wfn.org | Ecumenical Pioneer Dies

["Daphne Martin_Gnanadason" <Daphne.Martin_Gnanadason@warc.ch>]

Uniting General Council 2010                                    

>News Release 
>21 June 2010

Ecumenical Pioneer Dies

Delegates to the World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC)
have taken time from doing their ecumenical business to mourn the
death of Rev. Nico Smith, an ecumenical pioneer from South
Africa.
WCRC emerged late last week as the union of World Alliance of
Reformed Churches (WARC) and the Reformed Ecumenical Council
(REC). The new organization is meeting at Calvin College in Grand
Rapids, Michigan.
Early in their meeting on Monday, WCRC delegates held a moment
of silence to remember Smith. The communion's general secretary,
the Rev. Setri Nyomi, praised Smith, as, "one who has stood
strong as a prophet in the time of apartheid."
Smith challenged South Africa's apartheid system by moving with
his wife into a black township in the 1980s. He was 81. WARC is
the organization that officially declared apartheid a sin and
anyone who held to the view to be a heretic.
“Dr. Nico Smith was one of those African Afrikaners who
renounced their apartheid privileges and decided to suffer
reproach with the black majority in South Africa,” said Prof.
S.T. Kgatla, moderator United  Reformed Church in South Africa. 
“He was a minister, a prophet, friend and mentor in the Uniting
Reformed Church in Southern Africa. We will miss his insightful
advice on how white racism works and could be confronted.”
Kgatla is attending the WCRC meeting that runs through this week
in Grand Rapids.
Smith collapsed Saturday while attending a friend's birthday
party in Pretoria and died before he could be taken to a
hospital, said Marita Laubscher, the eldest of his three
daughters.
Smith, who had been a missionary in the far north of South
Africa and later a theology professor at the Universityof
Stellenbosch, began preaching in Mamelodi, the main black
township outside Pretoria, in 1982, according to news accounts.
He moved to live in the township a few years later, along with
his wife, Ellen, a child psychiatrist. They were the first whites
that the government officially permitted to live in a black
township in an era where apartheid laws rigorously segregated
residential areas, schools, hospitals and other public
facilities.
Smith's funeral is scheduled for Thursday at a church in
Pretoria where he and his colleagues helped build a multiracial
congregation.
The Uniting General Council 2010 in Grand Rapids, United States
(June 18-28) marks the merger of the World Alliance of Reformed
Churches and the Reformed Ecumenical Council to form the World
Communion of Reformed Churches.  
Contact: Kristine Greenaway
UGC News Room – Calvin College - Hoogenboom Center Room HC 204
Cell phone: 1-616-826-5540 or 1-616-826-8636: News Room:
1-616-526-7885

UGC News Room – Calvin College - Hoogenboom Center Room HC 204 
Cell phone: 1-616-826-5540 or 1-616-826-8636
email: kgr@warc.ch
web: www.reformedchurches.org (
http://www.reformedchurches.org/#_blank )