Special to United Methodist Insight
23 January, 2025
Dear Bishop Budde,
Greetings in the name of Christ, our Lord,
You do not know me. I belong to another era in another land. In the 1970s and 80s, I served as Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and President for some years of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) representing some 14 million Christians in apartheid-ruled South Africa. Your beloved episcopal brother, then Bishop Desmond Tutu, was our SACC General Secretary at the time. We worked together, confronted the regime together, marched together, went to prison together, laughed and cried together.
I write to thank you for being the first American church leader I have heard and seen to take an unequivocal public stand for the truth, justice and compassion of Jesus, against the massive, existential threat to these values represented by Mr Trump and the new US Administration. Your gentle, yet utterly uncompromising call to a leader who prides himself on vengefulness and your invitation to him to practice mercy, has echoed around the world. Because the heart quakes among even the strongest of us when answering the call to speak the truth in love to the powerful, it was immensely courageous. But more, the manner of it was grace-filled, offering the same respect to him that you pleaded he show to those he was threatening.
If you will permit a personal memory: when ex-President PW Botha was on trial for refusing to come before our nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Desmond Tutu and I were witnesses for the prosecution. Much of the evidence that I gave was about the dreadful consequences of Botha’s instruction to blow up Khotso House, the headquarters of the SACC, in 1988. Desmond was now Chairperson of the TRC and his evidence related to his strenuous efforts to make Botha’s appearance before them as painless as possible, even offering to hear the evidence in his home. At the end of his testimony, he turned to face Botha, just a couple of yards from him and said, “Mr Botha, as a Bishop in the Church of God, I have a responsibility for your soul. I care about you. I want you to know that we are not a vengeful people. Our people, the people who have suffered so much under you, could forgive you. Therefore, I plead with you, I beg you, to say the words our nation longs to hear – just three words: ‘I am sorry.’ Those three words could change so much in our land. I plead with you.”
It was an electric moment, much like that which followed your words in the National Cathedral, and the response was not much different: Botha angrily refused. We had already endured some of the worst that the regime could do and by then the worst was behind us. In spite of that, the hate-mail and threats still came, even though Botha was an ex-President, his power a thing of the past.
It has fallen upon you, however, to address your President at the beginning of his term and at the peak of his power, both imagined and real. You will know that a very painful and dangerous time lies ahead for you. Our experience was that unjust regimes don’t quake at the knees when prophets speak; rather they marshal strategies and smears to silence you. The hate machine is already in gear, determined to destroy the impact of your witness, if necessary by destroying you.
My prayer is that your action on Tuesday may shake other US Church leaders out of their fear-filled silence and that the wider Body of Christ may be mobilized to stand with you. In South Africa we had a formidable Ecumenical body so that none amongst us leaders had to stand alone. There is virtually no such body in the US Church. No one denomination, let alone one Bishop, can take on this regime, propped up by its “court prophets” and so much of corporate America, alone.
Yet you have ventured alone and in obedience to the Gospel, to speak words that needed to be heard. I pray now that your fellow Church leaders and millions in the US who follow the real Jesus, will join you. I pray that in response to your faithful witness there may rise an ecumenical, interfaith movement committed to bringing truth, justice, compassion and mercy back into the public discourse in your beloved land.
I also pray that meanwhile, in these very critical and fearful days, God will strengthen you in every part to face all that the regime throws at you …
So do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand … Is 41:10
In Christ,
Peter Storey