Introduction

The life of a cathedral and its parish, like that of any individual, is a pilgrimage of sorts - a journey. The liturgical cycles and seasons, the great festivals, and the sacramental rites around which its members shape and re-shape their lives, punctuate our way. Anniversaries come around year by year, as moments (not always noticed) of arrival - as milestones reached - and of moving on.

On occasion we may pause at such a moment, especially if it is a jubilee or a centenary, and review the journey. And in that backward glance, in the celebration and the glow of the achievement, our temptation might so easily be, merely, the praise of "famous men, and our fathers that begat us'. If eulogising was all we did - and in doing it we focused too narrowly on the journey itself, and not on the terrain through which we have come - then, certainly, important opportunities for reflection will have been missed.[1]

For, as Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane and others have recently re-affirmed, our spirituality is founded - and grounded - not just in scripture, tradition and reason (that oft-cited threefold Anglican 'way'[2]), but also in experience.[3] This being so in itself lends justification to the writing of a history, a meditation upon our past, which is the focus of the pages that  follow. Crucially, it also alerts us to the need to draw into the narrative our particular experience as Christians in South Africa, in a context from which the church can never be separated nor held aloof. As worshippers it is within the church that we draw near, and from it that we go out into the world; and in this daily rhythm, engaging our context, the latter inevitably impinges upon the church, and the church upon it.

After all, what is the church if it is not people? Nevertheless a good proportion of this book will focus on St Cyprian's Cathedral as a building - and it is the centenary of this magnificent expression of the church's life in Kimberley that is the raison d'etre for our history. The foundation stone was laid on 5 March 1907, and the building was dedicated on 13 May 1908. On this account 2007-8 makes for a worthy centenary to be celebrated, and a good vantage from which to look back on our past. But we should also be aware that St Cyprian's, as a Parish, dates back several decades further. The first gatherings of worshippers of the 'English Church' in the rough and ready diggers' camps of the Diamond Fields took place in tents in 1870-71, while successive "St Cyprian's" church buildings, known now only from the pages of history, were in Market Street, and, from 1880 until 1908, in Jones Street. The constant thread has been not so much the physical fabric but the institution, the parish, the people.

People of the New Covenant, we may be reminded, are called upon to be "living stones", to be "built up into a spiritual temple", around Christ, that "stone which the builders rejected", who has "become the cornerstone". [4] To the writer of the First Letter of Peter, these architectural metaphors make for a powerful vision of that living church, not constrained by the things of the world nor even by the temple at Jerusalem; it was to be a spiritual temple where, as Christ had said, "true worshippers" would worship God "in spirit and in truth".[5]

But equally, the temple, the sanctuary, the holy place, and the physical place for gathering, feature throughout scripture and in the tradition and experience of the church[6]; and in our particular pilgrimage. St Cyprian's Cathedral is such a place, where the worshipping community joins together in acts of sacramental remembrance and renewal: it stands as a sign of God's presence and of the mystical body of Christ; it is alive with liturgy and celebration; a place of silence, of prayer, and of song; a play and a dance of light; the bell and tower and call to prayer; the womb and tomb of the church; the prophetic fount; the bishop's seat; the altar of Our Lord. As a place, it is multi-vocal and dynamic. The building itself is not static, nor silent: by continued additions - of the Lady Chapel, the Chancel, and Tower; and the embedding of many forms of remembrance, in stone, and bronze, and stained glass - it grows. The windows, by the light that pours through them, proclaim the Gospel unceasingly; and God's Angels and his Saints stand by.[7] As metaphor, the cathedral symbolises, for those who worship here, those living stones, for the breaking of bread drawn near, but whose commission it is to be that spiritual church abroad in the world.