Multicultural Partnership of Faith

Duke Divinity School will send students and faculty to a South African theological school and host their academic counterparts beginning in the 2001-02 academic year through a partnership with John Wesley College, Dean L. Gregory Jones announced Wednesday. The "partnership covenant," to be signed Thursday, Oct. 19, by Duke Divinity School, the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and John Wesley College, calls for all three to "commit ourselves to a ministry of reconciliation, accepting God's call to live as ambassadors for Christ." The document also declares that all three partners will work to "strengthen ties with one another through friendship, mutual engagement and bearing one another's burdens." "Duke Divinity School is strongly committed to the importance of racial reconciliation, and we want to emphasize it even more in the future," Jones said. "We have a great deal to learn from the leadership of our brothers and sisters in South Africa, especially in the journey to a new South Africa and their struggles for truth and reconciliation." Bishop Mvume Dandala, presiding bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, arrived on the Duke campus Wednesday for a two-day visit to initiate the partnership between the divinity school and the 3-year-old seminary in the Republic of South Africa. Selected Duke students will make a two- or three-week "pilgrimage of pain and hope" to South Africa beginning in the summer of 2001. Student placements lasting three months to a year are in the planning stages. In addition, some divinity faculty members will spend portions of their summers teaching students at John Wesley College, which is located in Kilnerton, near Pretoria. Seminarians and faculty from John Wesley College will visit Duke as well. As a first step, students on each campus are praying for their counterparts each week. Duke students light candles symbolically wrapped in barbed wire, which were made in the South African township of Ivory Park. Peter Storey, professor of the practice of Christian ministry at Duke, helped structure the partnership between the schools. Storey is the former president of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and was bishop of the Johannesburg/Soweto area for 13 years. A native South African, he was a national leader in the church's struggle against apartheid and served as prison chaplain in the 1960s to Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. After Mandela was elected president, he appointed Storey to help select members of the nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. First-year students of all races at John Wesley College are immersed in cross-cultural settings in Johannesburg, including Soweto Township, the site of some of South Africa's deadliest struggles of the past. "It's a fairly traumatic and exciting introduction to university," said Storey. During their second and third years, students study in Kilnerton. For a century, the Kilnerton campus housed a Methodist educational complex. It was shuttered for 20 years when apartheid policy forced the church out of education in a state-sanctioned effort to lower the standards of black education. Only after the end of apartheid did the church establish a seminary on the site and begin to buy back the buildings that it previously owned. The seminary is pressing claims for restitution for the lost property under the new laws of South Africa. The partnership between Duke and John Wesley College will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 19, during a service of Eucharist at York Chapel in which Dandala will preach. Dandala, whose jurisdiction covers six nations and numerous institutions including John Wesley College, will speak with divinity students that afternoon. Duke Divinity School is one of Duke's seven professional schools. It is affiliated with the United Methodist Church and enrolls students from approximately 40 denominations.