“I never refer to myself as being the dominee,” says Charlene van der Walt. “There is no room for that
stuff, if you really want to engage with people.”
“I never refer to myself as being the dominee,” says Charlene van der Walt. “There is no room for that
stuff, if you really want to engage with people.”
After five years Van der Walt will be leaving her congregation at the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk to continue her postdoctoral research in contextual Bible reading at the University of Stellenbosch.
“I’m heartbroken,” she says. “To be with people in vulnerability, when you lose something or you break something – forever, or the bottom falls out of your world, people have trusted me to take that journey with them. It has been such a gift and a privilege.”
“There’s the fireman stage and the game ranger stage. After that it was theology. I never wanted to do
anything else,” she says. After completing her schooling in Johannesburg, Van der Walt studied everything she possibly could at Stellenbosch.
Her family was very supportive when she settled on ministry. “I’ve always been a bit out of the box, they were just so thank the lord-grateful that I’d got a job.” Her father passed away just a month ago.
“The PhD was a real kick for him, I think he was fairly worried that it was never going to happen.” She was awarded her docterate from Stellenbosch two weeks ago In 2006 Van der Walt returned from Nijmegen University in the Netherlands where she had begun her doctorate in 2005.
Having spent a year reading “on someone else’s money,” and having travelled Europe quite extensively her return to South Africa coincided with being, as she puts it, “flat broke”.
Conveniently Strauss de Jager, a former dominee of Grahamstown’s NG Kerk offered her a threemonth position at the church.
“I never thought I’d be able to fit into traditional ministry, it was never part of my plan,” she says. “There was a moment in which I had to decide, do I want to change the church from the inside or the outside? For the longest time I thought I would be on the outside.
Then being in Grahamstown, being part of this community, I found you can be part of something and also be critical of it. It’s probably weird, but possible.” She chose to stay and has been in ministry full time since May 2006.
Contextual Bible reading is about a reading- “starting with me”. “In the church, power is given to certain people to interpret biblical texts, the dominee, the reverend or the priest. But something in me realised a long time ago that that is extremely exclusive.
It grew in me that we have to trust people to interpret biblical texts, from where they are, we have to allow for a creative process to happen. Sitting in this chair this is my reality reading text from where I’m at, trusting myself and interpreting text in a lifegiving way.”
Van der Walt’s thesis centres on the “absolutely remarkable story” of 2 Samuel 13. The passage tells the story of Tamar, one of the few strong female characters to appear in the Old Testament.
“She has a voice,” says Van der Walt, “she is someone and that’s kind of cool.” Yet 2 Samuel 13 also deals with the vulnerability of women.
In engaging Grahamstown women in readings of the passage, Van der Walt was “very surprised because for me rape and trauma used to be a cognitive thing, you can talk about a lot of things conceptually, but to really hear stories of people being in a cultural position of having no power, being in a system where they have no space to move, it was amazing to see that violence was an issue for so many women.”
Van der Walt says: “It’s a process helping people find their voice. People are very scared of interpreting the Bible in ‘the wrong way’.
As if there is a right way.” he will be leaving Grahamstown on 1 May to take up her position at Stellenbosch where she will be investigating the relationship between how ‘scholarly’ and ‘normal’ readers interpret the Bible.
She says of her time here, “this is where my PhD got its heart. Because women shared their stories, and I’m extremely thankful.”
