{"id":13032,"date":"2017-05-26T21:33:30","date_gmt":"2017-05-27T04:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=13032"},"modified":"2017-05-26T21:33:30","modified_gmt":"2017-05-27T04:33:30","slug":"londonderry-or-derry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/londonderry-or-derry\/","title":{"rendered":"Londonderry or Derry?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I was in Londonderry, Northern Ireland on a school tour with my friend Derek Switzer. Londonderry or Derry, as he would call it, is quite an interesting place.\u00a0 The city is so divided that it is not possible to even call it by name without making people choose their side.\u00a0 Protestants loyalists call it Londonderry while the Roman Catholic nationalists, take away the word London and simply call it Derry.\u00a0 Tourists are never sure what part of the city to call it Londonderry or Derry, so they awkwardly go back and forth between both names.\u00a0 \u00a0The curbstones on the streets of the town try and tip you off to the location you are in and what to call it.\u00a0 On the Protestant side the curbstones are painted red, white and blue (The Union Jack) On the Catholic side the curbstones are painted orange, green and white. (Irish tricolors) Derek, who I was traveling with from Dublin, was trying to explain this history to me.\u00a0 It has included many terrorist acts, firebombs, bricks thrown, and vandalism.\u00a0 It was a city that truly needed a message of hope so we brought along Reggie Dabbs to speak into the schools there about hope.\u00a0 The message was that you can\u2019t change your past but you can change your future.\u00a0 This message was incredibly received by the students who had lived out this life and were just now starting to see change come after years of this struggle.<\/p>\n

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During the last twelve years that I have been going to Ireland I have witnessed the changing of this conflict. Places that were completely violent have started to change.\u00a0\u00a0 Londonderry is a place where there has been progress.\u00a0 It is very slow but it is happening.\u00a0 Andrew McCourt, the pastor of the church that we were working with has assembled a church of believers who are trying to challenge this past norm and bring all kinds of people together to bring hope into their future. \u00a0\u00a0So, his genius, was to look for someone who could help them walk through this successfully.\u00a0\u00a0 I was very privileged to meet their special guest, Donovan Cootzee. \u00a0\u00a0He is the general superintendent of the Assemblies of God in South Africa.\u00a0 \u00a0They had brought him in to talk about apartheid and how the church had\u00a0responded to it.\u00a0 Londonderry was just a few years behind where they had just been.\u00a0 This was my first time to have any grasp of this subject.\u00a0 I knew the tension that surrounded us any time we went into Northern Ireland but I would not have connected these two countries as being so similar and able to help each other in making changes.\u00a0\u00a0 I guess I have been a part of global perspectives on leadership longer than I thought.<\/p>\n

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Just like I couldn\u2019t completely follow everything in Northern Ireland I am sure that I cannot track all that has gone on in South Africa with apartheid.\u00a0 David Welsh in his book The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, does a monumental task of explaining the Rise and Demise of Apartheid.\u00a0 Even after his in-depth explanation I still struggle to figure out all that has happened.\u00a0 What I do know is that conflict is a real thing and can lead to violence, death and destruction.\u00a0 It does not protect those who are innocent or those who are children. \u00a0\u00a0As far as I can understand is that from the year 1948-1994 there was an intense system of racial inequality, segregation and discrimination.\u00a0 It was enforced by the laws of the South African National Party.\u00a0 Interestingly the similarity with Londonderry and South Africa is that there was a conversation started to bring to an end this division.\u00a0 It took pivotal people who risked it all to make these changes happen.\u00a0\u00a0 The put into practice delivering hope.<\/p>\n

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The other thread that I find fascinating is that faith and religion plays such a huge part in these conflicts.\u00a0 This has always baffled me how this could be so.\u00a0 I guess I could just read the Bible and see the conflict with Jesus and the religious leaders of his day and know that this is completely natural and does happen quite frequently in the name of God.\u00a0 Even in our day and time it is surprising what is done in the name of God.<\/p>\n

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In his conclusion, Welsh can\u2019t really pinpoint what was the tipping point for real change.\u00a0 He specifically looks at the election as a catalyst for the change.\u00a0\u00a0 Thing that were rumored to happen didn\u2019t but the change did happen.\u00a0 I really like that he pointed to the sides changing positions but in his final assessment it comes down to leadership.\u00a0 \u201cThe leadership of Mandela and De Klerk was the indispensable complement.\u00a0 They both had to keep potentially unruly support bases in line.\u201d1 \u00a0 Why does this sound like any leadership task?\u00a0 In the church, in the world and or anywhere that there are people to lead, it rises and falls on the leadership provided.<\/p>\n

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This is really what I experienced in person in Derry or Londonderry, global leadership.\u00a0 Andrew McCourt\u2019s leadership was extraordinary and his ability to think outside the normal way was so impressive.\u00a0 It takes leadership.\u00a0 Everything might not be perfect but it is going to be better than it was before. \u00a0His relationship with others who have experienced the tension that he was facing brought a fresh voice to catalyst change.<\/p>\n

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1David Welsch, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, (Charlotteville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2009),566.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was in Londonderry, Northern Ireland on a school tour with my friend Derek Switzer. Londonderry or Derry, as he would call it, is quite an interesting place.\u00a0 The city is so divided that it is not possible to even call it by name without making people choose their side.\u00a0 Protestants loyalists call it Londonderry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[975,980,663],"class_list":["post-13032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apartheid","tag-david-welsh","tag-lgp6","cohort-lgp6"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13035,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13032\/revisions\/13035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}