Khayelitsha, Cape Town · Public Health Response
Church of the Nazarene, Khayelitsha
What this story helps churches see
When the original plan fails, the building still matters. The work continues in a different form.
A pastor in Khayelitsha renovated an abandoned Church of the Nazarene building during the Covid-19 pandemic, intending to use it as a Doctors Without Borders quarantine site. When that plan ran out of resources, the building became a hub for food distribution. Mlambo and Mbaya document this case as an example of *missional spatial consciousness* — the conviction that churches must advocate for just and inclusive spatial planning even with the spaces they themselves hold.
Khayelitsha is one of the largest townships in South Africa. It sits on the south-eastern edge of Cape Town, hours from the inner city by the public transport that gets people to work. When Covid-19 arrived in 2020, Khayelitsha — like many densely populated, under-resourced communities across South Africa — faced the pandemic on terms set decades earlier by apartheid spatial planning.
A pastor in the Church of the Nazarene in Khayelitsha looked at one of the church's abandoned buildings and asked what it could be made to do.
The process
The initial plan was a Covid-19 quarantine site. The pastor began renovating the abandoned building and started conversations with Doctors Without Borders about using the space for medical isolation. For a township of Khayelitsha's scale, with limited indoor space available for safe quarantine, this was not a marginal idea — it was a practical one.
The plan did not survive contact with the resourcing required. As the case study records:
The building was then used as a hub for food distribution.
The pivot was unsentimental. The pastor did not abandon the building because the original plan failed. The building had been abandoned before; that was the point. The work was finding what could happen there now.
The Mlambo and Mbaya 2024 study frames the pastor's posture as "developing a missional spatial consciousness" — taking the spatial dimension of ministry seriously, including the responsibility to pay attention to the church's own buildings.
What was built
The outcomes here are modest by the metrics of housing and infrastructure case studies, and significant by their own:
- An abandoned Nazarene building was renovated and brought back into active use.
- A food-distribution hub operated through a critical period of the pandemic.
- A pastor's understanding of spatial justice — and of what church buildings should be doing in a context like Khayelitsha — was sharpened by the experience.
What they learned
The Khayelitsha Nazarene case is a useful corrective to a particular kind of optimism in church-land conversations — the assumption that every project should produce permanent housing or a major partnership. Sometimes the work is more provisional than that. A building gets used for a purpose. The purpose changes. The work continues.
The pastor's conviction, recorded by Mlambo and Mbaya, is worth carrying:
Churches need to advocate for just and inclusive spatial planning even with their own spaces.
The building did not have to be a perfect solution to a permanent problem. It had to be available, and to keep being available, as the situation changed.
Sources
- Mlambo, N. & Mbaya, H. (2024), The Church of Nazarene in Khayelitsha: Developing a missional spatial consciousness with special reference to COVID-19, HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies. Download PDF · Read on the journal site
Continue your discernment