Tag Archives: Brynn Bayman

Church

Under the Skin of South Africa

Brynn Bayman

Last night we had the next of our Lent Lecture series at St James.

After the more theological subject matter last week, this week we had a bit of a change of focus, and also our first home grown speaker in the form of Brynn Bayman, a member of the congregation who teaches at a local school.

As you may know, a couple of years ago, St James was twinned with a parish in South Africa. Whilst Rev Richard has been out there, and has brought back pictures and stories of his experiences, for many the parish out there is almost totally alien – Brynn’s lecture was an attempt to try and broaden peoples understanding of both the country as a whole, and our twin parish in particular. Brynn was asked to do the lecture, as he was brought up in South Africa.

During his lecture Brynn gave us an overview of the post war history of South Africa, looking at the effects of apartheid, and how in particular the Churches responded. He also mixed in with that his own experiences – as a student he protested against apartheid, regularly facing armed police in doing so, who at times opened fire on the protests – and also taking a closer look at how the apartheid laws totally changed in particular our twin parish.

One interesting point that Brynn highlighted was that whilst the authorities moved entire communities, and bulldozed houses to do so, they were never allowed to move church buildings. In some places this has left orphaned churches, in others the church is now either in a different community, or miles from where the church members actually live. This is the situation in our twin parish. The community who originally attended the church was moved to another part of the town, leaving the church building, and a different racial group was moved into the area around the church. However the bulk of the congregation are still drawn from the original community, so travel many miles to get to their church, whilst the community in which the church is located, very few actually attend.

Following on as he did from a couple of big names, Brynn was almost apologetic when he started his session. Certainly we thought he didn’t need to be. He delivered a great talk, and it was very interesting to hear what he had to say. Whilst you can always watch documentaries on TV about the history of a place like South Africa, it is massively different hearing someone who was involved and lived through the history actually talk about what went on.

Church

Lent Lectures

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Once again this year St James is running a series of open lectures during Lent. As before the evenings are free, and open to anybody who wants to attend, and will take place on Wednesday evenings in the Parish Centre starting at 8pm, with coffee served from 7:45pm.

The selection of speakers and topics is as varied as ever.

First up on 13th February is Berdine van den Toren who works for the Church Mission Society, who along with her family spent over eight years living in the Central African Republic as an educationalist helping the church to cope with the AIDS pandemic.

She is followed on 20th February by the new Bishop of Oxford, Rt Rev John Pritchard, who is speaking on the subject of developing your prayer life.

On 27th February we hear from Dr Lawrence Turner, a lecturer in the Old Testament at Newbold College in Binfield. He has written a book called Back to the Present: Encountering Genesis in the 21st Century, and will base his lecture around the topics in the book.

The lecture on 5th March is entitled “Underneath the Skin of South Africaâ€?, and will be given by Brynn Bayman, a member of our congregation, and a South African himself, who is currently teaching at Wellington College. Through the lecture he is hoping to give us a better understanding of life, and the problems of his native country, to help us better understand life for the members of our twin Church, St Matthew’s in Kimberley.

The final lecture on 12th March is again being given by a member of our congregation. Captain Abi Brown is an officer in the British Army who was married in St James a couple of years ago, and has recently returned from a six-month tour of duty in Iraq. In her lecture she is going to talk about what life was like for her and her colleagues, and also how she as a Christian deals with what she saw out there.

As you can see, a pretty varied selection of topics and speakers. As before I’m aiming to attend all the lectures, so hopefully I’ll post reports and pictures as the weeks go by.