Disciple: Clear Connections

A pilgrimage to Botswana reinforces deep relationships between dioceses

By the Reverend Canon Rhonda Lee

We 14 pilgrims from the Diocese of North Carolina settled into the pews at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Selebi-Phikwe, Botswana, alongside the few church members who were free in the middle of the day to greet us. Their rector, Father Seth, offered a prayer for our time together: “We thank you, Lord, that our friends from North Carolina have come to show us love.”

Parishioners and pilgrims introduced ourselves; we sang together; we talked about the challenges of ministering in economically depressed areas like Selebi-Phikwe, where the copper and nickel mine closed a couple of years ago, and former textile towns and declining farming communities in North Carolina. We gathered for a group photo in front of the altar before sharing a lunch the church had generously prepared. And then we pilgrims piled back into our minibus to travel to the next church where another group of siblings in Christ awaited us.

In our 10 days in our companion diocese of Botswana, we visited more than a dozen churches, a couple of preschools, a hospice and a pop-up lunch offering at Princess Marina Hospital in Botswana’s capital, Gaborone. We shared meals with clergy and lay ministers from Botswana and South Africa, including the Rt. Rev. Metlha Beleme, and also got to know a visiting priest from Botswana’s companion diocese of Newcastle, England. The Rt. Rev. Sam Rodman led a class on vocational discernment for students and clergy at St. Augustine Theological School, and we participated in a church growth workshop modeled on Invite.Welcome.Connect, led by the Rev. Canon James Amanze and St. Augustine’s ordinands. We saw large swaths of the Botswana landscape—and caught a glimpse of Zimbabwe—as we drove for hours from Gaborone in the south to Francistown in the north, in the capable and patient care of our driver, Tiabo, a lay minister at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. We encountered (at a safe distance) a few of Botswana’s renowned wild animals, including rhinoceros and giraffes, on a drive through the Mokolodi Nature Reserve. And just before returning home to North Carolina, we enjoyed refreshments at The No. 1 Ladies Coffee House, named for the series of detective novels set in and around Gaborone.

As I immersed myself in the pilgrimage, I realized our songs, prayers, conversations and dinners reminded me of something. In my mind, I began to hear echoes of long-familiar words now coming to life for me in a new way. Words like, “I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now.” The apostle Paul wrote those words in the mid-first century to a community that had welcomed him as a stranger and eventually loved him as a brother, and with whom he had shared the joyful good news of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection.

SO MANY FRIENDS

Our voyage to Botswana was not a “mission trip” in any sense of the word. But it was apostolic, grounded in the Good News of Jesus Christ, like the first Christians’ travels we read about in the New Testament’s Epistles and the Book of Acts. Our voyage incarnated the faith we Anglicans around the world share with each other, and put new faces on the Body of Christ. We pilgrims were received, not as strangers, but as friends and family members, because we shared a common identity as Christian disciples, and because our two dioceses had already invested deeply in our companion relationship. Signs of our connections were everywhere. Our leaders, the Rev. Dr. Leon Spencer and the Rev. Miriam Saxon, were greeted joyfully by old friends they had gotten to know on previous trips to Botswana. I was glad to shake hands again with Bishop Metlha, his wife, Thapelo, and Canon James, all of whom have visited North Carolina, and to meet James’s wife, Diana, and talk with her about Botswana’s role in the long fight against apartheid and white supremacy. Young adult alumni of Lift Every Voice smiled broadly when I passed on greetings from diocesan youth missioner Beth Crow, a leader of that three-year international journey of repentance, repair and reconciliation. The many members of Botswana’s Mothers’ Union who welcomed us were especially glad to meet Mary Gordon, our diocesan Episcopal Church Women president. Our Batswana (the term for residents of Botswana) friends cherished warm memories of the Most Rev. Michael Curry (and his recent royal wedding sermon) and were eager to get to know Bishop Sam and his vision for the Church.

COMMON GROUND

Like the first Christians who discovered communities across the Roman Empire had a lot of needs and challenges in common, Anglicans in Botswana and Episcopalians from North Carolina found we share many concerns. Our numbers are declining as our countries’ versions of mega-churches (and in the United States, the proportion of religious “nones”) increase. We wonder how small churches in rural areas with declining economies can be sustained, and what they would need to be able to thrive. We’re all looking for faithful, rigorous, yet flexible ways to train candidates for ordination and to keep them connected to each other and to their diocese after they’ve been ordained, and we know we need to help laypeople cultivate a sense of discipleship through their daily life and work.

Beyond our shared needs and concerns, we found, again as the first Christians did, that we had spiritual and material gifts to offer each other. The Diocese of North Carolina has been helpful in establishing and maintaining St. Augustine’s Theological School, less than a decade old, whose graduates are now helping to alleviate the shortage of priests in Botswana. On this trip, we carried a number of new theological and reference books, financially out of reach to the average student, to donate to the school’s library. And the pilgrims offered encouragement to our Batswana friends in a simple way we didn’t fully understand until we arrived, just by being ourselves; specifically, by five of us being female priests. Anglicans in Botswana have long desired to ordain women, and next year, they will seek permission from their Anglican Province of Central Africa to do so. We female priests were applauded wherever we went. We were invited to preach and were called “Moruti” (“priest”) with respect and joy, and (my favorite) “Lady Father” with surprise and good humor; and we committed to pray with and for the female theological graduates who are ready to serve their church as clergy the moment it becomes possible.

The most obvious gift we North Carolinians received from our Batswana hosts was their unstinting hospitality. We visitors relied on them for everything from food and drink to language interpretation and bathroom access, and we were always treated generously. Everywhere we went, we were offered lavishly spread buffets, tea, the fresh water we craved in the dry heat and peanuts, an African crop that our hosts were surprised to find was familiar to us. As we drove up to churches, we often spotted members working over a fire outside, putting the final touches on beef, vegetables, rice and sorghum. When they caught sight of our bus approaching, our new friends would jump up to wave and offer another gift: song. We were welcomed with song, we picked up choruses in Setswana, and we all sang hymns by Charles Wesley together. Many of us North Carolinians were left thinking we need more singing in our lives, so don’t be surprised if pilgrims bring a desire for song back to our parishes!

COMING TOGETHER AGAIN

Our diocese will have an opportunity to reciprocate hospitality, and the two dioceses will continue to love and learn from each other, when a group of pilgrims visits North Carolina from Botswana next year (tentatively scheduled for June). It’s impossible to predict what will most impress, intrigue or surprise our friends; what may seem familiar and what will seem strange. What we do know is that next year’s pilgrimage will continue to do what previous ones have: put faces to names, put names into prayers, put human flesh on our oneness in Christ.

That’s what companion diocese relationships do for the Church. They save us from abstraction and ground us in the Incarnation. Most talk of globalization today focuses on business and international crises and much of the talk is negative, tinged with fear of people we can’t see, don’t know and don’t trust. But as Christians, we believe we are members of a Body that both transcends time and space and is also made up of individual persons living our lives in a dizzying variety of places and ways. This Body is infinitely rich and yet can never be bought or sold. Its foundation, and its lifeblood, is love. Connections between parishes and ministries within our own diocese incarnate that love, and remind us of it when we forget. But connections with Anglicans who live half a world away, whose mother tongue most Americans can’t understand, whose history is dramatically different yet closely intertwined with our own, are an even more vibrant sign of our unity and diversity. As our world continues to grow smaller, and the Church enters more deeply into the challenging yet creative era in which we find ourselves, these companion relationships will offer more than we have yet received or imagined.

The Rev. Canon Rhonda Lee is a regional canon for the Diocese of North Carolina.