Sitting in the struggle

South Africa pilgrimage inspires MC Canada worker



Tany Warkentin’s experience on a recent learning pilgrimage in South Africa has inspired her to deepen the connections and relationships she’s forming in her own life and work.

“I don’t know if I’ve experienced one week that has caused so much reflection in so many different areas of my life,” Warkentin said.
Warkentin, 45, is in her fourth year as Mennonite Church Canada’s liaison to ministry in Africa.

Prior to attending annual Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission (AIMM) meetings in Burkina Faso and Togo last fall, she participated in the Just Peace Pilgrimage in Johannesburg, South Africa, hosted by Iziko Lamaqabane (a phrase in IsiXhosa that translates as “the gathering space of comradeship”) and organized by Mennonite Mission Network (MMN).

Iziko Lamaqabane (formerly the Anabaptist Network in South Africa) is an organization with a staff of four that facilitates “spaces of retreat, exchange and collective learning grounded at the intersection of Anabaptism, black liberation theology and critical consciousness,” according to its website.

During the week in Johannesburg—Warkentin participated in the first week of the two-week program—Warkentin and 19 others participated in daily Bible studies with their hosts and visited sites of colonial injustice. They spoke with people at a homeless shelter and an addiction centre, learned about the student-led uprising against apartheid in the 1970s in Soweto, and visited Sophiatown, a multiracial African suburb of Johannesburg that was mostly destroyed during apartheid.

Throughout the week, Warkentin said Iziko’s hosts didn’t shy away from allowing the group to experience uncomfortable situations. After Warkentin preached at a Brethren in Christ church, where they received a warm welcome, the group met with academics from the University of South Africa who grilled them with questions about why they—mostly Americans—had spent so much money to come to South Africa and what they knew about colonial sites in their own country, such as the Trail of Tears. They brought up the Mennonite concept of gelassenheit (meaning yieldedness), stressing the importance of the pilgrims not seeking solutions or fixing what they viewed as problems, but rather being “willing … to swim in the water,” Warkentin said.

“Let’s yield and see what’s going to happen and sit with those in the most painful sites of struggle and be in solidarity,” said Warkentin, paraphrasing what she heard. “Eat together, be together and naturally you will see ways of taking the step forward, of making a little difference that is very significant.”

The South Africa pilgrimage is part of a series organized by MMN. Andrew Suderman, MMN’s director of global partnerships, said in an email, “Our hope is for these pilgrimages to feed congregations and communities in engaging, learning from and participating in creating a new and hopeful reality. But it doesn’t happen overnight. This is why we’ve adopted the language of ‘pilgrimage’ … [it’s an] ongoing journey to work towards what the Apostle Paul describes as a ‘new humanity’ in the world.”

“Iziko are amazing companions in this journey,” said Suderman. “Their reflections and experience are ones that I believe we need to engage to help us better grapple with our own North American contexts and stories.”

Warkentin said AIMM partners are on the path of solidarity, but she felt that Iziko offered inspiration for her work in the church and in her life. “It clarified the path we should try to walk on and how we should do so,” she said. “It was striking to me to see it lived out so clearly in a much more radical, complete way. I mean, in all aspects of what they’re doing, [the Iziko hosts are] living out these concepts.”

MC Canada and Iziko are planning a pilgrimage for 2026.



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