This plaque commemorates the first church radio broadcast in South Africa and took place in the CMM Sanctuary on 25 January 1925.
The plaque pictured above and which hangs in our “Time Tunnel”, is an amazing inspiration. I love it. It reminds us that the Methodist Church back in the day was at the cutting edge of technology for the sake of the gospel. It speaks of an imaginative people daring to do something which had never been done before – “to get the sound of the gospel out”. This is not only a challenge to this congregation but to the Methodist Church as a whole – as we easily get stuck in the way we do things.
Think back over the last 30 years. How has the way we worship on a Sunday changed? By and large what we do on a Sunday today we did in 1980. Yet in this time almost everything in the world has changed. Or if it has not changed, it has died.
Think about music for a moment, or at least the medium by which music comes to us. Vinyls have been replaced by tape cassettes and cassettes have been replaced by CDs and CDs have been replaced by MP3 players and MP3 players have been replaced by iPods, etc. All this has taken place in the last 30 years. Oh, people still listen to Beethoven and even Abba (Lord have mercy!) but the method people use to listen to the music has changed. It has changed so much that many teenagers of today would not know how to work a record player.
The other night some of us went onto Long Street to share Holy Communion. It was like going out with a vinyl into an iPod listening world – very few people knew what we were doing. Only a handful had any semblance of a record player to play our record and hear its song.
We do not need to change the music. The music of Abba Father’s Love will always be the top tune, but we need to be more imaginative and daring in how we let the tune go out of this place.
On 8 and 15 May we will go out on Long Street to look and listen (yes I know that is the name of a music store – quite appropriate) and learn where we are. What kind of neighbourhood do we live in and most importantly who are our neighbours?
We will look for signs of life and signs of death. We will be attentive to areas of pain and hope. We will look for Jesus on the streets and in the bars – remembering that the resurrected Jesus has wounds fresh and large – large enough for us to put our hands in his side. We will meet in the sanctuary at 7 p.m. and be finished by 9:30 p.m.
Grace, Alan
PS: Today’s service is being recorded by the SABC and will be broadcasted on SAFM Radio next Sunday at 11 a.m.
