The Church of Mandela: Black Methodism and Queer Identity

The Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA) has successfully built an institutional identity as ‘the Church of Mandela’ through its involvement in opposing apartheid. ‘The Church of Mandela’ not only indicates that Nelson Mandela was the MCSA’s most famous member, but that the denomination has taken on its associations with Mandela and other social justice advocates as an institutional identity. This is further bolstered by an influential church-based black consciousness movement which responded to racist apartheid systems that excluded and marginalised black leadership and theology in the Church. In this chapter, I discuss queer clergies’ investments in this institutional identity and the ways in which they frame belonging and ‘authenticity’ as Methodists through performativities of, and identifications with, blackness. In some ways then they were able to access the promises held in the Church of Mandela. Yet, the MCSA’s visions of inclusivity, unity, and social justice clearly have its limits, especially when considering the persistent racialised divisions in the Church and the continued marginalisation of women and queer clergy and members. I also explore how despite these commitments, their experiences often demonstrated the limitations of this rhetoric. In concluding this chapter, I engage in a discussion informed by José Muñoz’s theory of disidentification and Orit Avishai’s (Queer Judaism: LGBT activism and the remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel. New York: New York University Press, 2023) concepts of agency, to make sense of how LGBTQ clergy navigate, survive, and assert their sense of belonging by forging an ‘authentic’ Methodist identity and establishing clerical authority.