a lot of time talking about life, and then saying where are the Kingdom values, where are the signs of the Kingdom at work in the lives of the people; how does it relate to the scriptures and give them something that they can take away with them into their life of discipleship or whatever. So, speaking to you as a local preacher, you will always remember when you preached and you were asked the question, “Did he preach Good News?” That for me is the kind of founding block of my understanding of evangelism. I’m always looking for good news in terms of Kingdom signs, Kingdom values – expressing something of that element that is life giving. So in order to understand the REV. ANDREW former church title story, the evangelism that came out of it was “How do you respond to a situation of bad news?” – in which they were given threat of closure, you know, a top-down decision was made that they…you know, What’s the point of keeping this community alive? Why should it be having a presence in REV. ANDREW suburb 1 when there are bigger churches round about? Obviously that’s not the kind of question to throw into my face! Especially when I live in the area. So you eventually pick up some clues that for me evangelism is local, in the sense that there is a connect with the neighbourhood – which turns into a “neighbour-good”; and you market yourself in that way, that the place that you’ve inherited, and that’s unfortunately the nature of the Christian family, is a place of rootedness and presence. And so your community life centres around the expression of how that community connects with the neighbourhood, and obviously the broader issues and broader surroundings. So it’s into that kind of vortex that my understanding of evangelism is rooted. But obviously it has a much broader perspective for me. My background is one of Religious Studies so I’m not kind of closed, sort of open the suitcase and hammer about.[0510] I’m a lot more open in my approach to looking at the world in a broader context. And I try to bring that into the understanding of evangelism within the context. So… 
MM 0515: Given your basic understanding of evangelism – and thanks, that’s actually very helpful – What’s your understanding of conversion? Are there some people that … you’ll probably want to define conversion as well!
REV. ANDREW: 0530 I prefer to use the word “transformation”…and right behind the pulpit we have the classic that I forget her name, the banner lady from REV. ANDREW nearby church 3, made, or helped the ladies make a banner, and there’s a picture of a butterfly, and the quotation from the New Testament says, speaking about being “a new creation” which is always my mentor [unclear. measure?] for understanding conversion. But in the Wesleyan tradition it’s sort of we’re going to convert you to our way of thinking. But I like to see the process of transformation as a process. But you come to the four “Alls” within the Wesleyan tradition and you can say instead of “All men need to be saved”, “All men need to be transformed” [0632]. They are exposed to the Word, the written Word; they’re exposed to what we would call the heart of Jesus, which is Spirit; they’re exposed to fellowship of community; they’re exposed to the sense of otherness within the sanctuary and within the worship environment.  So for example, if I said, “Here’s a benediction” it would be a benediction that says “May the kindness of Jesus, the love of God, and the friendship and unity of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us.” And that’s for me when you can say “Aha! That’s my moment” because I can receive that as a gift. That can be a moment not so much of conversion as transformation. I can be a new creation.
MM: 0746: And what sort of things change when someone is transformed?
REV. ANDREW: Well, you know, the best story is that REV. ANDREW former church title – we’ve got limited resources – so obviously that has been a big challenge for me, to see a community trying to sustain [0808] itself with squat, you know, other than the building. So the transformation comes at various levels. It comes in people’s lives that are transformed, We do a lot of ground work for example with people who are mentally challenged. There’s an organisation called [name of institution withheld] around the corner. We try and enable some of those folks to feel a sense of community and it’s been for me, OK, maybe not lots of stories to tell but significant stories of one youngster, for example, who was a lad from St Stithian’s, he got totally pissed at 21, rolled his car, brain damage, and kind of stationed at [name of institution withheld]. And he now phones me regularly, just telling me his kingdom signs [0995] and moments of saying “I just want you to know, I’m enjoying, I’m wanting you to feel, to share that. That is a life that’s been transformed, that he’s got a reason to get out of bed in the morning – and he’d probably phone me to say, “What do you think of the cricket, or the rugby?” or something like that. No, he’s alive; and he’ll come to the Bible study, or he’ll phone me to say “I can’t make it, I’ve got to go to the doctor”. But there’s a connection – nothing major, but it’s there.
MM: [0948]: Would you say your congregation has grown or shrunk or stayed static over the last five years?
REV. ANDREW: Well, some say it’s grown; It depends how you define growth
MM: Ah! There we go – another definition
REV. ANDREW: Another definition. And for me, I’ve always worked with small congregations. I’m not a numbers man. I’m not like Dale Steyn playing cricket over here who’s got 1.5 million on twitter, you know, and when a friend of mine said to me, “I don’t want to hear how many people who are reading his twitters, I don’t even want to know what he looks like, or how beautiful he is, I just want him to take bladdy wickets!” So you know it’s just like a kind of a process of just saying, “What’s our focus?”, Where are we going to take root and grow?” And I think that changes happen in the life of people, they happen in the life of community. We’ve done some very significant “evangelistic” – I don’t like the word – evangelistic events in REV. ANDREW suburb 1. We started a thing called “Table Talk”, which basically was a result of saying “We’ve got twelve tables in our store room, and a statement which I’ve always enjoyed which comes from the Sheffield Inner City Mission – “There’s nothing to talk about until there’s something on the table” [1122]. So we put stuff on the table and build community around it. We created a no-cash deal for everybody; everybody had to write out invoices and we had a central computer point. We have a model there which can be shared with any church. Because they talk about Christians and how they love each other, but they still put their hands in their pockets and steal what should be going to the cause, but it’s a neater way of controlling the process. And that for me was quite transforming: it, but, as with most projects, and I’ve specialised in projects, they have beginnings and they have endings; we’ve just pulled the plug on it and said it’s reached its sell-by date, because ever Tom Dick and Harry now is running his own private car or car-boot sale. But the intention was not so much to make money – it was more to build community, and to say, well, to use your word, “where strangers become friends”.[1241]
MM: What sort of backgrounds…the people who do start attending REV. ANDREW former church title; what sort of demographic are we looking at, what sort people – people from other churches, people from [name of institution withheld] which is quite interesting as a place nearby…what are the people like who start attending your church?
REV. ANDREW: [1310]: You know, you’ve got to remember that REV. ANDREW former church title was traditionally a conservative, fairly fundamentalist little church that developed out of a Sunday School. And it really had some rigid, intolerant sort of people who I think after my first week they’d all disappeared, which was quite therapeutic for me because I had an opportunity not to have to deal with that baggage, but also to start from where the people were, which is really where it all begins. And present an interpretation of Good News that I think would be relevant for the 21st century [1407]. I’m not a gimmick man; I’m not a guy who sits there and tries to entertain every Sunday. I mean it’s just another wave and another question that we can go down. I’m a fourth generation Methodist Minister, so my roots are fairly deep [1436]. That can be an advantage. It can also be a disadvantage. And the people who come, I think have come for various reasons.  I think a lot of people come for warmth and fellowship and unity that we have generated; that we have fairly open in the service, we have a lot of dialogue; because we are small, we can just interact. We have taken a long time, for example, to eventually put up a drop-down screen – which an engineer in the congregation bought from cash crusaders! And now we are feeling the benefit of that in a way which you and I don’t understand. I mean, one of the key things, we’ve just pulled in – and one of the key things is evangelism, you’ve got to get the community around your church, and not having this sort of shit of people coming in from suburbia or whatever.[1551]. And for me my hit has been recently I have got the lady next door to church – she doesn’t come to church but she has just run a social media course and a facebook course on the new system. So I’ve just been on that. We’ve got others who are birders who live in the street and take photographs of things, nature things that are happening on the Common, others who are teachers and doctors who come into the church. But they’re local, and they walk to church – but that’s my motto, to try and get people to walk to the community. But that takes time; you can’t just build the five minutes; but it’s been the good approach now, so your property, as I said earlier, it gets owned by the community. So we’ve got local Pilates classes, we’ve got aqua yoga aerobics classes after aqua yoga anyway, they have that straight after worship on Sundays. Some serious stuff like that. And other ventures like training classes [1723]. More recently a jazz group, an a cappela group that’s playing at Oude Meester, they use the church for practice. Someone phoned and said, “I’d like to teach people that are getting married to dance.” And so there are ventures that are starting to roll. That comes with time.  But it comes back to your question about connecting with the local environment. And that environment, you’re bound by that, and your [1806] modern day suburbia, and we still like to see ourselves as feeding on the old Inner City Mission where I was in REV. ANDREW suburb 4.  We have the same circuit number; we are in the unique position of being our own circuit – we don’t pay assessment – we’ve managed to sort ourselves…we’ve got one more year to go, we’re just about ready…
MM: 1830: We’ll talk about finance things later. I’d just like to go back – you talked about the people who left when you arrived, the sort of more fundamentalist people. Are there any other trends you’ve seen in people who exit? People who’ve not been able to go with this.
REV. ANDREW: 1846: There are other people who’ve wanted to be more lively and charismatic, who have gone off on their journeys; others who have felt we are not inclusive enough of people of other faiths, and have gone off on their Sufi walks. You know we’ve got a youngster who’s Jewish, we’ve got him into the music group which is a separate thing to…. Music is an important thing for me. [1922] But you know we visit at the Synagogue in REV. ANDREW suburb 1 which is you know behind the Pick ‘n Pay [1931]. So there are those links.  And we’re starting now to get a couple of Zimbabweans linking in, not a great number. I think it’s very difficult for people of different culture to identify with, you know, what’s on offer there. Because we are small they can’t get totally immersed – because their numbers aren’t massive. It’s quite difficult. And also, in terms of the demographics, [2011] we have a lot of people who are retirees, and who enjoy the non-pressure of being a small community.
MM: 2038: One thing that I’m interested in is, do you get peripheral members, people who count themselves as members but you see very seldom? 
REV. ANDREW: 2050: No, no, no, the trend today, Martin, there are two trends. The one is that there are people out there who have church association but have got quite frustrated with what’s on offer in their local church. And so they do what we call the “elusive butterfly”, they go flitting and looking.  And many of them have found REV. ANDREW former church title to be a home, maybe on a once-a-month basis, but particularly depending on what’s on offer. So the whole thing’s related to events and experience
MM: 2138: Do you get a big influx at Christmas and Easter? 
REV. ANDREW: 2130: No, no it’s always packed. But packed for us is eighty people…no more space. We’ve got exactly eighty chairs, so you know you’ve reached your full quota. 
MM: 2153: I think you’ve answered question four as well as we’ve gone along. I’d like to probe in the next section more about your thinking on evangelism. Do you teach people about evangelism? If so what particular aspects do you emphasize? You’ve talked a lot about this already, but is there anything else?
REV. ANDREW: 2222: The teaching is very much a communal experience; and the teaching that…we don’t sit there and say “This is how evangelism works”. We try to live it out, 
MM: to model it
REV. ANDREW: Ja, to model it. [2237]. For example, one of the first things I did in REV. ANDREW former church title when I walked in was, “Good God, there’s something like nine doors, all facing the space. So the first thing I did was, from my printing background, was to get someone to cut out labels with the nine gifts of the Spirit and put them on each door, right above there, and I said to them, If you want a lesson on evangelism it’s there and it’s ready for you every time you walk into this place, because what you are experiencing here in this church is what I call a Pentecostal laboratory. So you need to understand that if we are going to look at our lives, we need to be able to say “Well maybe I need to concentrate on the love and the joy and the peace and the patience.” [2330] So the ideal of trying to enable people to capture something of the dynamic of the fellowship needs, and the spirit of life in community for me is trying to live out the message, and proclaim it that way. I don’t sit there and have formal classes saying “This is evangelism” because it would be dead in the water before I began. [2401]. 
MM: 2406: What are some of the important things that people who are not Christians need to hear and see?
REV. ANDREW: 2415: They have to see… the most important thing about today’s society and church is that when a church meets basic human need, I mean, for example, if it addresses poverty, so, for example, just little initiatives…we have had some members in the congregation who have been “secret Santas” [2432] they have said, “We don’t want you to know who this is from, but it’s our way of saying…our way of recognising. So for example we’ve got quite deep roots into [nearby old-age home], in [road name withheld], which is… a number of people there like the community we bring. We’ve begun initiatives like “Take a Break” which is like what we’re doing in Vida Café which is, you know, an affordable coffee, a cheaper coffee, it costs them nothing, just for people to meet and talk for an hour. Music is big, for me [2525]. I’ve really been cheesed off with the way music has gone in churches today, where it’s more about context than what we are singing, and how insipid the theology is. And nobody’s out there to actually knock it. And so what we do on the third Sunday of every month, which has become, we’ve been running for about seven years now. We’ve got a very good organist – keyboardist – but he’s a jazz musician, but also the principal organist at the REV. ANDREW nearby church 2 [2611], at REV. ANDREW nearby church 2. And John and I we’re virtually a mobile…you could put us in Claremont or you could put us anywhere and we could rock…I mean I don’t say that in a…just touching in on telling the stories of great hymns of faith and getting people to find there voice through unbelievable backing [2633]. So music at REV. ANDREW former church title is a serious draw-card for the disenfranchised and the folks who are really pissed off at what’s been happening in their local churches. I mean, I don’t want to make this public, but we get such a spillage from REV. ANDREW nearby church 3
MM: Nothing’s going public! [2657]
REV. ANDREW: [2702]: We get such a spillage from REV. ANDREW nearby church 3 of people who were absolutely frustrated. The hymns of the faith are just not shared, you know. And you’ve got…well the best comment I’ve ever heard is someone said, “I’ve become a Catholic, it doesn’t work anymore. I want to escape the Protestant guitars”.[2722] You know the kind of shit that goes on in sanctuaries where you get musicians up front who think they’re musicians and they play, and you can think “Shame, God bless him, he’s there. But he actually never ever would have made it on any platform, and then you get assaulted for an hour, because the guy, this worship leader, thinks he owns the service! 
MM: [2753]: I need to move us on
REV. ANDREW: but you understand what I mean
MM: [2804] Anything from John Wesley that you find helpful in these…you know, you talk about going back to roots
REV. ANDREW: [2810]: We’ve already mentioned the “Four Alls”; I’m passionate about spreading Scriptural Holiness. I think that that’s…you know we always talk about Christian Perfection, but it’s just completing the circle, making the connect. 
MM: [2829] Do you use any anecdotes from his life?
REV. ANDREW: [2834]: My anecdote of John Wesley, I’ve been to…I’ve stood on the grave where he preached, his father’s grave at Epworth. I’ve been through Epworth and I’ve been to his Tomb at Wesleyan Old Street at the back of the Chapel. I’ve followed him intently throughout the UK. I’ve looked at his steps. I think my time in Newcastle in the north of England – I was at a church called the New Brunswick church for a year of my life in 1982 –this was with a non-racial team from South Africa, kind of the very first experiment in a youth exchange; and I visited about forty churches over there. And that church did…what I saw there turned my life around in terms of just how you transform poverty [2930] and that the fact was Wesley had been quite prominent in the community, and the community was still alive. For me, Wesley…the four elements of reason, tradition, scripture and experience [2952] – the fundamentals of just looking at faith from a Wesleyan perspective, and the little prayer that we’ve sometimes said, you know, “Do no harm by any word or deed/ do good wherever there is any need”, put it to music, “Remain attentive to God’s Word, stay in love with God”. [3012] It comes from Reuben Job, he was a Bishop, one of those many Bishops in America. But he summarised Wesley, as I’ve just done for you – so you can put that down as a credit to Reuben Job, not to me. He also gave us music for it, and it’s a nice jingle to try. I think for me I have enjoyed Wesley at various levels.  I think his catholicity of spirit has helped me immensely, universal love; transformation or salvation by faith through grace, and that spirit of seeing new creation moments or kingdom moments happen in people’s lives…gets my motor going. I’m not comfortable with the way our church is run at present [3117] You know as a Methodist Church I don’t think we get Episcopalian, we never have been, 
MM: 3128: Hang on, I’m going to move you on from that pathway
REV. ANDREW: You do that; but I can give you a run on that
MM: 3137: You’ve drawn a picture of a certain kind of evangelism.  Do you find that some of your congregation buys into the more than others, and if that’s so
REV. ANDREW: 3150: That’s a good question. I think for me the miracle of actually having people come to church on a Sunday is absolutely mind-blowing – that they’ve actually chosen to come and be present in a church service is a respectful moment in my life [3204].  I mean when I was in REV. ANDREW suburb 4 I turned it upside down, and we had worship on Wednesdays [3217]. We just changed things and said “Let’s try and help people in the process of Sabbath living, rather than Sabbath keeping. Because you know when you look at a Sunday now compared with what we grew up with, I mean it’s chalk and cheese. So the process is always on the go; it’s …you’ve got to look at it and… can you just repeat that question, the last one?
MM: 3249: It was based on, are some of the members of your congregation more involved in evangelism, as you’ve described it, and if so, drawing on your pastoral experience, could you give some reasons.  Why are some people more fully involved in this process of contact with people…
REV. ANDREW: 3312: it’s the same wherever you go.  I spent three months in Detroit and it’s the same issues wherever you go. You’ve got your doers and you’ve got your laggers…it’s human nature.
MM: Yes, that’s what I want to know – tell me why?
REV. ANDREW: 3323: I think it’s just human nature.  If you follow the Enneagram to its logical conclusion you’ll find that some people are achievers and some are just happy to sit back and do bugger all, you know, and that’s the bottom line. I mean you can ask your wife can ask you that question every day, “Why aren’t you doing the dishes?” or “why aren’t you cutting the lawn?” or “Why aren’t you painting the house?” or whatever.
MM: 3354: I’m asking the questions!
REV. ANDREW: Been there, done it all
MM: 3402 I think you’ve also addressed question seven quite a lot, about taking responsibility for situations in the world that are not directly related to your church
REV. ANDREW: 3410: Yes, that’s big; and we try and encourage  .can I just say around that point that for me I try and bring out the best in people.  And so, for example, we’ve got members who take responsibility in broader fields. We’ve got a land surveyor who is now chairman of the Friends of Rondebosch Common – there are many environmental issues which I am very involved about: helping people get a mind-set that says, “Look carefully at your context and see the damage that you are doing and seeing the resources that are needed”. [3449] And so, you know, this recent triumph of having a local person next door not come to church but actually come in and offer these course has been seminal for me. Or, a young couple down the way who had a baby; they came to us on Christmas day. And that to me…I even write about it on my blog. So that’s an issue that’s very close to my heart; and how do you deal with poverty, how do you deal with sustainability and so on.[3542]. 
MM: 3546: OK. Now question eight, you’ve already spoken a lot, talked a lot about conversion – you talked about “transformation”, preferring to see it as transformation. Anything else that you’d like to say there? What’s this transformation? How important is it for Christian Discipleship, that sort of thing?
REV. ANDREW: 3611: I think the key is to help people discover who they are and there’s a process for enabling people to think seriously about what’s going on in their lives and how they actually learn to dig deep within their soul. And the other need, it’s a key process of, I mean if you want to be like the Indian warrior with a big chopper and a bow-and-arrow and sort of nail your specific target…But there is a real place and a space to allow people to be themselves, to feel that they are in a trusting environment, and to eventually open up to you [3654]. I mean I had a little thing yesterday: a lady said, “Can I come and see you?” I said, “A pleasure.”  She was there an hour beforehand and I was still in my pyjamas.  I said, “You’re welcome.” She just…there was a measure of trust and she was quite open and she said, “I know I’m divorced from my husband, but he’s staying with our daughter, and he’s an alcoholic. “ And it wasn’t just to dump it on me, it was just simply to share it, to say, “I believe you are able to do something”. So, which I did. I was able to write to a minister, put the story together and say, “Listen, can you make an intervention here and can you connect?” So that whole process of allowing people to connect and seeing the benefits of what transformation or conversion means [3801].You know, the dream of seeing the husband and the home life changed – kind of brings you back to your “four alls” again.
MM: 3817: And anything in Wesley’s understanding of conversion that helps you, that motivates…you’ve already spoken…
REV. ANDREW: 3821: No now look, you come back again to the “Four Alls”: all men can be saved, all can know they are saved and all need to be saved, and all can know they are saved and be saved to the utmost. But that for me, it’s not…there are entry levels at all points. Some people are further down the track than others [3832] So for me the driving force with Wesley is always that “The best is always yet to be”, There’s, you know, I mean, you can look at this and I mean I was just walking to go and buy bananas so I walked in the car to – not walked – but I looked into the cars by Woolworths which is quite a nice walk along the Common and so on, and I was just disturbed by these ever-burgeoning traffic jams that they’re having, [3916] and I just said, “God’s truth! All these cars and there’s only one driver, number one. I looked at the City busses and they were all empty – and the Wesley within me said, “This needs transformation!” I went to movies last night with a friend of mine – this was the second time I’d seen it – a movie called “The Imitation Game” which is worth seeing; and the service at the reception was absolutely shocking. Now I want to write to management and just say to them, “How can you improve things?” We went into a theatre, which – the friend who I was with is a production manager at Coca Cola and he said, “My gosh”, he said, “How the hell do you sustain this when you’ve got six people in the theatre?”[4023]. You know at Canal Walk, what rent are you paying? Just simple logistics. I did a wedding at Maatjiesfontein, at the weekend, and we were driving back between De Doorns and Worcester, and I saw a man, he was in a big Civils truck, and he went right over a white line, down the…and we were just expecting accident after accident, absolutely reckless. So I got up to him and took a photograph, which made him quite aggressive. And first thing Monday morning I phoned the manager, sent him the photographs and said, “You guys sort this out” [4107], and took responsibility for something that really needed transformation and needed to be dealt with. Not in a vindictive way, but just for the sake of making the planet a better place, with better, a safer place, with better drivers. 
MM: 4129: Now let’s see – question nine. I think we’ve talked a lot about evangelism as being an integral part of your church, 
REV. ANDREW: 4150: We live it out. And we live it out at two things, well, at various levels. For me what is always important for every church is for it to understand its role, what its identity is. But key to me and key to our South African heritage is that a good striving point is “How do you create unity in diversity?” You know, how do you actually generate a spirit of fellowship that is meaningful, that is deep, that is actually sustaining? And I think that we have kind of missed that boat, and we need to look at that very carefully. And we’ve got a ….great possibilities here, to make it happen. But that leads me into other aspects of secular society and ja the reality of choice, which is…I don’t think we’ve begun to deal with that. 
MM: 4307: and choice is quite important when dealing with evangelism, conversion, that sort of thing – that cluster of ideas. Oh, here’s a thought. Are there any practical boundaries, if you’re thinking of evangelism as part of your church program: are there any practical boundaries that limit your church, that you talked about the neighbours…
REV. ANDREW: 4340: Well, you can’t have alcohol on the property. And I don’t drink. But it’s just an aside
MM: I mean by boundaries, places you cannot go or cannot reach, that you would say, “This, although I’d like us to be there, is beyond us”
REV. ANDREW: 4408: That’s a good question. We had a delightful story to tell which is quite worth sharing. We had a situation where a homeless guy decided to become a regular member at REV. ANDREW former church title. I knew you’d enjoy this story. And when he came in he really honed. I mean you used to watch okes accommodate and I used to take him into the room next door and spray him with perfume, just let him settle in. And bless his soul, the late James Timoney, that you and I went together to funeral of, got hold of me one day, and he just – because he used to worship with me and he used to ask the sort of questions that you might ask if you get into church growth, but he came to me and said, “REV. ANDREW,” he said, “What the hell are you doing?” You know he was quite outspoken. And he just said to me, “Deal with this professionally.” That was his point of attack. He said, “Our resources are stretched. We don’t have the capacity to deal with this.” He said, “Go and speak to Karin – Karen at the Homestead [haven?] in Claremont”. And that opened the doors of setting an awareness of our limitations and also our approach of being able to say, “This is the only way we can deal with it”. Because we get the usual, you know, the steady flow- we’re like a piece of Velcro, it sticks to us, you know, and I’m quite ruthless because of my days in REV. ANDREW suburb 4, where I was taken out so many times – where I said, “Sorry guys, this is not right.” And James did something to me; and I bless him for that because he just said, “You’ve got to do this professionally and properly”. And so we support initiatives that do the job better than we do. And so we partner with, get alongside those who possible make a better job of it.
MM: 4645: are there any barriers at the other end of the social scale? 
REV. ANDREW: Sorry, any?
MM: Similar sort of barriers but at the other end of the social scale
REV. ANDREW: 4658: Ja, I mean it’s very difficult, up at the top end…are you talking about the economic environment here?
MM: Yes
REV. ANDREW: We’ve got a broad cross-section of people, but I think when it gets to the top end now … you know I argue that we promote a gospel of equalities and common values and Spirit, and an element of stuff that money can’t buy.[4729]. The trends that are happening at the other end of the scale is that it’s “Dial-a-Priest”, you know, that it’s Priest-on-Demand – “Where are you?” and “How much do you charge?” I’ve actually enjoyed those boundaries because I dance on them – I know how to dance on them. So I have utilized that fact – in fact I have more people reading my blog than I do have coming to church. [4805]. I have great joy in getting, as Wesley would say, to where the people are. So if I have a look at my last week I had a wedding at Grootbos at Stanford, on the Friday. The weekend before that I had a wedding at Lambert’s Bay. And the Grootbos was on the Friday, on the Saturday I was up at Maatjiesfontein. That’s a hell of a…that’s some serious travelling. I’ve got a break this weekend. So on the high end stuff we get a lot of the rugger-buggers together, I enjoy that, to have a good time; and then the whole of March is Wine Estates for weddings. II was very upset in terms of high end…I double-dated, and I had a wedding on a yacht sailing from Hout Bay to Llandadno. I had to phone Kevin Needham and say to him, “You’ve got to help me! I’m not available.” [4924]. Fortunately, he could help me. I would have enjoyed that. But the high end stuff? I’ve mixed and mingled with the mink, and I know how to mix and mingle with the manure.[4939]. So it’s 
MM: 4943: Any John Wesley cognates there? Any stories from his life?
REV. ANDREW: 4944: Well, you know, the concept of John Wesley saying “The world is my parish”, I’ve always said, “My parish is the world”, and I’ve turned it on its head. I’m not comfortable with trying to think that we’re gung-ho and we’ve got all the answers for world peace and [inaudible] but I do think that when we take our world, and our context and our environment seriously, then things begin to happen. [5014]. So my ministry is based…well, you’re catching me on spillage, because REV. ANDREW suburb 1’s really a product of REV. ANDREW suburb 4, you know, an extension of the work.
MM: 5034: We’re getting close to the end here – question 10. Which is what sort of evangelism outsiders find most persuasive? You’ve spoken a lot to these, but under this…what’s offensive? What’s persuasive? Thinking from an outsider’s point of view looking in towards your ministry and your presentation of transformational good news.
REV. ANDREW: 5058: I think my biggest concern with, with, with … outsiders is that perceptions are incredibly negative among people who are on the fringes or not even on the fringes and who couldn’t give a damn, you know. So for me – I thrive on working with people of no faith, who are actually not interested in what we are doing. And I actually find that to be one of the most driving challenges in my ministry. It’s not a question of “How do you make the church relevant” but how do you make the connect [5155] with this dynamic, changing world.  And so now and again there are moments of sort of like Kingdom signs, when all of a sudden we get it right, and you know, Good News just surprises us. I mean the other day we’ve been running “Music at REV. ANDREW former church title” faithfully, it’s just a regular event, just plugging away, sharing the story; and a woman came to me afterwards and she said, “I just want you to know that we have enjoyed the work that you are doing over here”, and just gave us ten grand. Which was just gob-smacking. It was a kind of a deceased estate thing, it was in honour of a loved one, but (and I wouldn’t say this publicly but it should have gone to REV. ANDREW nearby church 3, but the ministry at REV. ANDREW nearby church 3 really rocked her boat)…that was quite moving. And your last question?
MM: 5316: Just before that, is it possible to limit some of that offensiveness? By the way you talked about ministry you talked about limiting offensiveness. Are there some ways you can help people limit the offence they, and the church – the way the secular world experiences Christianity in a negative light?
REV. ANDREW: 5345: No you can, you know, and it’s questions of getting inroads into the media, of beginning to share some of the stories that are happening. I just recently went on this facebook course and Margaret was talking of how things have changed. Radio took 37 years to reach 50 million people; TV took seventeen years; FaceBook took sort of three years – and it got down to the point that Angry Birds took 35 days. And that process of realising that there is a whole new world out there…The question that she raised with me was “I don’t know what’s going to happen next” [5434]. That for me is a word that is so rich in gospel, that we actually don’t know what is going to happen next. We have the faith to say that these doors of opportunity will reveal themselves. It’s the same old human nature, it’s the same old earth. It’s the same old basic values. We’re all living, we’re all growing older; we will all die, and that’s it. That it’s the quality of life that we find ourselves striving for. The bad news is that all the negative stuff, which is the headlines. A lot of the quieter, gentler, softer voices are just kind of pushed away by the advancing tide. [5531]. So for me things like whether you’re rich or poor, Eskom is a huge issue. And it’s lovely, because it’s actually making people face the real world, life without electricity and without power and who am I? and how do I deal with it?… and I think that’s absolutely wonderful – it’s a levelling process of people realising that jobs are scarce and it’s not easy to get a job, and I think that even when I look at my own children they’re working their guts off to try and just make ends meet: I enjoy that energy, and I feed off it. So basically I’m saying to you that there’s work to be done. I’m retired, so I can sit back and smoke grass or whatever. But if you said to me, “What’s the best good news in this story over here?” the best good news was that I retired at 60, and I highly recommend it. I think I would be a bit frustrated if I didn’t have this challenge of REV. ANDREW former church title. But you know the driving point was that it was threatened with closure. And right now we’re under investigation, you know. Big word. And so we’re trying to tell the stories, and that you’ll find on facebook. [5709]
MM: 5710: Last question: who decides on any budget expenditure for the needs of those who are not Christians, or people who are not members of your church community? Where does the money come from? I know you’ve said that money is an issue in an under-resourced church.
REV. ANDREW: 5735: I think that the secret to that community has always been where I’ve come from, is to build up a really good team of people. Not all like-minded, because … the one thing that I can say to my credit is that I have built up a really good team of leadership at REV. ANDREW suburb 1, and that that I can just walk away – as I did with Detroit for three months – and it ran without me. And with that there is consultation, there is a measure of accountability, and the proposals are put in front of them, and, or they come off the floor – “Can you help?” or “Can we make a plan?” [5818], and we say yes or no. But it’s not big high-end budgeting, although we’ve managed to turn the corner a little bit with these limited resources. But it’s a nice story. It’s a kind of miniature parable of what I like to call the “future church”
MM: 5847: Let’s just finish off with a fantasy scenario. Suppose you were given R10,000 to spend on people who were not in the church. How would you spend it?
REV. ANDREW: 5901: Well, I would look for the biggest human need, wherever my feet were placed. I would begin to say, let’s make an assessment of…
MM: 5910: In REV. ANDREW former church title
REV. ANDREW: 5914: In the REV. ANDREW former church title community? Well the easiest way to answer that is that I consider the future of the church to lie in possibly four areas: number one, education; two, worship; three, food; and four, what I call the service industry. Being able to minister in a creative way. I’m just talking in broad terms. If I was given that as start-up capital, then I would always come back to my core business which is to create employment for people, and use that as start-up capital. And then my experience with small business venture for example was that we started with a seven-and-a-half thousand rand grant, and we built the project up to finding full-time work for sixteen people and part-time work for a hundred people per annum [10015]. And where we had no money – we were generating at nearby suburb R70 a Sunday – we were turning over R3m per annum. Out of a little catalyst.  And people believed in it because it was meeting a basic human need.  So for me, if I was pushed hard enough, I would put that money towards designing a fabulous kitchen, and I would create meals, and around it community, and around it I would bring in my music, so that it’s the best place to go for things that can be bought… and that’s the good news
MM: 10111: REV. ANDREW thank you very much
REV. ANDREW: There you go
MM: Thank you very, very much
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