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JOINING HANDS FROM MOZAMBIQUE, GHANA, KENYA AND MALAWI TO PLANT TREES Episcopal Relief and Development ran a training workshop, and before the Eucharist, trees were planted. Others will be distributed for planting Bishop Magangani from Malawi, Bishop Joshua from Massenoem East Kenya and Bishop Vicente Msosa from Niassa – Mozambique took part

A ROCHA IN A TIME OF LOSS A tragic car accident took place in South Africa and the International Director and his wife of A Rocha (Christians in Conservation),  Chris and Suzanne Naylor were tragically killed.  A Rocha founder Peter Harris and his wife Maranda were also in the accident , tragically Maranda passed away and Peter is still in hospital As part of our prayers for him and honouring the work of the Naylors, a “Church in Creation” was held by the river and some of the reflections were from Peter Harris’s work Is creation care biblical? The way the Bible frames the question, ‘What is Christian mission?’ is to ask us who Jesus is, and what it means to follow him as Lord. Many passages serve as examples: the first chapters of Mark’s gospel are among the clearest presentations of many. Through a series of episodes, Mark introduces us to Jesus – Lord over sickness, religion, politics, the personal life. And then as he tells us of Jesus stilling the storm, he makes it clear that he is Lord over the weather, and by extension over all creation. This goes far beyond seeing the story as simply a reassurance of personal comfort in times when the weather gets rough and the boat of our personal life threatens to be overwhelmed. Equally, from the beginning of Genesis to the final promises of Revelation, the biblical story is one of God’s love reaching out to his whole creation, and supremely to people within it. Nothing else can explain the promise of the first covenant in Genesis 9:17: ‘This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on earth’, or the ringing hope of Romans 8:19-21: ‘The creation itself was subjected to futility… in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the glorious freedom of the children of God’. The Bible understands that those who follow Jesus as Lord are led straight into relationship with him, and thereby to the restoration of all their relationships, personal, social and with the wider creation itself. We never find the biblical call to mission beginning with people, then simply trying to assess their most pressing needs. This agenda owes more to the humanism of the renaissance and enlightenment than a robust Christian world view that begins with the question, ‘Who is God, and how can we make him known in the world?’ The logjam in evangelical thinking that has so sadly opposed social action to evangelistic endeavour, rather than understanding both as a consequence of the knowledge that Jesus is Lord, is only one of the consequences of this false point of departure. For people like ourselves, raised in a post-enlightenment culture that puts people and not God at the heart of our thinking, such a re-ordering doesn’t always come naturally but we cannot but admit that it is more biblical. Praying for those who have lost loved ones and for the broader A Rocha family at this time of sorrow. The meditation was led by James Irlam Photos by James Irlam

SWEEPING THE CITY As part of the Love Cape Town City Fest, Green Anglicans joined A Rocha (Christians in conservation) and African Enterprise to ‘Sweep the City’, a clean up campaign linked with the Christian Festival in Cape Town Clean ups took place in Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha

FOR THOSE IN PERIL ON THE SEAOur Family @ St Mary the Virgin, Struisbaai had their Sea Sunday service today where our Clergy blessed the Fishermen, Boats and prayed for all the families who depends on the sea for their daily lives.’Photos All Saints Church Bredasdorp

Rachel Nyaradzo Adams delivered an inspirational story of courage to the Michaelhouse community at our 123rd annual Speech Day on Friday. A curious thing is happening in Southern Africa. Baobab trees are dying. Statistics show that in the last 12 years alone, 9 of the 12 largest baobab trees and 5 of the 6 tallest have suddenly died. The Panke tree, the oldest in the world at 2500 years, once beautifully nestled in the soils of Zimbabwe, died in 2011. Holboom of Namibia, with a girth of 35.1m, also died a few years ago and the Sunland Boabab of South Africa, at a 1000 years old collapsed in 2016 and died finally in 2017. These once robust manifestations of strength, longevity, healing, spirituality and protection are collapsing and coming to the end of their impressive and beautiful story. Researchers are not clear why this is happening. These trees, which have faced far worse weather conditions than what we are facing now, and managed still to survive, are all of a sudden succumbing to conditions that we are yet to be clear on. And while researchers are fixated with the question why, I am preoccupied with the question ‘what’? What does it mean when the theatre that we call life starts to change dramatically all around us. What questions are we to ask when all that we have known to be true and sufficient no longer is? What answers do we allow to emerge in the process of asking and do we have the courage to face the requirements of those answers? I will turn to biomimicry for an answer, the field of study that looks to nature to solve some of our most pressing challenges. With the lens of biomimicry we look at patterns or occurrences in nature and search for the wisdom they reveal for possible application in our day to day lives. And so we fix sound problems on bullet trains by learning from the design of birds like the owl and the kingfisher. We learn how to run businesses like a redwood forest. We imitate shark skin to create bacteria resistant plastic surfaces for hospitals. In my field of work, which is leadership development and personal mastery, I am also looking to occurrences in nature for metaphors – symbolic moments from which I can draw both wisdom and inspiration. This moment when the baobab is dying, feels like a significant one. A moment in which I imagine these trees are whispering to us, inviting us to look around us and ask “what else is dying?” “What else no longer works?” “What else needs new ways of being?” We are a continent of old problems. Leaders who we once considered our heroes and our liberators have in many cases betrayed our freedoms. Systems, which were off to a good start in yesteryear, are now failing to support our populations – (think healthcare, education, and infrastructure such as power and water supply) – and many people are being left behind as a result. Cultural practices of hierarchy and power distance in which we cannot criticize or provide feedback to leaders who are older than us are relegating our countries and organizations to old ideas and old preferences. I came out of a process a few weeks ago where I was talking to a number of young people from across the continent and not a single one thought their country’s ecosystems were supportive to them reaching their fullest potential. The World Bank echoes the frustration. A report released two days ago states that extreme poverty will become almost exclusively an African phenomenon by 2030, with 90% of the world’s poor projected to live on the continent. So biomimicry. The African continent is having what I am now calling a baobab moment, a moment in which we are faced with the reality that whatever we thought was going to work, and what we thought was going to be resilient, is not going to work and is not as resilient as we would have liked to believe. Whatever ideas we had about progress, development, governance, systems, institutions are being challenged, even the idea of Africa Rising is being disputed on many fronts. So much is questionable. Too much is difficult. The future is currently unknowable. We need new ideas. I have learnt that the only lens that matters when we are faced with the difficult and unknowable, is courage, that characteristic that C.S Lewis described as “not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point”. When we start to see life move in a direction that is not supportive of our highest ideals, we must be willing to wear courage as our armour. This afternoon, I hope I can infect you with an appetite for this value that is already written into your school’s code. I hope I can ignite in you the courage to look squarely in the eye the changes that are all about us – in our schools, our communities, our countries and on our continent. Through my own story and experiences, I will share with you what I believe are the four key practices of courage. I use these with my clients at both a personal and group/team level, but I consistently go to them in my own life which often requires courage and courageous commitment. I hope that whether you face a baobab moment in your own personal life, or if you are faced with the calling to address larger, archaic, structural issues. Issues like xenophobia fed by the old problem of imagined borders; gender-based violence fed by the old idea of unhealthy masculinities; violence in general fed by the old amygdala based idea of making peace by waging war; poverty fed by the old idea of greed, class-maintenance and privilege – whatever your mission, I hope you find some use for the practices that have been such an anchor for me. In 2015, I held the prestigious title of Director