The Church Land Programme

The Church Land Programme (CLP) is based in Pietermaritzburg. It emerged in the mid-1990s, in the early post-apartheid moment, as part of a wider movement of churches asking what their land was for. It produced one of the first preliminary church-land audits in South Africa, published in the Bulletin for Contextual Theology — The Land Issue series in 1999.

But the audit work — important as it was — is not what the CLP is best known for. The CLP is best known for what it did next.

The process

The CLP's most consequential move was methodological. It shifted, over time, from being an organisation that worked on behalf of the Black poor to being one that worked with them.

That shift sounds small. It is not. Working on behalf of a community means producing analysis, advocacy and policy proposals from a position outside the community — the analyst speaks for the people. Working with a community means treating the community as the source of knowledge, the holder of analysis, the producer of theology. The role of the organisation changes from spokesperson to listener, from drafter to publisher.

In 2025, Ntandoyenkosi Mlambo published the most thorough study of this shift in Religions journal. Her analysis sets the CLP's methodology against the longer tradition of Black Theology of Liberation (BTL), which emerged in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s through the Black Consciousness Movement. BTL has always been for Black people in the world. But, as Mlambo's paper argues, BTL has at times struggled with a middle-class positionality toward the Black poor and oppressed.

The CLP, working alongside grassroots movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo and rural land-rights groups, has offered something concrete: a way of producing theology from below, by allowing communities to tell their own stories and treating those narratives as primary theological material.

What was built

The CLP's outputs are unusual for a research organisation:

• A series of community-led publications, including bulletins, story collections, and contextual theology documents that put the community at the centre of the writing.
• A sustained, decades-long set of relationships with rural and urban land movements.
• A documented methodology that other organisations and theologians can study and adapt.

The 2025 study identifies three things in particular: the CLP's strategic shifts over thirty years, its publication partnerships within communities (not about them), and what those choices suggest for how Black Theology of Liberation might do its own work.

What they learned

The CLP's contribution, as Mlambo summarises, is that "narratives from below can be promoted in Black Theology of Liberation's methodology." A theology that takes solidarity seriously cannot speak for the people it speaks of. It has to find ways of speaking with.

For any church considering its own land, the CLP's lesson is more uncomfortable than it first sounds. Doing church land justice is not, in the end, an act of generosity from the church to the neighbourhood. It is an act of the church recognising that the neighbourhood already holds the questions, and the analysis, and the theology — and that the church's most useful posture might be to listen.

Sources

• Mlambo, N. (2025), The Church Land Programme and Black Theology of Liberation: Solidarity and Suggestions for an Innovative Methodology, Religions 16(2), 262. Download PDF
• Powell, C. (2021), Fostering a Praxis of Spatial Justice in Suburban Churches, MTh thesis — CLP context. Download PDF
• Powell, C. & Mlambo, N. (2022), Space, Place and the Church — CLP's role in the post-1994 land audit work. Download PDF
• Church Land Programme website — primary source for ongoing publications and methodology.
• Church Land Programme (1999), Bulletin for Contextual Theology — The Land Issue.