Guy Shaw on the Reason for the Recent Looting in South Africa

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the

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Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We have a guest with us today, which I'm very grateful to have from a long ways away.

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I didn't calculate how many miles, but thousands. Pastor Guy Shaw, who is in Umshlanga, which is just outside of Durban on the east coast of South Africa.

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He's in Umshlanga Baptist Church, and he's going to talk to us a little bit about what's going on there in Africa with the recent events that have been in the news and what it's like to do gospel ministry there and what the effect of government policies over the last 20 years have been.

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So, Pastor Shaw, thank you so much. Thanks, John. It's a real joy to be joining you today, and we've been following your

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YouTube ministry over the past year, really have appreciated your commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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So obviously, I'm a white South African. Many people, when they think of Africa, I remember once I was in the

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States and I met some people and they said, but you're white. And I said, yes, I'm white. And they said, but you're from Africa.

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And I said, yes, I'm from Africa. My ancestors were from Scotland a few hundred years ago.

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And so in South Africa, we have great diversity when it comes to cultures.

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And it's been a joy for me to spend my entire 50 something years of life here in South Africa.

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I grew up in the apartheid years, very much in the thick of the apartheid years. And there were rules in place in our country that prevented people of certain races from being allowed to go into certain areas and have the privileges which we as white

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South Africans enjoyed. I also spent two years in compulsory military service in the late 80s.

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It was compulsory at that stage for all white male South Africans to serve in the military to ensure that there was a strong military presence.

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And so I got to see much of the happenings on the political scene in South Africa during that time from a military perspective.

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Subsequent to that, the Lord called me into pastoral ministry, and I spent four years in the seminary preparing for that.

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And I've been pastoring two churches for the past 20, 24, 25 years.

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And so it's a great joy to be a South African. I really count it as a privilege to be on the southern tip of Africa.

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And Africa has 90 or so countries. Some people think that Africa is one big country, that it's got 90 different countries of various sizes.

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And South Africa is the one, obviously, on the southern tip of Africa.

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So, yeah, it's been an interesting journey to have grown up during the apartheid years. My own children don't know the apartheid years.

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They've grown up in a fully democratic South Africa. In 1994, we had our first completely free and fair elections where everybody in the country who was entitled to vote legally was able to vote.

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And so that's 27 or so years ago that South Africa became a fully democratic country.

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I was very interested to see yesterday, somebody had posted on social media a photograph of one of the lines of people to vote back in 1994.

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And they posted a similar line from last week, towards the end of last week, where people were in lines to get food from supermarkets that had run out of food due to the unrest which took place in South Africa last week.

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And they compared the two and they said, surely after 27 years of democracy, things should be different.

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And so that kind of really, really did strike me. So essentially, John, what really happened is last week, we woke up Monday morning to news that unrest had broken out, particularly in our province of South Africa, which is on the

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East Coast. It's a lovely, temperate climate, wonderful weather.

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And we awoke to the fact that trucks had been burned and there was unrest.

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And that unfolded during the course of the Monday into the Tuesday to large scale looting of shops, warehouses, car dealerships, whatever you want to call it.

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People went crazy and literally just broke down doors, broke down warehouse roller doors.

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And there was wide scale looting that took place. And so that's how last week really unfolded.

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We have not seen anything like that on the scale that had happened, certainly in my lifetime.

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I don't remember it happening like that. Could you give us an idea of the scale? How much looting are we talking about?

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And were there people that were killed as well? Yes. So the looting was widespread across our province.

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And that mainly relates to the fact that our former presidents in South Africa, President Zuma, who's now incarcerated for failing to appear before a judicial commission, most of his supporters were within our province in terms of culturally.

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And so that's why the looting and things really were mainly located in our home province.

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It was very widespread. Every small town, every large city within our province was affected in some way.

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Durban itself, which is a city of about three and a half million people, I think it is. Wide areas of Durban were affected.

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Primarily the looting took place in the industrial areas with warehouses. But many, many supermarkets and shops were completely stripped of everything and bare shelves were left.

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And this unfolded over the course of two days. And it was going on daytime and nighttime.

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We obviously, social media was a picture, a window to what was happening as well as Internet services and that kind of thing.

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So many small towns have been literally devastated by the looting that took place.

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In one of the towns where I have family members living, 50 percent of the shops in the town were completely looted.

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The doors were broken down, the windows were broken, everything inside was taken. And that was anything from a clothing shop to a food shop, to a furniture store, to a liquor store, whatever it was.

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There were people who were killed and some of the looters were killed during the looting, either through a stampede.

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But certainly a number of looters were killed by bullets. People defending other businesses or residential areas.

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So personally, I spent four nights every evening from 8 p .m.

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to 12 p .m. last week alongside my community members, guarding our local residential area, blockading the entrance streets to make sure that none of the looters made their way towards our residential areas.

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We were safeguarding our properties, our families. Praise God that didn't happen and they didn't come to our area.

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But many residential areas were fairly affected by it. And it's sad to see.

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And a lot of cleanup has since happened. And so I was driving around a bit yesterday and today and a lot of the areas have been cleaned.

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But last week they looked like a war zone. It really was not a good sight and certainly not the picture of what we would want for us, our country as proud

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South Africans and citizens in this country. Is there a concern that it's going to happen again or is there just nothing left to loot?

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Well, there's always a concern that it could happen again. You know, supermarkets have been restocked. Supply chain trucks have been working tirelessly all weekend to get food back into stores because the stores were shut.

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Most stores were shut for about four days. Even the stores that had food, you could not access food.

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So you had to make do with whatever you had at home. There's always the thought and this is where social media plays its part.

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You know, voice notes go around, get spread around with rumors that trouble is going to start again.

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I think the situation at this stage is pretty much under control. The police and the military have got involved to stabilize the situation.

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We're not in a state of disaster, a state of emergency, but the security forces are doing what they need to do.

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But I really want to commend the neighborhoods for standing up and ensuring that their communities were protected.

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I think many would recognize that the state failed to to protect the citizens quick enough.

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And that had not had it not been for the local communities who stood together and ensured that their loved ones and properties were protected, things may have been very different.

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So, yeah, it's been a pretty unique situation. I praise God that things seem to be peaceful at the moment.

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And I really pray that it stays that way for the immediate future. Yeah. Well, thank you for giving us a picture of what's happening over there since you're living there.

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I'm not. And most of the audience listening isn't. But what we've heard is that from a lot of major media like BBC, etc.,

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organizations is poverty is the root cause of all of this. And yeah, there was a situation with the ex -president and I guess the people affiliated with the

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Zulu tribe primarily were angry. And so they decided to spark this. But that it really wasn't that it was poverty and kind of a holdover from apartheid that really caused this.

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And of course, we're used to hearing these things all the time in the United States. And I'm sure Great Britain and other Western countries about colonialism or slavery or indigenous manifest destiny, indigenous land, taking that and that all the all the problems are really rooted in these things.

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But as you pointed out before, there's been democracy, widespread democracy for 20 years.

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And and this just doesn't seem like it should be. And those in those who thought that rolling back apartheid, which we'd probably all agree with, but the way that it was done and the result of it has probably surprised some of those who would have been very much in favor of that, thinking that that would solve a lot of the problems.

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So I'm curious to hear you as a Christian pastor. Maybe talk about what's the root cause? What's really happening?

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And we know sin, but specifically in that situation, what's really going on to spark something like this?

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Yeah. Yeah, John, I mean, I was going to say, obviously, sin is at the root cause. I attended a conference a number of years ago and the speaker spoke about the heart of the problem being a problem of the heart.

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And so we know that that that is the primary root cause. I think I would say many of our people in our country live in abject poverty.

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The unemployment rate is over 30 percent, which is a really high number.

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COVID and the pandemic has not helped. Some of those who had jobs have lost those jobs. So there certainly is that element of a feeling of hopelessness in many people who would perhaps desire to work hard and earn a living so they can put their head down on their pillow at night knowing they've done a good day's work to earn their wages.

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But sadly, even though democracy has existed in South Africa since 1994, the state really has failed to, in my opinion, to move from being a liberation organisation, which set people free and brought democracy into South Africa.

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They have failed to make the transition from a liberation organisation to a good governing party who are able to do the best for the people, to uplift those who for many years were kept down by the legal laws in South Africa.

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And so, John, quite frankly, 27 years on in our country with our abundant resources, tourism, our infrastructure, we are top when it comes to infrastructure, roads, many of those things.

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Our country should be flourishing. And it's sad to see, because for most of us, we desire that all the peoples of our country are uplifted in any way, through education and through job opportunities.

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But that has not happened. And what has happened instead is that the few at the top have enriched themselves even further, and the ones at the bottom have been left with nothing.

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And so I think poverty was not, in my opinion, the primary cause of the unrest last week.

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It's certainly come to light that the state really have been or did use the people to achieve their own political purposes over the past week.

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As our president alluded on Friday evening in a nation address, that there were attempts, in his opinion, to overthrow the government during this time, that it actually had nothing to do with poverty, it had nothing to do with people being hungry or jobless.

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But the common people were used for political purposes. And again, for me, that's a tragedy that people who have nothing could be used to create a situation in which many of them are going to have even less because they're going to lose their jobs.

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The economy is going to be worse off because of the unrest. And many of them will lose their jobs. I've heard of businesses that have closed that will never open again because the owners of those businesses simply do not have the resources to restart the business.

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Some of those businesses employ hundreds of people who will now no longer have jobs.

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And so it's created a really, I think, a situation that's even worse than it was before.

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So there's short term gain. Those who looted may have gained some extra possessions.

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They may have gained some extra groceries for their cupboards for a very short period of time. But that's temporary. Yeah. When all of those things are eaten and the

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TVs that have been taken break down, they're going to be left again hopeless. And so I realize that many people point to poverty as the cause of this.

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But sadly, it seems to have come to light that political forces who've been trying to win power have actually used the people in an attempt to gain what they want to gain to the loss of the common man and the common woman.

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Well, this is very similar in some ways, it sounds like, to what happened here last summer with the

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Black Lives Matter riots that burned down, I don't know how many cities and businesses.

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And there was just a lot of violence. It was scary for a lot of people who live near those places. And now there's max exodus.

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People are leaving and it's leaving these communities in a worse spot than they were before with all that, not just money leaving, but responsible citizens and so forth.

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As a pastor, you're pastoring there and the situation we've covered on this podcast,

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I've talked about the farmland situation, the attempts at reparations and adjusting for past abuses and things of this nature and how they've really been kind of failures, both in your country and in our country, whatever attempts have been made here.

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But in the church, the church we know is an institution from God that is separate from the government. And right now there's a big push for the church to be activist in this political sense in the same way the government is, that the church needs to somehow uphold those who have been oppressed historically by doing some kind of a quota system or platforming people that are black or brown or different color than a white person or a gender or something like that, women.

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So there's attempts at reparations and there's all kinds of things. And I'm sure those things have been going on in South Africa for probably longer and probably in a stronger way.

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I'd be curious to hear what you have to say about that in the church. How do you navigate tension? Because there is tension.

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It sounds like a long, not just racial lines in the way that an American would think of it, but these tribal lines, which is what happened last week.

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And then what's your response to, I'm sure, I don't know who's there pushing that.

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You're probably not listening to, is it Desmond Tutu? You're not listening to those people.

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But when you hear that line of thinking, what do you have to say to it? Yeah. So our stance as a church is that our calling is to preach the gospel and to remain faithful to the scriptures.

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And that God, when He saves people through faith in Christ, He brings them into a true family where everybody's equal.

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And so our aim is to never arrange the ministries of our church or to have a particular focus in our church that is dictated along racial lines.

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We had to preach the gospel. And when I started this church about six and a half years ago, there were certainly people of color who were here.

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Our area itself is quite a mixed area in terms of cultures and races, which is wonderful.

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But it's never been my intention or the intention of the leadership of our church to do anything special to draw people of any particular race into our church.

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So we have decided that our job is to preach the gospel in its purest form, to stick to the scriptures, to allow people to know that when they come to Christ, they become part of His church, where everybody is equal at the foot of the cross.

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Everybody is received with equal dignity. We worship together. We're an

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English -speaking church. So what a lot of churches have done in South Africa is in order to become multicultural, they ensure that they incorporate different languages into the church service.

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So they may try and sing songs of different African languages or whatever it might be.

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I've seen it happen before. Sometimes it works. And in my opinion, it doesn't always work too successfully.

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I think it tries to create some artificial lines which don't always work successfully.

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I think what you've got to do is when you stick with the word and you stick with the gospel that all are equal in Christ, it creates a natural drawcard to the ministries of the church.

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And so I've found over the last six and a half years that as we've adopted that approach, that we have seen the church naturally become a multiracial church.

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So we are predominantly white, I would say, if I can use that description, but we have many other cultures who happily join us on a

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Sunday morning and are happy to be in a service where we sing in English, we preach in English, and yet they are part of this church.

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And if you had to speak to any of them, they would identify the Umshlunga Baptist Church as their home church.

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They love to be here. During last year, during the hard lockdown, where we were restricted from meeting, some of the people in the church shared their sadness over not being able to meet together as the body of Christ.

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And they shared how much they value being together as the body of Christ, being white or Indian or black or whatever it might be.

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They really cherish what God has done. And so our approach has very simply been not to create anything artificial along race lines, but to allow

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Christ to build this church as he said he would, for us to remain faithful to the authority of the word of God and to preach the gospel and to show dignity to everybody who is part of the family of Christ.

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So that's been our approach. I don't know if that kind of makes sense or if there's anything else around that.

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That's what I'm most familiar with. But today, that's not enough in the minds of so many.

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They think that you must do something extra. Now, it doesn't sound like—so the looting and all of what happened last week did not approach close to your—it wasn't in your backyard.

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It was in your province or it was a province that you use. I don't want to use the wrong word. Yeah, provinces.

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South Africa is made up of a number of different provinces that really are geographic. They'd be states. So in US terms, it would be a state.

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They're not as self -governing as the US states are. They still fall under the larger government.

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They're less able to have flexibility in making laws that are particular to that particular province.

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But certainly, John, probably as the crow flies, the closest looting to us would be one and a half or two kilometers.

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Let's say a mile, mile and a half, maybe. There was a factory, a pesticide factory that was petrol bombed.

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We've had to live with the fumes blowing over us for the last five days. Nobody knows what's in the fumes.

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Nobody is saying. The company is not saying. Every now and again, when the wind changes direction, we just get these fumes coming over us.

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The fire department tried to put out the fire. Water got into the stormwater system, which got into the local lagoon, killed the fish life.

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So there's all kinds of things going on at the moment that are not great, but it was close to us. But because of—

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That is close. That is close. Let's put it this way. There were a few nights where we could hear gunshots and that kind of thing.

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Yeah, that's close. It was close, yeah. What really separated us out from everybody else is that there's a national road that goes between where the looting was happening and where we are.

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And there's another suburb next to us. And those guys took serious precautions to ensure that any looters wouldn't get across to them.

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And therefore, we were protected de facto because they were guarding their neighborhood.

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But no, I mustn't try and understate things, John. It was close by. And so there were things happening within a five -mile radius of us.

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There were some pretty nasty things that were taking place. I didn't ever particularly feel at risk.

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Maybe that's the peace of God that was upon me and my family. My daughters and my wife were a little bit more uneasy about things, perhaps because I was out there spending time with the guys who were in touch with security forces and things.

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And I was hearing what was happening. Perhaps it was easier for me to kind of get the bigger picture.

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But yeah, I won't understate it and say that it was somehow happening sort of 50 miles away.

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It was on our doorstep without being on our doorstep. Well, it sparked a bunch of questions in my mind as you say this.

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And we're both—I'm Scottish as well—descended from people. And we both have lost our accents, unfortunately, and gained new ones.

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But they're known to be an independent lot, those Scottish people.

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And in the United States, a lot of them settled in Appalachia. And that's where in America, they say the gun nuts live, right?

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The people that have all the guns, maybe a sign on their property that survivors will be shot or something.

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Don't come on my land. We've heard about all of those things, yeah. Yeah. So I'm on the edge of Appalachia where I live right now.

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But so one of the things that has been happening over the last few years in the United States is as violence seems to be increasing, especially in urban areas, but you don't know.

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I mean, it comes to the rural areas now and then as well. Churches are starting to invest in more security measures.

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And people that I just never thought would own a firearm are now buying firearms and trying to protect themselves.

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And these are Christians, a lot of the people I'm referring to. South Africa has been doing that a lot longer.

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I think they're a lot more independent, I gather, at least. Is that something that's just common or the church is all do they all have security?

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Or they all are the men taking their responsibilities and their minds seriously? We protect our church, we protect our families, and that kind of thing.

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I'm just curious. Yeah. So I would say that I think that's happening more in the

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U .S. than it's happening here. I've not heard too many churches where somebody would be carrying a firearm when they come to church.

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There are certainly those that carry a firearm.

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But some of these instances that we've seen where a church in the

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U .S., there's a gunman who comes in and members of the congregation take out their weapon and they protect the people.

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I've not heard too many of those stories here in South Africa. Okay. So security in South Africa is more around the issue that the security precautions that churches put in place here in South Africa is more linked to crime of people breaking and entering, taking property and that kind of thing.

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It's not necessarily security that's linked directly to lives being under threat.

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There are areas around Johannesburg that churches would maybe have armed security to protect cash offerings, people giving their tithes and offerings and that kind of thing.

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We've not had to do that in our church. We have a security system to protect our building when we're not here so that there's an alarm system, but we don't have any kinds of elaborate security measures in place.

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If you were to ask me, are any of the men or the ladies who come to our church on a Sunday morning packing?

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I'm not too sure. You may not want to answer that. To my knowledge, they're not, but they could be and certainly

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I don't want to be naive to think that some of them are not. Yeah. Well, I think because so much of what

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I've heard, it's not a perfect parallel, but because there's so many similar issues between the

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United States and South Africa, I almost wonder, okay, South Africa might be a view into 10 years ahead or where things are going in the

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United States in some ways. And so that's why I ask these questions is, okay, is this something that churches in the United States will have to think about even more?

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One of the things I wanted to ask you maybe more in closing though, because I know we've already talked for a while, which

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I'm actually shocked that it feels like we've only been talking for about five minutes, but in the

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United States, with the social justice movement and how it's progressed and taken over the church almost overnight, is there a pressure?

28:30

In the United States, there's very much a pressure. Is that the same in South Africa where there's a pressure from, I don't know who the influential religious leaders are there, but do they try to enact some kind of a shame upon people who don't go along with what the

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ANC wants or I don't know, what's that like? So there's always been an element of social justice in South Africa from the apartheid years, which you mentioned the name of Bishop Desmond Tutu.

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So he would have fallen into that category. And by and large, a lot of your evangelical churches back then would have shied away from any kind of links to any social justice movement.

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Over the last 15 years, 15, 20 years or so, that has tended to become more mainstream in evangelical churches, the pressure to conform to social justice issues.

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And in fact, I would say it's gaining momentum even as we speak at this time.

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And so churches are being pressured to not just preach. In fact, a lot of churches are being told, well, all you people do is you just tell people about the

29:43

Bible, you don't do anything to change people's lives. And so that guilt does get heaped upon churches who are not doing anything in aligning themselves with the social justice movement to get with the program, because if you don't get with the program, then you're kind of missing the boat.

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You're not a church where things should be, yes, by all means, preach the gospel, but this is where we're at.

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We're at social justice issues now in our modern world context. And so yeah,

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John, there is a lot of pressure to get with the social justice movement. And I'd say it's growing in momentum and spreading certainly across our

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Baptist denomination here in South Africa. There's increasing pressure, not formally.

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There's no formal pressure. We're actually not a denomination. We're a union of churches who voluntarily associate together.

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There's no real hierarchical structure, but there's no sort of policy pressure to conform.

30:51

But it would be almost more from even amongst pastors themselves moving in their circles kind of saying, well, what are you guys doing on the social justice issue?

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And you'll be frowned upon if you're not publicizing all of your social justice work on social media and almost as a way of attracting people to your church because they see how much good you're doing.

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And so they'll want to come to your church because, well, we can see how much you're doing for social justice, and therefore we're attracted to your church.

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We want, again, I'll come back to this. We want the gospel to be the high point of the ministry of our church.

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And we don't want anybody to come here. Look, people will obviously come here for different reasons, and God uses those reasons to bring them.

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But we don't want anybody to come here to say, look, we're at this church because you're a social justice activist church, and that's why we're here.

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We want people to come here because they say that we believe in the gospel. We believe in the authority of scripture, and that's why we want to be at this church.

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You know, good works result from being in Christ. And for every member of our church, we pray that they are living out the fruit of being a

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Christian wherever God has placed them, that they are the salt and the light where God has put them. We as a church don't need to invent or bring about a massive social justice project in order for good to be done.

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Good needs to be done through the individual Christians who are going out there every single day, and they're encountering those who are unbelievers, and are able to, as God moves them and as God gifts them, to start various ministries or projects that do reach out to people, reach out to the hungry, reach out to those who need clothing or whatever it might be.

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But we don't want that to become the primary driving program of our local church.

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We want the gospel and scripture to remain the high point, yeah. Well it sounds like we need to be praying for South Africa, for the political situation as well as the church, and that there would be faithful churches like yours that do not bend to the pressure.

33:09

Now I mentioned the name of your church, Umshlanga Baptist Church. Is there a website for your church if people want to check out any of your sermons, or what would that be?

33:20

Our website is www .umshlangabaptist .co

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.za, and that's spelled U -M -H -L -A -N -G -A, and then

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Baptist, B -A -P -T -I -S -T dot C -O dot Z -A, which is a South African domain name, yeah.

33:41

Well I do appreciate it. I'm waiting for your book, Social Justice.

33:47

I have it on order. From Amazon or from me? COVID has delayed the delivery of the book to my home.

33:56

I would have had it by now already, but because of the current COVID wave that's coming through South Africa, the online delivery service have notified me they've had a delay in the book being delivered to me, so I'm looking forward to getting the book.

34:10

I am curious. I've never had to ship to South Africa, so you got it from Amazon, I'm assuming.

34:16

They must have their printers there in South Africa too. No? No, I got it from a

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South African online company called Loot, L -O -O -T dot

34:27

C -O dot Z -A, and I ordered it through them, and they obviously source it through whoever, and that's probably also been the delay in terms of getting the book.

34:37

I'm looking forward to it being delivered to my home in the next couple of weeks. All right, well you'll have to let me know what you think of it, and it's mostly about the

34:45

United States. It's a history of what happened here, but yeah, I'm almost finished.

34:50

A lot of parallels, a lot of parallels. There are, yeah, yeah. I'm almost finished with the next one, which is more of an in -depth, but I think

34:58

I actually have a chapter about South Africa in it, and just kind of will we learn the lessons in the

35:03

United States from looking at South Africa, but thank you so much for your time. Thank you for all the wisdom that you've shared with us, and God bless you.