As the CWM Assembly began in Durban, South Africa, 250 delegates and ecumenical guests gathered for a week of praying, working, and acting together as they explore the theme “Rise to Life: Together in Transformation.”
Keynote speaker Prof. Puleng Lenka-Bula set the tone by reflecting on how hope and faith lead to transformative action. Lenka-Bula, of Lesotho and South African descent, is a trained feminist ethicist with a Ph.D. in Social Ethics.
She is the first woman Principal and Vice-Chancellor at the University of South Africa’s existence and the third Black Vice-Chancellor since the advent of democracy in 1994.
The Assembly theme suggests, Lenka-Bula said, that we are all called to action, to agency, and to active advocacy.
“Such a method takes risks to present the cogency of radical change, so we don’t discuss only for the sake of discussing,” she said. “The current global economic system is a pyramid system that at its center denies and denigrates humanity.”
She expressed grave concern over the deification of money and the rise of fundamentalism in the world.
“It is that important for the church and society not to forget too soon, that prior to 1994, people like me were not human, according to the laws of South Africa,” she said. “They were walked over, and the majority were trampled upon.”
She also questioned what it means to genuinely extend solidarity to those who are being decimated in Gaza. “What does it mean when we as church leaders do not ask these questions and appear to be somewhat complacent?” she said. “On whose side are we?”
She named ecological devastation as another serious challenge facing the world, citing as one example tornadoes and flooding that have wreaked havoc in the very area in which the Assembly is being held.
“A combined total of 21 lives are reported to have been lost in both tragedies, but you know that it’s not just here in South Africa that ecological degradation and climate change are a constant concern,” she said. “It is a threat that the world as we know it—or thought that we knew it—will no longer exist.”
She concluded her address with a call for missional imagination, action and, most of all, hope.
“Sisters and brothers, the work of transformation is not only the work of those at the high echelons of power,” she said. “God’s creation is not for exploitation but we must be in harmony so we can live together and rise in life.”
Active hope should be high on the agenda of the CWM Assembly, she concluded.
“Hope is based on the promise of God to all humanity, and it is based on the promise of salvation to all,” she said. “In this sense, hope is the relationship to the faith that can be articulated.”