“Why Is the Old Dying and the New Is Not Being Born?” The Church’s Struggle with Public Justice and Righteousness in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This article attempts to present how the church has struggled with public justice and righteousness in Zimbabwe where the past and old dominate the national debate without giving room for emerging personalities and ideas. The church introduced programmes, organisations and documents in an attempt to theoretically break away with the past. The documents are results of transformative projects designed to address the holistic needs of people in Zimbabwe against both the localised and internationalised neoliberal paradigms of Capitalism, Colonialism and Christianity that disempowered rather than liberated followers. Being critical of the past, Derrida says: “To ask such questions, such difficult questions, requires that we change the most resistant, archaic structures of our desire”. The Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations (ZHOCD s) introduced the post-liberation discourse through the Zimbabwe We Want Document (ZWWD) in 2006, and a national economic discussion through the National Holistic Agenda for Renewal and Empowerment (NHARE) in 2019 against the idea that the Church must be confined in the pews and politicians in the public arena. These documents and programmes engaged with both politicians and citizens in critical ways to achieve both justice and righteousness. Justice and righteousness are big themes in the Bible and Christian doctrine. Breaking away with the past promised to reverse the slippery slope on public life in Zimbabwe that increased national poverty, class inequalities, and factionalised politics. The opening of space in public life by the ZHOCD allowed citizens to engage in all public life and justice struggles, which is “a revival of a voice that has been silenced after independence, or was send to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), paralysed, captured, neutralised or unauthorised”. It explored new alternatives to engaging state theology in relationship to the margins. Scripture has been useful in the church’s engagement with the state on public life goods, hence the question: “Why is the old dying and the new not being born”? The article pursues this question in view of the church programmes and documents.