Today’s challenge is to find out as much as you can about Desmond Tutu’s understanding of Christianity. Tutu, though not as famous as his close friend Nelson Mandela, is in the words of Ron Burgundy ‘quite a big deal’! He is, however, quite controversial in some Christian Communities. Mandela claimed Tutu had made an “immeasurable contribution to [his] nation” and that “Desmond Tutu’s voice will always be the voice of the voiceless”, but in other places has been called “evil” by Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and even racist, idolatrous and a bastion of the New World Order by Dean Ministries.

Your job today is to find out exactly what he thinks Christianity is all about. Obviously that’s a pretty big question and it’s going to be hard!

The following are just ideas and you might want to spend a bit of time reading as well as watching… The laptops are booked for you and there are some questions at the bottom that might help….

Some questions to think about:

• Why is Tutu so involved in human rights?
• Tutu has been a key player in a number of big disagreements, take notes on as many as you can.
• In South Africa, DT got into a lot of problems for claiming that “God is not a Christian”. What could that mean?
• Find out about the Truth & Reconciliation in South Africa. What does it have to do with his Christianity?
• Find about the fears about a ‘reversed’ apartheid that South Africans shared in 1994. What was Tutu’s understanding of it?