Journey leads from South African prison cell to Mississippi pulpit
Journey leads from South African prison cell to Mississippi pulpit
July 28, 2004
By Woody Woodrick*
JACKSON, Miss. (UMNS) — One never knows where a walk with God will lead and Ross Olivier says he’s an example.
The 49-year-old pastor is on a “journey that began in a jail cell in Pretoria (South Africa) and has led me to Galloway (United Methodist Church) in Jackson, Miss.”
Olivier (pronounced Ollie-FEE) delivered his first sermon as senior pastor at the Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church in Jackson on July 4. Olivier came from South Africa, where he served as chief executive of the six-nation Methodist Church of Southern Africa.
During a service of installation and introduction, he shared his testimony with his new congregation, talking about attending boarding school, serving in the South African military during a war and working for a finance company. Olivier told how he believed in making as much money as he could, as fast as he could, by any means possible. Eventually, he stole from his company.
Despite the outward trappings of success, Olivier said his life was falling apart. Challenged to change his lifestyle by his wife, Shayne, he packed a bag and went to a hotel. There, he said, he faced a moment of choice.
He turned himself into the police, was tried, convicted and sentenced to three years in jail. While in prison, he began thinking about God and began to feel a sense of love and forgiveness. “That’s when God came into my life,” he explained.
Upon his release, Olivier spent seven months seeking a job. He eventually was hired as a municipal meter reader, and then was promoted to become the town’s treasurer. During that time, he joined a church and eventually became a pastor. Following six years of university studies and ministerial work, Olivier earned his bachelor of theology degree and was ordained in 1985.
During his ministry, Olivier has cared for and comforted church members who were among the most oppressed and brutalized during South Africa’s apartheid era.
Later, he headed a churchwide initiative to help define the church’s new role and mission in a democratic South Africa. He has led small rural churches and the largest church in the “connexion,” or general conference.
Olivier's first church appointment was to a circuit of 23 churches in Heidelberg, a small rural
town. "I look back and see that was a wonderful, wonderful proving groundthroughout my studies, having to bring together theory and practice,” he said. “You had to integrate what you were learning theoretically with what you were learning and practicing on the ground.”
His nine years in Heidelberg coincided with the harshest years of the apartheid era in South Africa. Resistance was building as the government enforced laws that banned organizations, imprisoned people and allowed detention without trial.
“It was just an awful time,” Olivier recalled. “I had four white congregations and 19 black congregations that I was solely responsible for. The folk bearing the brunt of the oppression of apartheid were moms and dads and children in my congregations. I became exposed to the naked reality of the brutality and the injustice.
“To be authentically engaged in ministry, you could not avoid the ministry of justice, and that meant choosing sides,” he added. “It was a moral conversion for me on so many levels. I had grown up in a very, very conservative community. Many of the values that I had to embrace in the cause for justice were values that distanced me from members of my family, members of the community.
“At the same time, though,” he explained, “our own approach always was to remember that we were in ministry and to offer not only a gospel of comfort and not only a prophetic voice in the midst of this injustice, but also constancy, to be an agency of healing and reconciliation.”
Oliver played a primary role in a process throughout the connexion called “Journey to a New Land” to help redefine the church’s purpose in society in the post-apartheid years. He was elected as general secretary of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa in 1998.
In that position, he served with the presiding bishop as the church’s link to civil society, business leaders and government officials. He met regularly with the president of South Africa and various members of the national cabinet to discuss legislation that may affect society or social issues. He also represented the church in its partnerships with other religious leaders, both Methodist and from other denominations, across the globe.
While preaching and lecturing at United Methodist-related Duke University in 2000, Oliver met Bishop Kenneth Carder of the Mississippi Area. The bishop invited him to speak at the 2001 Mississippi Annual Conference session and to explore the possibilities of a mission partnership between the Mississippi Conference and the Methodist Church of Southern Africa.
In late 2003, Olivier began having a deep sense of God’s telling him to return to parish work, his first love. Several opportunities arose, including at churches in England and Australia, and Olivier and his wife realized that their future might lie beyond the borders of South Africa. The Galloway posting came through Carder.
Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church, founded in 1836, is the oldest church in Jackson and the only one still at its original location. The church was known as First Methodist until 1917, when it was renamed in memory of Bishop Charles Betts Galloway, a former pastor.
In the 1960s, Galloway “struggled with the issue of civil rights, first closing and then opening the doors of the church,” according to the church’s Web site. “The result of opening the doors caused nearly one-third of the church’s membership to transfer out.” The membership decline continued through the mid-1980s.
Today, however, Galloway is a vibrant, growing church with large numbers of young families, single professionals and older adults.
* Woody Woodrick is editor of the Mississippi Advocate.Freelance writer Hermine Granberry and coordinator of communications for the Mississippi Conference, Gwen Green, contributed to this story.
News media contact: Linda Green, Nashville, Tenn., (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.
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