Wednesday 30th March 2005
A knock at the door brings an elderly woman with a young baby asking for baptism. She is clearly not the mother and Christopher the new parish Priest at Postmastburg discovers that this is the grandmother. The daughter has no idea who the father is as she was raped in the city. Undoubtedly she is one of the 58% of women in South Africa who is HIV positive, but has gone back to the city leaving the baby with the extended family in the village.
Hermann the vicar at Mbarto, just back from his visit to the link parish at Deddington with Hugh White the incumbent there, has another funeral to do on Saturday. The coffin is very ornate and the funeral feast is massive. Hermann knows that the family has borrowed heavily for the cost of the funeral and is working with others to try to get a new culture of low cost funerals.
These are just two of the many issues that 11 clergy from the diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman shared in their summer school this year at Kimberley, held at the Railways Training centre there. They were there to taste working with Portfolio and Keith Gruneberg, Phillip Tovey and Keith Lamdin had travelled there to work alongside them and to learn from them as well as teach them.
For some years now the Culham Trustees, chaired by Tony Williamson, have been trying to find a way of using some of their trust fund income to enable some professional development for some clergy in the Anglican Communion in another part of the world. Clergy from our link diocese of K&K seemed a good idea. After a number of meetings to explore many options and after a couple of visits in both directions this was the launch for a joint dioceses CME (continuing ministerial education) and training venture. The overall plan is for these 11 clergy from K & K to work with Portfolio towards an award with our partner university Oxford Brookes.
The first part was our visit and teaching on a summer school in Kimberley and the second part will be their coming to stay in Oxford for a couple of weeks to continue their study. They will be based at Ripon College Cuddesdon and will be visiting parishes in our diocese on the middle weekend. Several of them are looking for link parishes so it would be great to start thinking now if you do not have a link with a parish. Every parish is the size of our diocese apart from a couple in Kimberley itself, and every parish has what they call outstations and we call multiparish benefices.
We are also looking for someone to make a donation to help each of these clergy buy their own computer so that we can be in email contact with them. They have committed to putting half of the cost from their own pocket but we do need help to match it. We are still waiting to hear from their diocesan secretary with an estimate of the cost, but if any reader would like to support this work, do get in touch.
Keith Lamdin is director of Stewardship, Training Evangelism and Ministry.