Stewards of Grace

A Reflective, Mission Biography of Eugene and Phyllis Grams in South Africa, 1951–1962

Grams

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781498273367
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Stewards of Grace tells several stories in one. It is a story of two faithful stewards of God's grace called to serve the poor, despised, and marginalized in apartheid South Africa. It is a story that captures how cross-cultural missions from the west at the end of the colonial era led to a thriving church in the southern hemisphere. It is a story of God's power to redeem and transform the lost, heal the sick, and build the church of Jesus Christ. It is a story of the positives and negatives of Pentecostal missions in its third generation in the mid-twentieth century. And it is a story of radical Christian discipleship.Written first for those who would like to know the story of the first of six decades of ministry for Eugene and Phyllis Grams, this book also reflects on mission theology and practice. The very personal story is full of painful struggles and amazing miracles, human opposition and divine triumph, and examples of how God's plan works through and despite human weaknesses for the praise of his glory and grace. Reflection on ministry, missions, theology, and the Christian life are based on Scripture, history, and the Grams' personal experiences. The biographical narrative explores such things as the call to Christian service, evangelism, church planting, justice, compassion, cross-cultural ministry, partnerships, and spiritual power. The result is both a riveting biography and a narrative theology of mission practice to challenge and encourage every believer.

1

Under the Thorn Tree

The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from now on and forevermore. (Psalm 121.8)1

The children were overjoyed at the thought of a picnic away from their squalid township with its little cement block houses, their corrugated tin roofs baking in the African sun, bits of rubbish blowing along the dirt roads, and the uncertainties of life that poverty daily delivers. “What is a picnic?” they had asked. This was a new idea to them. Ed Louton and his older sister Phyllis had grown up taking picnics on Belle Isle near East Detroit, Michigan in the United States of America. They told the children that they were going to go to the countryside, and there would be lots of interesting food, places to run, singing, and games.

Ed, Phyllis and their new African friend, Clifford Dammie, transported thirty children to the picnic site a few miles outside Mokopane, the African township that lay beside the white town of Potgietersrus. Most of the children had never driven in a car before, and Ed had only recently learned how to drive his father’s car. The Louton family had settled in this small town just a few months earlier as first-time missionaries to South Africa. The year was 1951. Potgietersrus was about one hundred and seventy miles north of Johannesburg on the road to Rhodesia and just thirty-six miles to the south of the larger town of Pietersburg,2 which was situated at 4,035 feet above sea level and 1,000 feet higher than Potgietersrus. Both of these northern Transvaal towns are dry and dusty. The hot climate of this region of South Africa does, however, give way to luscious, green, forested areas as the elevation changes to still higher heights not far from Pietersburg. Still, the sights, sounds, and smells of their new home in Africa were completely different from the large, American city that the Loutons had so recently left behind.

The Mokopane location was named for the people of the area. The name “location” or “township” was given to areas set aside for non-white residents that sprang up around white settlement areas. The largest of these in South Africa was “Soweto” (“South Western Townships”) on the West Rand near Johannesburg. These townships sprang up as service communities to the white towns and cities.

Ed and Phyllis had initiated a ministry to children and youth in the Mokopane location. On Friday nights, they would begin to sing and walk through the streets of the location. Children playing in the streets and young people about their own ages would hear them, leave what they were doing and follow them to the church building, where they would hold a service.

Their parents, Albert and Louise, also had a ministry in the surrounding villages. The whole Louton family, including little, two year old Joy, would drive out on a Saturday or Sunday to a nearby village and begin to sing under the trees until people gathered, and then they would hold an open air service. The Africans loved to sing, to move with the music, to wave their hands. They could sing the same song repeatedly, and they could continue singing for a full hour. In this regard, church meetings were quite different from many Western services, with their liturgies, recited prayers, hymnal singing, and so forth. Such worship was formal, even logical, but all too subdued for a continent of people who sang as much with their bodies as with their voices, were by and large an oral culture, and did not concern itself with form. As Pentecostals, however, the Loutons had little concern for formal worship too, and they saw extended times of worship as the mark of spiritual fervor. Pentecostal worship, itself influenced by the black church in America, was a natural fit for Africa.

On Sundays, the Loutons would again go out to the villages to transport whoever wished to the church service in the Mokopane location. These were in many ways happy days. The missionaries were appreciated and well received, and they in turn enjoyed the people in the villages and locations. The people in these more remote areas had not yet fully felt the bite of apartheid as it was taking hold, law by law, of the country.

As Ed ferried the Sunday School children in his father’s Suburban to the picnic, he was just beginning a lifetime of ministry in this country. He was all of eighteen years old, adaptable, exuberant, and, most of all, he loved the people. He quickly learned the language of Sepedi, came to understand the culture, and would, many years later, become an instructor in missions at the Africa School of Missions in Nelspruit.

The picnic that day was highly unusual, if not illegal. Since 1948, South Africa was settling into the social and political cement of apartheid (meaning “separateness”). The government was industriously passing laws for racial separation in intricate detail. The children might not have been aware of any such laws, but an immense wall of legislative acts was dividing the country into color zones. Beaches, parks, benches, drinking fountains, toilets, places to live, who could marry whom, schools, busses, trains—the list was endless to establish “separateness” between the races. The British had practiced such separation throughout their Empire, including in the Union of South Africa, but the Afrikaaner government in the country turned apartheid into a fine art—and legal system. These were now the days in South Africa when the Nationalist Party was in power. Some three years before the Loutons arrived in the country, the Nationalist leader Daniel F. Malan had led his party to victory in the national elections.

CAPSULE: Apartheid

In the Afrikaans Dutch Reformed Church, apartheid was law and even doctrine. In 1857, the General Synod ruled that blacks should worship separately from whites on account of the church’s weaker brethren’s wishes. Over time, the Bible was used to back up this view. God had separated the races that had attempted unity at the time of the Tower of Babel: what God had set apart, let no man bring together. As the Afrikaaners trekked inland in the 1800s, they saw themselves as the Israelites entering the promised land. The Israelites long ago had confronted the Canaanite inhabitants in battle for the land; now the Afrikaaners met the African tribes in battle. Were the Canaanites not descendants of Ham, who had been cursed by his father, Noah? The victories of these new Israelites settling Canaan only confirmed that they were God’s chosen people to dwell in this land. Just as God had warned the Israelites to remain separate from the Canaanites, so God’s people in Africa should remain separate too.

Since the Nationalist Party took charge of the government in 1948, several laws had been enacted to establish apartheid in the country. In 1949, the Mixed Marriage Act made marriage between whites and blacks illegal. That year also saw passage of the Population Registration Act, which classified the races of South Africa into three groups. English speakers were grouped with the Afrikaaners by virtue of their European ancestry, while the various African tribes were grouped together as natives or Africans. Another major group under apartheid was the so-called Coloured race, a mixture of races. It at first included Indians and other Asians, but they would later be distinguished as a separate group.

The largest grouping by far was the “Bantu,” or native Africans, who belonged to a number of different tribes. While different areas of the country would have different percentages of these “races”—more Indians and Zulus in Natal, more Coloureds in the Cape, more Basotho in the Orange Free State, more Xhosas in the Eastern Cape, for example—each larger racial group was well represented almost everywhere, including in the northern Transvaal. However, another law, the Group Areas Act, permitted the government to designate certain areas of the country as regions restricted for use by a given race. The Illegal Squatters Act of 1951 permitted the government to relocate people from urban areas. And the Abolition of Passes Act, despite its title, required blacks to carry identity books—passes—at all times. In 1951, the government began to create “homelands” for each tribal group that were intended eventually to separate African tribes from each other and remove them completely from white-ruled South Africa.

Potgietersrus bore a name that told the story of apartheid itself. It symbolized the separation of races and the domination of the races by the white settlers. The town had been named for Hendrikus Potgieter, a commandant who was killed in the region in 1854 when his forces engaged an Ndebele chief by the name of Mokopane. His forces had been ambushed, and so they pursued Mokopane’s warriors, laying siege to them in a cave. Most of the three thousand warriors died of thirst, and the rest were killed when they tried to break free.

Nobody in 1951 could have guessed that apartheid would one day be overturned. The Afrikaaners were still advancing against the Bantu, no longer with their weapons but now with their laws. Yet just forty-two years later, in 1993, Nelson Mandela would become South Africa’s president, and Potgietersrus would be renamed Mokopane.

In 1951, Mandela was already working towards that end as one of the key leaders in the African National Congress. The ANC had been organized in 1912 by various African leaders in order to protect the rights and freedoms of all Africans. In 1950, Mandela was elected to the ANC’s National Executive Committee, which was reshaping the ANC into a more aggressive form of opposition to the Nationalist Party’s apartheid agenda. In response to the Nationalist Party’s victory in 1948, the ANC in the following year called for full citizenship of all South Africans over against separate development. They called for voting privileges, land redistribution, trade unions, and free education for all. To attain this, they advocated strikes, boycotts, non-co-operation, and civil disobedience. In 1952, Mandela became the Volunteer-in-Chief to travel the country and organize people into a mass civil disobedience to defy the injustice of the apartheid laws.

• • •

But what would the picnicking children have known that day in 1951 about all this separation of the races? Neither did Ed, Clifford, or Phyllis have politics on their minds. They had simply planned a picnic outside the African township, outside white Potgietersrus: two white American adults, one African adult, and some thirty African children. The air was full of excitement, with the joyful singing of the children as they travelled into the countryside. Some of the children sang songs learned in their Sunday School classes in their native Ndebele and Sepedi tongues, and Phyllis and Ed joined in as best they could. Both of them had lovely voices, and the exuberant singing of the children was irresistible.

After leaving the first group of children and Phyllis at the picnic site, Ed and Clifford returned to Potgietersrus to bring the food and the rest of the children from the township in the Suburban. The children ran higgledy-piggledy along the riverbank, climbing rocks, and trying to kick over the two or three foot high anthills that dotted the landscape. The picnic already seemed a success, but Phyllis suddenly felt the great responsibility she had as the only adult present with these children. There seemed to be no danger from the river, which was at this time of year more of a riverbed with a little stream running in it. However, she had already heard of the flash floods that would suddenly swell these African rivers downstream without a cloud in the sky and sweep people away to their deaths. Or perhaps one of the little ones might slip and slide down the rocky embankment and injure herself. As Phyllis surveyed the timeless kopjes (hills) that emerged like little heads popping up through the veldt (grassland), she remembered a story about the leopards and poisonous snakes that were there. She had not yet become familiar with the beat of life on this strangely wonderful continent. In truth, they were fairly safe, since most of the truly dangerous African animals had retreated to more remote areas and thrived only in the game parks—except for the snakes. There were a variety of deadly adders and cobras, as well as mambas and boomslangs. Phyllis shuddered at the thought.

Just then, she noticed that the children were chasing what seemed to her to be butterflies. They were actually ants that emerged from the anthills with wings at this time each year to fly away and begin a new colony. The children caught them, plucked off their wings, pinched off their heads, and popped them into their mouths. Phyllis was aghast. She had never seen anything like this, and she did not know that eating flying ants was a time-honored tradition all over Africa that was not at all dangerous. They were tasteless: eating flying ants is all about texture—bush popcorn, without the salt and butter, and a little wigglier.

Phyllis decided that she had best restore some semblance of order. She called to the children and had them sit in the shade of a large acacia tree. “Let’s sing,” she said. After a few songs, Ed and his friend had not yet arrived, and so Phyllis told the children a Bible story. She was just finishing when the rest arrived, and the prepared food was set out. After the picnic, the children chased the flying ants once again while the adults sat in the shade of the large acacia tree and watched them at play.

This part of South Africa, with its warm, sunny climate, grows some very different foliage from what the Loutons had known back in Detroit, Michigan. It is a good climate for planting bougainvillea and poinsettias, and these, along with the beautiful jacaranda trees, give delightful color and scent to the town. But these were not indigenous plants. Here in the countryside, the indigenous plants of the northern Transvaal dotted the veldt. Potgietersrus is warm enough and far enough to the north, very near the tropic of Capricorn, for marula and baobab trees to be seen in the veldt. The marula tree’s overripe fruit is the wild animals’ beer, and they love it. A staggering elephant that had had its fill of marula nuts once sat on a car! The swollen trunk and root-like branches of the baobab tree, seldom in leaf, give it the appearance of being stuck into the ground upside down. But the most common tree is the fever tree, also known as the thorn tree or acacia, whose wood had once been used by the Israelites to build the ark of the covenant during their wanderings in the Sinai. The acacia is said to be a symbol of refuge, since its branches extend far out from its trunk and form an inviting umbrella in the African sun. Its little leaves help it to survive very dry conditions; a larger leaf would quickly dry out and wilt. The acacia offers more than refuge from the sun, however; it is capable of providing food for animals, birds, and insects, and yet its long thorns give it protection from some animals.

Ed and Phyllis noticed a plaque on the thorn tree under which they were sitting. They stood up and walked over to the trunk, being careful to avoid a low-hanging branch with its three-inch thorns. “David Livingstone slept here,” Ed read out loud. Dr. Livingstone, the famous African explorer and missionary, had begun his ministry in South Africa. He had arrived at Kuruman in the northern Cape Province in 1841 to join the mission work ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Under the Thorn Tree
• Chapter 2: An Outpouring of the Spirit
• Chapter 3: A Clear Calling
• Chapter 4: The First Wedding
• Chapter 5: The Second Wedding, and a Honeymoon
• Chapter 6: New Pietersburg and Beyond
• Chapter 7: Village Ministry
• Chapter 8: Old John
• Chapter 9: Faith
• Chapter 10: Tshediso
• Chapter 11: Furlough
• Chapter 12: Welkom
• Chapter 13: From Every Tribe and Tongue and People and Nation
• Chapter 14: Lesotho
• Chapter 15: Return to Welkom
• Chapter 16: Into the Bundu: Sekhukhuneland
• Chapter 17: Testimonies of Transformation: Middelburg
• Chapter 18: Name Above Every Name: Machachan
• Chapter 19: God’s Gold
• Chapter 20: Restitution
• Chapter 21: Fields White for the Harvest
• Afterword
• Pictures
• Bibliography