A church without walls

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1:09The suburb is on one side of the M1, kind of like the main motorway that takes you from Johannesburg to Pretoria. It's a Monday morning in Johannesburg, South Africa. I'm with Jane Codrington and we're heading to a place where a church founded by Jane meets a couple of times a month. So we're heading into a school called Bella Vista School, which is a primary school, a remedial primary school. Jane was a Methodist pastor for years until she walked away from institutional religion to build her own church from scratch. She called it We Are Church. She says it's a community for those who haven't always felt at home in traditional church.

2:01We're a group of Christ followers seeking to find a space to be together without doing traditional church. We meet in a school hall. We really just are seeking to be love in the spaces we find ourselves. I'm John Offord and this is the documentary on the BBC World Service For this week's Heart and Soul I'm in South Africa hearing how setting up this new church has been far from easy for Jane Not only did it mean walking away from institutional religion but also family, friends and left her questioning her Christian faith altogether Today I've come to see what she's built in its place this is a school hall the semi-circle is laid out with sort of three rows and then at the front is a table just like that it's literally that simple we did a workshop on Palestine we did a trans 101 workshop and we did a child protection workshop in here before this school hall there was a Methodist church where Jane served as a pastor back at the house I asked Jane what it was that ultimately made her leave the institutional church I think maybe the hypocrisy of it the struggle that I witnessed to see authenticity in the people leading the people who were managing the money the finances who were living their lives in one way and then preaching something different from the pulpit.

3:42I wanted to ask you if you can describe what it felt like emotionally to turn your back on your faith community. It was very distressing and I found myself in therapy for about six months solidly because there was a sense in which I wasn't believed. Were there moments you doubted the decision you'd made? Absolutely. And doubted God and doubted what I thought was a call, doubted what I thought my entire belief system and structure there was a sense in which I questioned pretty much my whole world view I guess so that seeking out of those few years was really really key. Did leaving ever feel like a betrayal of your calling or your or your past self?

4:30In some ways but But in other ways, it felt almost being more true to who I was. So there was a sense in which it was more about awakening and becoming. That sense of coming out and saying, this is who I am and this is what I stand for. And everybody else can just get over themselves. I am no longer going to stand for this. There was a sense of that. And it was liberating. A big part of We Are Church's ethos is the embrace of people from the LGBTQI plus community. It's a stance that has cost Jane family and friends. So Jane, so some of your family don't speak to you anymore because of your decision to leave the institutional church.

5:23How has that affected you? It's been devastating. It's meant that my children lost out on relationships that they could have benefited from. It's meant that I've lost out on relationships. My husband has. It's devastating. and it's also made me wonder if I could have done more and whether I have been a hypocrite because I have said that I stand for love and I have, in inverted commas, given up. but I have reached, I sadly have had to draw a line in the sand for my mental health really because the constant rejection and judgment has essentially been too much for me to bear. It is a sadness. It's a deep sadness.

6:28We've had family members tell us that we are, as in Graham and I, leading people to hell. We've been accused of being apostate. We've been accused of harboring sin and abuse. And yeah, we've been accused of all sorts of things. And And in the very early days, when we began the journey of questioning the scriptures and just interrogating some of what we were reading, I was in my early 30s and I had three small children and I had somebody say to me, why is your husband so intent on proving that being gay is okay? Is he gay himself? And I remember thinking, why would you even go there? Like, why?

7:37Jane's husband, Graham, has lived this story with her. The hurt, the accusations and the determination not to give up on faith altogether.

7:45Jane Codrington:For me, the remarkable thing about the people who are now in our faith community is that, to be honest, as beaten up as many of them are by the church, Whether it's beaten up because of their sexuality or beaten up because of the sexuality of their children, even weirder. Beaten up because life has beaten them up. And the church often spits out those people. Beaten up because of things they've done in their marriage or things done to them. or beaten up because they were asking the questions you're not allowed to ask at church about God and the Bible and other things. And I think for me the most amazing, humbling thing is these people, including myself, we still love Jesus.

8:37Jane Codrington:And so we weren't prepared to give up on our love of what Jesus and his model model and who we believe him to be of what that gives to us in our lives. For me, I never lost my faith. I just found deeper depths. As Jane's husband, obviously I'm going to say this, but she's the most remarkable woman and it's a real privilege to be her life partner and watch her express so much of who I know her to be as a human being, but to allow that to emerge into a community where she really has just become everybody's mother and big sister. Guys, no, you come. I think, why don't we take the stuff outside and just actually use that space, right?

9:24Otherwise it's sort of... And then if somebody wants to open up this and this, we can work out what we need in terms of groceries. In Jane's world, even a garage becomes a place of ministry. but it also tells you something about how far she has moved from the institution she once belonged to. I've basically been given by somebody who's moving overseas a few bags of clothes and I've got some people from the church with me and we're just going to go through them and see if we can find some good things that we can give away. These are some of our pride posters from last year. these are some of the posters that we stood on the side of the pride parade holding.

10:19This one says, you are so loved. We believe all people are made in God's image. God doesn't make mistakes. Our faith teaches us that love is a gift from God. And we stand with you. We love you. We embrace the LGBTQI community. So the idea with these is that if people are walking on the parade and they see these and the idea of being queer and Christian resonates with them. They can stop and talk to us. And was that quite a moment for you when you went to Pride in Johannesburg representing the church? How was that? So Graham and I wore t-shirts that said free mom hugs and free dad hugs and it was very emotional.

11:08People could see us from about 50 meters away and actually approached us crying. And interestingly, Graham got a lot more hugs than I did. More men and more boys were looking for dad hugs than men and women were looking for mom hugs, which I think speaks volumes. From spending the day with you, I know that obviously social activism and social justice is really important to you. Is that what drives you? Yeah. Yeah, I think it is. Absolutely.

11:58We've got to leave the world in a better place than how we found it. Where's this coming from, this overwhelming sense of needing to support people from the LGBTQ plus community? I think it's a justice issue, John. It's a justice issue. It's an issue of who is being left out and who is being excluded. and I can't help but see in the scriptures the verses and the way Jesus engages with, first of all, women. LGBTQ people in this time fall into the space of being marginalized in many, many spaces, especially in South Africa and especially in Africa. many parts of Africa are, they criminalize being gay and people are beaten and put in jail.

13:00In my mind, this is a justice issue. There's actually no, and advocating for this, it's the only thing to do because it's a justice issue. Inside the house, I meet Vincent, a graphic designer who has fled Uganda after being arrested for activism. As a graphics designer, I used to advocate for queer persons via my designs as I was doing posters and all that stuff. So it came to a notice that I was advocating for LGBTQ, whereby in Uganda it was an offence. So I decided to flee to South Africa because it is labelled as a country that welcomes queer persons. What would have happened to you if you'd stayed in Uganda?

13:54We were like, we are going to beat you to death. Because, honestly speaking, you were cursed to our family. And one thing I know, if I stayed in Uganda, I don't think I could be still alive by this time. Mommy Jen is more than a mom, but an angel sent from God. I'm human. I deserve a right to be free. I deserve a right to be loved.

14:35You're listening to Heart and Soul on the BBC World Service.

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16:14I'm John Offord and I'm in Johannesburg, South Africa, spending a day with Jane Codrington, a former Methodist pastor who walked away from institutional religion to build her own church for the people every other church had turned away. So I think we're very valid in the space. We Are Church meets in the school hall twice a month but the rest of the time it lives here in Jane's home in her garage and out on the streets of the city that afternoon more members of We Are Church gather at Jane's home for lunch over orange juice and quiche Dear Lord God thank you that we can all be in this place and thank you that we can share a meal together and we pray that you bless to our health in Jesus name Amen Over lunch I asked Jane when faith first became part of her life.

17:07It was during my teens.

17:11Maybe 15, 14, 15. And I don't know if I could even have said it was specific. but there was a sense of enjoying Bible teaching and seeing a comfort in it and an ability in it from then. But I don't know if I could be more specific than that. So you mentioned hypocrisy earlier. So you described the institutional church as full of hypocrisy, if you like. I wonder if you can share what you experienced. Well, I suppose one of the things, for example, would be around people's reaction to couples getting divorced. Then, for example, those two individuals who'd maybe been the victims, in inverted commas, of the fallout from that, would then pass on that same level of ungracious behavior to maybe a gay person who walked through the door or a homeless person who walked through the door or somebody who didn't quite match up.

18:34So the sense in which somebody had experienced rejection but couldn't then see that they were doing the exact same thing to the next person. And I saw it within our family as well. It just didn't make any sense to me. You would think that somebody who'd experienced such shameful treatment by others would then extend grace because they knew how it felt and yet couldn't. I just don't understand that. And then to be critical of something that one just has absolutely no idea about is also just, again, beyond me. So, yeah, that type of hypocrisy. Hello. Hello. How are you? Fine. How are you? Good. Hello.

19:33Hi. Hi, John. Sorry, Nicola. Nicola. Nicola. Nice to meet you, Nicola. That's Nicola Morrison with her husband, Christopher. She had been training for ministry in a Presbyterian church until she was dismissed after challenging its structures. They've been part of We Are Church since 2022. I joined We Are Church with Christopher, my husband, a few years ago and came from a Presbyterian background. and I was training to go into ministry. And then I left that not in a nice way after sort of seeing that structures and the way the organization functioned wasn't very equal. It was easy for me to leave the church because I was essentially fired for standing up against certain things.

20:22Coming from where we came from, we were under the impression that we were already inclusive but you don't see that until you get perspective. It's been a wonderful experience of just human beings all being who they should be. Listening to Nicola and Chris it's clear how much of this community is shaped by Jane so I ask her directly about the theology behind it. How do you reconcile biblical texts that are traditionally interpreted as condemning LGBTQ plus relationships with your theology of inclusion? The biblical texts have been badly translated. The scriptures that are generally referenced are referring in many places to violent, power-dynamic relationships, abusive relationships, and relationships that would mimic pedophilia.

21:32They are not referencing loving, same-sex relationships. The Sodom and Gomorrah passage, just as an example, is just a, that was never ever about homosexuality. That was about hospitality and rape. Where we get the word sodomite is just bizarre. I mean, that's just an absolute crazy, crazy thought. And I think what I've wrestled with more than anything is how, not the scriptures per se, but how the theology around those scriptures was essentially fed to us as the truth. And it was essentially based on a bad translation. And that's made me angry, actually. A whole generation and a whole culture has been shifted, changed, and marginalized, essentially, because of a group of white, straight, patriarchal people choosing a translation that suited them.

22:49That has been a wrestle for me more than the actual scriptures, if you like. So if you're wrong about this, what do you think God would say to you? Well, if I'm wrong, then I've loved and given grace to far too many people. I'm not really sure what to do with that. Do you ever doubt your interpretation? Doubt, yes. But I'm also fine with that. So I guess as I've grown older and read more, I'm more and more aware that I am probably a Christian agnostic. I may not know all the truth or even half the truth. I just would rather err on the side of being more loving, more inclusive, and more available, and more loving, I guess.

23:56It's as simple as that, than being more excluding, and more judgmental, and more dogmatic. and I would rather be wrapped over the knuckles for being too loving and too including than being not loving enough and not inclusive enough. What gives you confidence that you're not betraying your faith? I guess a deep sense of peace and a deep sense that I am loved and a deep sense of who I am. yeah and a deep sense of assurance i'm quite relaxed with the mystery quite relaxed but for jane these questions about exclusion and care are not abstract they are deeply personal so jane so you you have experienced personal loss recently in the family yeah yeah yeah We lost our youngest daughter three months ago.

25:06She passed away after a long illness, and I was her primary caregiver. That was a big part of my identity, I guess. Her life was filled with struggle. She was autistic and she was adopted from parents who were HIV positive. So her life began with us, with me as her advocate, right from the word go. So loving and caring for someone on the margins has been a role that I've fulfilled for a long time in many different ways. And what did Rebecca think about the church that you created and the drive for social justice? Rebecca loved going to church. I think her presence was instrumental in teaching many of the people at We Are Church about neurodiversity, really.

26:16She forced everybody by her presence to embrace noise, the unexpected. She forced people to be okay with interruptions, with the candle at the front being blown out, because she fancied blowing out the candle at the front. I think she would be proud of how we are continuing. I think she'd be good. She'd be good. I just can't begin to imagine how you guys are coping It is day to day but again I think part of a faith community that's authentic is that they're doing it with us and the grief and the crying and the sadness is not hidden and for me that's part of how we our church shows up it's doing what it just does how it naturally is and how it naturally works I ask Jane one final question when you look back at your life one day what do you hope this chapter says about you?

27:28I hope that there are just people out in the world who are in healthy whole relationships jobs spaces who are on the journey of faith navigating this world,

27:54feeling like they belong, feeling safe and seen because there was a space at a school where they were able to finally understand who they were and how much God loved them. and that space was made possible by a few individuals who rallied together and made some good coffee and unpacked the scriptures as best as they knew how by the end of the day i realized we are church is not really about buildings or doctrine or even disagreement it's about what happens when people stop asking who belongs and start asking who has been left out and in many ways I'm left with the sense that this is a church without walls.

28:53You've been listening to Heart and Soul on the BBC World Service. This programme was presented and produced by me, John Offord, with executive producer Rajiv Gupta.

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