The Anatomy of Hope: Leadership Lessons from South Africa
I first became aware of the word “apartheid” in 1989, at an open day at Sheffield University, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK. The student union building bore the name “The Nelson Mandela Building,” a defiant act of protest against South Africa’s system of racial segregation. I didn’t fully understand the politics at the time, but the fact that students in the UK felt compelled to rename their building after a man imprisoned thousands of miles away piqued my curiosity. Who was Mandela? Why did his name evoke such fierce loyalty? That moment became the seed of an interest in the story of South Africa and the miracle of its transformation.
Reading Patti Waldmeir’s Anatomy of a Miracle[1] brought many of those memories back. Her book does not romanticise South Africa’s transition; it lays bare the fragility, the backroom negotiations, the betrayals, and the ordinary human costs of forging a new nation, the rainbow nation. For me, this became more than history. It became a leadership reflection: how courage, compromise, vision, and reconciliation can transform impossibility into reality.
My next major window into apartheid came not through a textbook, but through a film. In 1992, I watched The Power of One,[2] a haunting portrayal of South Africa’s racial divide. The movie was graphic, gripping, and deeply unsettling. It arrested my teenage imagination in a way that statistics never could. The cruelty was not abstract; it had faces, names, and consequences. As leaders, we often forget that stories change people more than data. Waldmeir herself weaves narratives of individuals whose choices shaped South Africa’s destiny. Numbers can shock, but stories move the heart. Leadership that ignores the power of storytelling risks missing the deepest currents of change.
In 1993, I watched a South African club rugby broadcast live on TV for the first time in years. Until then, sporting sanctions had locked them out of the international arena. I was amazed by the speed and size of the players, but what struck me even more, in reading Waldmeir, was her observation that sanctions didn’t work on politicians. They worked on ordinary people, who lamented their absence from global sport.[3] Leadership lesson? Sometimes pressure doesn’t shift the top first; it shifts the grassroots. True transformation often bubbles from the bottom up, not the top down.
In the past twenty years, I have travelled to South Africa more than twenty times. Every visit leaves me struck by the disparities between the communities. The malls of Johannesburg exist side by side with the townships of Soweto. Luxury and poverty are neighbours, but they rarely meet. It is here that leadership must resist the temptation of easy victories. Transformation takes patience, endurance, and relentless commitment to justice. Waldmeir reminds us that the miracle of South Africa was not that change came quickly, but that it came at all. (Although her lament in her postscript on page 287 shows the work still needed, even now).
The 2009 film Invictus[4] tells the story of how Mandela used rugby, the same sport once a symbol of Afrikaner pride, as a bridge toward unity. Against all odds, he embraced the Springboks, a team many black South Africans despised, and turned them into a symbol of national pride. Mandela saw what many leaders miss: reconciliation requires using the symbols of division as the tools of unity. Leaders cannot simply ignore painful histories; they must reframe them.
One of the most haunting lines in Waldmeir’s book comes when she observes that people were persecuted simply because of where they live.[5] Those words took me back to 2010, when my wife and I visited a leper colony in Ethiopia. I took a photograph of her standing beside a woman whose face had been eaten away by disease. The only difference between them was geography. My wife was born in Australia; the woman was born in rural Ethiopia. Leadership must reckon with this uncomfortable truth: geography is destiny for millions. To lead with compassion means to act as though someone else’s suffering is our responsibility, not their misfortune.
Even today, the global movement of churches I belong to reflects South Africa’s fractured past. We have three distinct church networks there: white, coloured (South African terminology), and black. They are reminders of the apartheid era, with leadership styles as diverse as their histories. The challenge to make them one is as daunting as what Waldmeir describes in Anatomy of a Miracle. Theologically, we believe the Church is one body. Practically, the scars of history make that unity feel impossible. And yet, as South Africa’s miracle reminds us, impossible things can happen. Leadership in such contexts requires patience, humility, and the long view of history.
Alex Russell reminds us in “After Mandela,”[6] that the miracle was never the end of the story. The early hopes of equality soon collided with entrenched poverty, corruption, and widening inequality. The danger of romanticising the transition, he argues, is that it masks the ongoing struggles of ordinary South Africans who still live with the geography of suffering. This correlates strongly with Waldmeir’s reminder that apartheid’s legacy is not quickly healed and with my own experiences of seeing disparity first-hand in South Africa. Leadership cannot afford the illusion that one decisive moment secures permanent change. True leadership requires ongoing diligence, accountability, and the willingness to keep pressing for justice long after the headlines have faded.
Waldmeir’s Anatomy of a Miracle is also the anatomy of leadership. It is dissected piece by piece, negotiated step by step, often held together not by perfection but by fragile trust. The South African story reminds me that leadership is less about bold pronouncements and more about steady hands, willing to sit at the table with adversaries, willing to reframe old symbols, and willing to believe in a future that seems impossible. As I reflect on my journey, from seeing Mandela’s name in Sheffield, to films that gripped me, to the stadiums of rugby, to the leper colonies of Ethiopia, I realise that leadership always demands more than strategy. It demands imagination, courage, and the relentless pursuit of reconciliation. The anatomy of a miracle is really the anatomy of hope.
[1] Patti Waldmeir, Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).
[2] The Power of One, directed by John G. Avildsen (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 1992).
[3] Waldmeir, Anatomy of a Miracle, 57 & 133.
[4] Invictus, directed by Clint Eastwood (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 2009).
[5] Waldmeir, Anatomy of a Miracle, 167 & 169.
[6] Alex Russell, After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa (London: Hutchinson, 2009), 44.
About the Author
Glyn Barrett
I am the founding & lead Pastor of !Audacious Church in Manchester, England. I was born in Manchester, but moved to Australia at the age of two. My wife and I were married in Australia and began married and ministry life in England 29 years ago. After serving as youth pastors for 12 years, we moved to Manchester to pioneer !Audacious Church. As a church we now have 7 locations. 3 in Manchester, Chester, Cardiff (Wales), Sheffield, and Geneva (Switzerland). In 2019 I became the National Leader of Assemblies of God in Great Britain. We have over 650 churches in our movement and have planted 98 new churches since May 2022 with a goal of planting 400 new churches between May 2022 and May 2028. I am the Global Chair for Church planting for Assemblies of God which currently has 420,000 churches and also chair Empowered21 Europe. I'm happily married to Sophia, with two children, one dog and two motorbikes. I love Golf, coffee and spending time with friends. I love to laugh, make friends and create memories!12 responses to “The Anatomy of Hope: Leadership Lessons from South Africa”
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Hey Glyn,
I really appreciated when you said, “Transformation takes patience, endurance, and relentless commitment to justice.” And when you wrote, “Theologically, we believe the Church is one body. Practically, the scars of history make that unity feel impossible.” I know I often get stuck focusing on the brokenness and injustice of a country and forget to look for the hope that’s still there. What pastoral counsel would you give to an overseas worker in an equally fragile African context who feels exhausted from the long road of patience, endurance, and relentless commitment to justice—and who sometimes forgets to notice the hope along the way? (Asking for a friend, of course.)
Hey Elysse. Thank you for that question. Tell your “friend” they are amazing for what they do.
I’d say this: exhaustion is real, and naming it is not weakness. Transformation is rarely quick or linear, so don’t overlook the small victories along the way. Practice noticing hope on purpose, lean on the body of Christ (even online when not possible locally) so they don’t walk alone, and keep lifting eyes to the bigger story God is writing. Ultimately, knowing you are walking in the purposes of God is such an encouragement. The road is long, but impossible things do happen, and our ultimate hope is secure in Christ. Tell your friend, the journey is achieved one day at a time and that many are praying.
Glyn, you have been blessed with a perspective generated by proximity. You mentioned that beyond the major cities, poverty and luxury are often neighbors who never meet. As a leader, can you think of any pathways the church could establish in the impoverished communities that would allow residents the empowerment to take hold and change their own lives?
Thank you Jen, that’s such an important point. I think one of the greatest pathways the church can establish is proximity with dignity. Not charity that creates dependency, but presence that builds capacity. That might look like churches creating training hubs, micro-enterprise initiatives, or even mentoring networks where people discover skills, confidence, and opportunity. The key is not to “do for” but to “walk with.” Empowerment begins when people see they already carry God-given potential, and the church’s role is to unlock and affirm it.
Hi Glyn,
You highlight reframing divisive symbols (like Mandela and the Rugby team, the Springboks) as a leadership tool—what are some ways you can do this in the fractured church network you mentioned?
Hi Christy, the situation is complicated. The leadership styles and culture, including Ecclesiological structures, are so vastly different that while they carry the same name, they are in fact totally different. It presents a huge challenge. As a spectator in the stands (in other words, not speaking as an expert in that space), one way could be to take historically divisive practices, such as worship styles, languages, or leadership structures and rather than erasing them, reframe them as gifts to the whole body. For example, instead of seeing a black, coloured, or white church’s worship tradition as “their” expression, we celebrate it as “our” shared inheritance. Another way is to use shared mission projects, planting new churches, feeding communities, or training leaders as common ground. When symbols of division become platforms for shared purpose, they shift from markers of separation to bridges of unity.
Great post Glyn. Thank you for sharing your personal experiences and observations over time. I’m especially struck by the concept that “geography is destiny for millions. To lead with compassion means to act as though someone else’s suffering is our responsibility, not their misfortune.”
This calls to me about the geographic – and therefore cultural – differences we experience in the US. I was born and raised in NJ, but have spent the last 40+ years in New England. It is wildly different from the southeast, the southwest, the midwest, and even the northwest of our country.
And the second part of that is also hard-hitting: “To lead with compassion means to act as though someone else’s suffering is our responsibility, not their misfortune.”
How does this revelation impact the way you lead in the difficult circumstances you describe (the division in your church, for example)?
Thank you Debbie. For me, that revelation impacts leadership by constantly pushing me toward shared responsibility. In any divided church denomination contexts, it means refusing to treat another group’s challenges as “their problem” but instead embracing them as “our burden.” Practically, that looks like listening before leading, creating space where every voice is valued, and pursuing initiatives that lift the whole rather than favour the part. Compassion in leadership isn’t passive sympathy; it’s the decision to shoulder responsibility for wounds I may not have caused, but am called to help heal.
Thank you for your post, Glyn.
What does it mean to lead with hope when history, geography, and inequality make unity feel impossible?
By the way, I thought Invictus was a get movie.
Thank you! To me, leading with hope means choosing to see beyond what is to what can be, even when history and inequality shout the opposite. It’s holding onto the belief that unity isn’t just an ideal but a possibility, because God has done the “impossible” before. And yes, Invictus is such a great reminder of that!
Hi Glyn, I praise God that you have responded to his call in ministry. I hear your lament about your church, and (not to make an escape route), I am brought back to what Brett Fuller said last year about people who come to him asking how to make their church look like his – the answer he gave – only do it if God calls you to do it. I wonder if there are ways to come together for social, listening, and learning opportunities without having full integration. Even as I say this, I am aware that maybe what God is calling you to pursue.
Thank Diane. I agree with Brett Fuller’s wisdom: we can only build what God has called us to build. The challenge for the church in SA is discerning whether God is asking for full integration or simply for small, faithful steps of listening, learning, and coming together. Either way, the differences in leadership, ecclesiology and culture is so vast, it may make sense for them to operate as part of the family, but cousins, rather than siblings.