Letter from the Rector - St Luke's Church

8 April 2022

Letter 2 2022

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ,

We are about to start Holy Week, and are preparing for our Easter celebrations. As we do this we are aware that we are a few steps further on the road of life.

We have had our Vestry Meeting, after skipping one last year due to the restrictions that Covid placed on us. And we welcome our Parish Council who will lead us through this year: Wardens : Angela Mlhanga and Anthony Still; Treasurer : Reon Odendaal and Councillors : Charles Sarjoo, John Hoffe, Fred Kusambiza, Mpumi Sishi, Sue Cock, and Hilton Tardew.

State of Disaster and Covid

We are all, I am sure, relieved and thankful that the National State of Disaster has been lifted. This an answer to prayer; ongoing, concerned and fervent prayer. And so we need to give thanks to God that he has heard and answered the prayers that have been offered over the last two years.

Though this does not mean that our prayers should stop. Covid has not been eliminated. It is still very much part of the world and our lives. We are just learning to live with it, and have been blessed that the Omicron variant has not caused more severe illness in the majority of cases.

But this can change. The nature of viruses is that they often mutate – and there is no determining what the mutations may produce. It is quite possible that future mutations could produce a variant that is as transmissible as Omicron, but produces illness as severe a SARS. So, we wait and pray, and continue to be cautious.

There have been suggestions from various authorities that there is likely to be a 5^th Wave of Covid, possibly even in April. So we need to do what we can to protect ourselves and others.

Transition Period

When the president lifted the State of Disaster, we were told that there would be a 30 day period of transition when many of the restrictions would remain in place while some would be lifted or eased. So the situation is not yet back to what was “normal” before Covid struck.

The regulations around Covid would move from the State of Disaster and would be promulgated under the Health Act. Though this suggestion is being challenged by many people and organisations, so we wait to see what the outcome will be.

As a result the Parish Covid Compliance Committee has agreed that we should keep the current practices within the parish around services and using facilities as they are at the moment while we wait to see what the final outcome of the changes to regulations may be.

When the new regulations have been issued, the Committee will meet again and decide whether we should change any of our practices going forward.

Back to Normal?

The reality is that the world has changed profoundly in the last two years, and the war in Ukraine is changing things even further. No matter what the regulations are, life will not go back to what it was like up to 2019.

In the church, we are unlikely to get back to cramming 150 people into church for the foreseeable future. I think most people are more aware of space and would prefer having some space between themselves and their neighbour.

As people of faith, we know that we are not called to go backwards, but to go on. During the Exodus, the people often wanted to go back to Egypt, but were called to go on to the Promised Land. When Jesus ascended into heaven he commissioned the disciples to go out, to go into the world and take the Good News to all people. No going back, keep going on!

At a Clergy Meeting this week, Rev Dr Paul Siaki was speaking about some of the issues raised in his new book, Church Interrupted or Church Reset, which looks at the impact of Covid on the church, and the challenges we face in this changed world. During his talk he said we need to realise that “the best is yet to come”! This struck me, and I have been encouraged by it.

The Best

What Covid has done is expose and cause us to confront many changes and weaknesses that were already part of our world. If one looks at the parish statistics for the last number of years we have been in a gentle slide. We do not want to ‘go back’, not even to the 70’s and 80’s when the church was regularly full to overflowing. The best is yet to come, we want to go forward!

The world as a whole is also on a slide – sometimes slowly, and sometimes rushing headlong. God has generally been ignored, and where people do claim the title of Christian, they have often domesticated God and used him to serve their narrow self interest.

So our prayer this Easter needs to be : “God, do a new thing in our time!”

We have looked during Lent at our identity as God’s children. We have this new identity as covid leaves us with a ‘new world’ and Russia is rapidly forging a new world order (having “blown up” the one that prevailed since the fall of the Berlin Wall.) We live in a new environment with new buildings and businesses developing all around us.

We need “new wineskins”.

We ask God to lead us into this new world. As we have learned from his word, where we are told to “put off your old self . . . be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God” (Ephesians 4:22-24).