ELKHART, Ind. (Mennonite Mission Network) – The earth trembled as South African government bulldozers moved in to destroy the evidence that people of diverse races could live together in harmony. Over the roar of the engines, Stanley Green pleaded with two dozen classmates lying in the path of the devastating machines. The year was 1974 and those stretched out on the ground were ready to make the ultimate sacrifice in protest of the apartheid system’s takeover of the Federal Theological Seminary of Southern Africa (Fedsem) campus in the town of Alice.
“Theirs was a reckless hope in the humanity of those who drove the bulldozers. But it was clear that the government would tolerate no opposition. The list of those who had been murdered by the security apparatus of the state was growing every day,” said Green, now Mennonite Mission Network’s executive director.
The situation was a troubling one for Green and the five other members of the Fedsem student government who implored their friends to abandon the life-endangering protest. Though the student leaders whole-heartedly supported the resistance, they deemed that it did not warrant the loss of human life. Green believed the protesters heeded their pleas because of the credibility of Stanley Mogoba, one of the six leaders, who had spent years on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela.
Because Mogoba had paid a great price for his resistance, his analysis that, in that particular moment, it was not strategic to become another statistic in the government’s implementation of a horrific system, convinced the student protestors to walk away from certain death, Green said.
When 19-year-old Green began university studies at Fedsem in 1972, it was the first time he had lived in proximity to people of other races. His family was classified coloured by the country’s Population Registration Act of 1950 that separated South African people into four distinct communities based on the color of their skin. At the top of this social ladder was the white minority composed of the descendants of European settlers. The dark-skinned indigenous majority was relegated to the lowest status. Asians from many countries, often referred to as Indians, and coloureds (people of mixed ancestry) occupied the middle rungs. Green calls this segregation a pigmentocracy1 where privilege was based on skin color.
During his four years at Fedsem – a nondenominational, interracial university that defied the apartheid system – Green discovered the liberation of interracial worship, study and play.
Download full-resolution image.“One of the abiding feelings for me is sadness at the impoverishment inflicted upon all people living in a segregated society,” Green said. “Fedsem created an island of harmony in the midst of the insanity of the government’s propaganda, which asserted that integration leads to chaos and goes against the laws of God.”
Inspired by this reality of different racial groups living and working together, Green became involved in the South African Students’ Organization (SASO), which was founded by Stephen Biko, a medical student who mobilized South Africa’s people of color to speak out against the injustice of the apartheid system. Green became acquainted with Biko and engaged in protests alongside him until Biko became a martyr of the anti-apartheid movement when he died in police custody in 1977.
After the government’s expropriation of Fedsem’s land and buildings, St. Bede’s College in Mthatha, Transkei (a quasi-independent homeland at that time), invited Fedsem to hold classes on their campus. Professors and about 200 students traveled the 140 miles to continue their education, first living in tents about three miles from St. Bede’s classrooms. Later, pre-fab buildings were erected to house the students. In 1975, Green graduated from Fedsem with a Bachelor’s degree in theological studies.
Three Group Areas Act displacements
The move from comfortable accommodations at Fedsem to poorer ones was not the first, nor the last, downward displacement forced on Green by the apartheid regime.
In 1959, when Green was 5 years old, the government created a coloured group area2 to which his family had to move. From a financially stable lifestyle where his father was employed as a labor union representative and his mother worked for a printing company, the Green family was forcibly relocated to an empty plot in the designated coloured area. This uprooting necessitated long commutes to the city center where his parents were employed. Soon after the move, while his mother was on pregnancy leave, Green’s father was fired as he attempted to negotiate better working conditions with management.
“Both of my parents were without work and they were in the midst of building this house. I remember that we propped up tables for doors, nailed boards over the openings for windows, and slept on mattresses on the concrete floor,” Green said.
Download full-resolution image.Yet another forced relocation occurred in 1980 when the church in Dysselsdorp, Green’s second ministerial appointment, lost one of its properties. (Green’s first assignment, a three-year co-pastorate of an 8,000-member Congregational church in Oudtshoorn, came immediately after his graduation in 1975.) In the Dysselsdorp congregation, Green was the sole pastor of 4,000 members scattered in 19 locations on farms around the town. Every Sunday, Green preached in three different congregations, in addition to performing baptisms and serving communion. The main church in town seated 2,000. Green preached there every other Sunday and divided up his Sunday afternoons and alternate Sundays attending to the needs of smaller gatherings on the farms.3
During the week, Green helped to oversee schools for black and coloured children on the farms. The church buildings served as classrooms, because the government didn’t provide educational facilities for the children of farm workers.
“It was a very exhausting, tiring ministry,” Green said. “Often, the farm owners, who were upstanding Christians of the Dutch Reformed Church, made very little connection between their confession of faith and social justice. We worked hard to help the children of the laborers gain an education and escape the penury and the degradation of working on the farms.”
In compensation for Dysselsdorp congregation’s building that was seized because it was located in a newly designated white area, the government offered a monetary sum worth 10 percent of the cost of rebuilding. So, members rebuilt with volunteer labor in the neighboring village of De Rust, about 6 miles away. Weekday evenings at 6 p.m., Green would drive around to his parishioners’ homes with the church pickup truck. After a full day at their jobs, about a dozen men would hop into the back of the truck sitting on bags of cement and wooden planks. They would continue their hard manual labor working until midnight to construct their new church building.
Missionary ministry in Jamaica and California
After three years of serving the Dysselsdorp church, Stanley Green and Ursula, his wife of five years, were chosen by the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa to become missionaries in Jamaica. Following five years of leadership in three congregations of the United Church of Jamaica and Grand Cayman, the Green family – which had grown to include son, Stanley III (Lee) in 1980, moved Pasadena, Calif., where Stanley began to pursue a doctorate in missiology at Fuller Theological Seminary. There, the Greens helped to found the Pasadena Mennonite Church and, then, Stanley went on to serve as senior pastor of Faith Mennonite Church in Downey, Calif. A second son, James, was born to the Green family in 1988.
Discovering Anabaptism brings together two streams of Christian faith
Becoming part of the Mennonite Church resolved enormous tension for Green, who through his growing-up years had been torn between the spirituality reflected in his mother’s intimate relationship with God through expressions learned in the Pentecostal church, and his father’s Anglican background that emphasized the social dimensions of the gospel. After his parents’ marriage, they attended the Congregational church as a compromise. This was the church in which they raised their children.
“So I had this bifurcated spiritual influence,” Green said, about the divergent faith expressions in his family that mirrored those in the larger South African society. “I happened to be in a Pentecostal church when I heard the call of Christ.”
Green, 17 years old when he committed his life to Jesus, continued to struggle to bring together his desire for a living relationship with Jesus that he saw in his mother, and his longing to minister to a hurting world in the name of Christ that followed in the steps of his father’s faith.
“It wasn’t until I heard Anabaptist/Mennonite speakers articulate a creative convergence between those two dimensions as essential that I saw the possibility of overcoming the gulf that separated the two parts of my religious experience,” Green said.
In 1977, following the Soweto riots that killed 700 schoolchildren, the South African Christian Leadership Assembly, a coalition concerned about the deepening divide between black and white Christians, brought together 3,000 leaders from across the country. Among the invited speakers were Mennonites from the United States – Myron Augsburger, Ron Sider, and John Howard Yoder. Green surmises that these formerly excluded pacifists were invited in an attempt to find a way to reduce the ever-increasing violence.
“What I found particularly refreshing was a sense that the divide that had infected the South African church was an anomaly,” Green said. “Hearing these Mennonites speak was a kind of homecoming that allowed me to affirm without reservation the expressions that both my parents had embraced in their lives.”
This holistic understanding of Jesus’ call served Green well when, in 1993, he was called to become president of, what is today, Mennonite Mission Network, whose tagline is “Together, sharing all of Christ with all creation.” He has ministered in this capacity for 20 years.
“I see you” – common humanity rather than monument-building
“I don’t feel particularly interested in rehearsing accomplishments I have achieved,” Green said. “The one thing I hope to be remembered by is that every person with whom I’ve had an encounter feels that I accorded them dignity and embraced them as another individual with whom I share common humanity.”
Green’s longing comes from growing up in a society where he not only felt invisible, but where there was an intentional effort to make him feel less than human because of the color of his skin. In Green’s adolescence, that lie of dehumanization was unmasked when missionaries from the United States, Jack and Louanne Parsons, came to Green’s church with a camera, a rarity in Green’s community in those days. Jack Parsons took many photos of members of the youth group.
Jack’s interest in making Green and his friends visible had a profound impact on the young people, telling them that they were important and that they mattered.
“I want to communicate this liberating and affirming message to every person I engage with. I want to tell them, ‘You matter,’” Green said. “This is my continuing protest against apartheid and every system that seeks to diminish people based on their ethnicity, skin color, or social status. I want to hail the humanity of every person I meet, and help them to know that they matter, despite whatever anyone else may say.”
The emphasis of the Parsons’ ministry resonated deeply with the Zulu cultural context in which Green grew up. The Zulu greeting, Sawubona, translates literally as “I see you.” The response, Yebo, means “Yes, I have been seen.”
“I really appreciate that greeting,” Green said. “It’s recognition of the other. To be seen is to somehow matter. I want every person I encounter to feel like they have had their dignity affirmed.”
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Footnotes:
1Apartheid became officially illegal in 1991, and the dismantling of the system gained ground with the election of Mandela as president in 1994.
2Discrimination existed prior to the Christian Nationalist Party coming into power in 1948, six years before Green’s birth. However, the new government codified segregation; introducing race classification, which became the basis for geographical “group areas” and housing segregation, as well as creating separate social services for each race and banning marriage between races. The latter was called “immorality” in apartheid speak.
3The apartheid government confiscated the land from black and coloured farmers with the goal of reducing non-white land ownership to 13 percent. Former land owners had to work for white commercial farmers in inhumane contracts, forcing them to buy everything from firewood to food staples from stores owned by the white farmers. Although the post-apartheid constitution promised land reform, today, only about 10 percent of seized lands have been returned to black and coloured farm families.
