PEN and Echo@Work, Inner-City Pretoria

The Dutch Reformed Church in inner-city Pretoria carries a particular weight of history. The 1998 internal property inventory recorded over six hundred properties and more than fourteen thousand hectares of land in DRC hands across South Africa, and even that inventory was acknowledged as incomplete.

This story is not about the inventory. It is about what two interconnected groups inside one parish in Arcadia have done, room by room, to reshape what a church building can hold.

The process

PEN — Participate, Envision, Navigate — is a faith-based social action organisation that grew out of the Dutch Reformed Church. One of its outreach coordinators, working with street-based people, kept noticing the same problem: people bathing in streams because there were no spaces of dignity to wash. The team's response was practical and structural. They reformatted a set of urinals in one of the churches into showers. The building itself, without any change of address or title deed, started to do something different.

The same parish, in another decision, conducted a funeral for a Black man who had been street-based. It was the first funeral held for a Black person in the history of the church.

Echo@Work, in a parallel move, took a former retreat centre attached to a church property — twenty rooms, each with a sleeping area, built-in cupboard and washroom — and turned it into a residential community for disconnected young people. The decision met early resistance from the church council. A few members struggled to understand how the church premises, "a public space, churchgoing people's territory," could possibly host people who were not yet part of the congregation.

What followed was the patient work of changing that question. Echo@Work began hosting a monthly supper, open to anyone in the congregation. The expectation set by the hosts was unusual:

Congregation members are still getting used to the idea that they do not need to show up at these suppers with a plan to change the world, but that it is good enough to simply be with the Echo@work people, sharing a simple meal.

What was built

The outcomes here are deliberately small and structural:

• A bathroom retrofitted so a stream is no longer a person's only option for dignity.
• A retreat centre repurposed as a residential community.
• A first funeral that should not have been the first.
• A monthly supper with no agenda.
• A church council that has had to learn to be present without solving.

What they learned

The two ministries together describe a different mode of spatial-justice work — one that does not start with a development partner, a feasibility study, or a ground lease. It starts with a single room in an existing building and asks what that room is currently for, who it currently excludes, and what would have to change for the room to do something else.

A church inheriting property shaped by a particular history does not have to begin with the title deed. It can begin with a room.

Sources

• Mlambo, N. (2023), Dutch Reformed Church in inner city Pretoria: forming a new church space in South Africa, 1856–2020, Stellenbosch Theological Journal 9(1) — primary source for the PEN interviews. Download PDF
• Powell, C. & Mlambo, N. (2022), Space, Place and the Church, International Journal of Public Theology 16(1), pp. 74–88 — Echo@Work case and "welcome strangers" framing. Download PDF