“Marriage discipline” in the African church had made me uneasy for twenty years. Now I was responsible for it. Girls seemed to graduate automatically from the confirmation class to the penitents’ class as they became pregnant. In Pretoria I asked my elders and betters about the boys: they replied enigmatically, “Well, you can’t tell.” The rules seemed daft, but I had no power to change them. Now I could no longer dodge the challenge.
Soon after my arrival in Malawi, I was conducting a confirmation in a strongly Muslim area near Lake Malombe, in a congregation led by Yohana, a returned soldier. His wife Anna had been a Muslim but was baptized before she and Yohana married in church. They had three children before Yohana joined the army in the 1940s and was sent to Ethiopia. Family pressure brought to bear on Anna, who gave up her Christianity and was married again to a man of her old faith whom her family had chosen for her. She was now the second wife of a Muslim.
Mainstay of the congregation
Yohana came back to his village after the war and made every effort to persuade Anna to rejoin him but without success. After two years of bachelordom, he married Mary, a Christian girl, by village custom. They had several children, two of whom I confirmed. The church elders and priest said that Yohana and his present wife were the mainstay of the congregation, now about a hundred strong. They had been together for fifteen years and their home was an example to Christians and Muslims alike. Both were “under discipline” – they could not receive commumion.
After hearing their story, I lifted the ban. Then the priest asked, “Can they now be married in church?” I had to say “No.” Church law saw him as still being married to Anna, now a Muslim; to marry Mary in church would be bigamy. I saw a string of unanswerable questions coming up, “Don’t they need the grace of marriage?” Doesn’t the Bishop want them to be faithful to each other till death?”
On the way home I reflected on the women of Esizibeni, the smallest, newest and most vibrant of our congregations in Swaziland. Every one of its ten members were women who were married to men of Swazi traditional religion. All of them would have been excommunicated for life under existing Church law. I wrote in the next Ecclesia:
Our marriage must express the spirit of the Good Shepherd who came to seek and save the lost. I came to Malawi from Swaziland where Christianity was often planted by Christian wives of polygamous husbands. It was a profound shock to learn that in Malawi none of them could have been baptized, not from any fault of their own but because they had the misfortune to belong to a society where polygamy was the rule. Changes are coming. One of them is that baptism will no longer be refused to a woman who is married to a polygamist.
I do not believe that the Christ who refused to condemn the woman caught in adultery would refuse the means of grace to a woman today who, caught in the meshes of an inhuman economic system, does the best that her conscience and her priest can tell her to do.
The ‘inhuman economic system’ was of course migrant labour. At the time I wrote, 300,000 of Malawi’s 600,000 men of working age at any one time were outside Malawi, on Witwatersrand gold-mines, on mines and farms in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) or on the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). In Mangochi District, where Yohana and Mary lived, women out- numbered men by two-to-one.
Province changes the rules
The Province considered all these problems and in 1969 One of many important decisions was to make it possible for a “non-christian man with more than one wife to be received into the church with his believing wives and children and in due course to be confirmed and to receive communion provided the local community gives its willing consent.” This had been forbidden by the Lambeth Conference of 1888 and had caused much heart-burning, especially where we were working in Moslem communities such as the southern lakeshore and the question had come to the fore in the researches by Adrian Hastings.
a new canon came into force, which provided for a small panel of three, usually the parish priest and two local lay-people to listen to the couple and make their recommendations to the Bishop. I wondered how this would be received. Instead of the shock I expected, everyone seemed delighted. John Liomba, a teacher who had been ordained as a voluntary priest, had been going through his parish records at Malindi and wrote:
Ellen Chuma’s case I found the most fantastic Ellen, now in her later fifties, was married to a faithful Moslem name Ngulinga some forty years ago. Hence she was excommunicated in the middle of 1931, in the days of Bishop Gerald Douglas. She has remained so until now. I could not believe this. I felt water collecting in the corners of my eyes. Forty-two years! But whose fault was it? Could poor Ellen have made a better choice?
The answer was “No.”
Ernest Chimpango’s problems
Ernest Chimpango was a victim of the harsh discipline of UMCA days, like so many Malawians he went to Southern Rhodesia to find work, he came back to the Ntchisi area after two years away, only to find his wife had found a new husband. He spent a year trying to persuade her to return, but it was too late.
Reluctantly he remarried and was promptly barred from communion. I went out to his village and found the whole congregation indignant. Women and men all agreed that a man could not live alone in a village. Ernest was their father-in-God in a huge parish with many congregations where a visit from the priest was a rarity. At a long meeting with the local clergy, they all agreed that he should continue as a lay leader in the congregation.
Ernest later moved to Blantyre, one-hundred-and fifty miles from Ntchisi, and set himself three tasks: to build up the Chewa-speaking congregation at St Paul’s; to found a new congregation at Chilomoni – some miles from St Paul’s; to build a semi-circle of churches from Chileka airport to Magomero, where the first missionaries who had come with Bishop Mackenzie in 1861 lie buried. Ernest was working for Air Malawi when I ordained him as a voluntary deacon in 1977, together with Douglas Cook, one of the leaders of the Thyolo congregation, Ernest’s wife was now leader of the Chilomoni branch of the Mothers’ Union in the congregation he had begun. On 18 February 1979, Ernest and Douglas were both ordained priests.
Lay leadership in action
Chapamanga congregation on the Mozambican border in the south-west corner of Malawi, began in 1979. A member of the congregation approached Fr Antonio, a Catholic priest, saying that there were refugees from Mozambique who wanted to be baptized. He said he had too much work on hand and sent the request on to me, addressed to Likoma Island! The letter eventually reached me and I passed it on to two splendid laymen at Nchalo Sugar Estates, Gileburg Chiweko and George Mtsinje. One worked in their head office, one in the sugar plantations. For several months they struggled each Saturday by bicycle the fifty miles of sandy road to Chapamanga to instruct the new catechumens, and to lead Sunday worship. Then fifty miles back again. (I was happy to be able to ordain them both soon afterwards as voluntary deacons and later as priests.
Ernest Chimpango baptises
A year later Ernest Chimpango was called from Blantyre to baptise this group. In an interview with the editor of Mpingo (as Ecclesia had now been renamed) he said:
It is fifty miles from Nchalo and it is a long way on a push-bike. I found that every thing had already been organised by the two deacons. On the first day I failed to baptize all the 100 people, I only baptised seventy-two because I got tired standing up to the waist in water in the River Mwanza. It was good that the area was hot; if it had been Blantyre it would have been different (Blantyre is 800m higher).
Since then we have been visiting this place and we have more than forty-five Christians who were confirmed by Bishop Ainani on 25th May.
We left Malawi soon afterwards and I was not able to visit Chapamanga myself as I had a long visit to Botswana and Matabeleland to fit in. Ernest Chimpango kept up his work for many more years. I happened to be in Malawi when he died in 1997 and was proud to be asked to preach at his funeral in Blantyre, for which Justin Malewezi, Vice-President of Malawi, came down from his home in Ntchisi. I had been right to break the rules and restore Ernest.