WORLD-RENOWNED spiritual teacher and entrepreneur Muzi Cindi has been involved in evangelism for the past four decades, and knows all too well how religion – in its many expressions – can be used as a weapon to disregard the value and dignity of other human beings.
Speaking to NOWinSA ahead of the Human Rights Day Summit at the Birchwood Hotel & Conference in Eastern Johannesburg on Thursday, Cindi minced no words as he tells us that discriminination and violence in the name of religion is, as a matter of fact, an attack on God, and that it is ‘incongruent with His character’.
All thanks to a profound ‘born-again’ awakening back in 2007 that made him realise that he had a special calling, this year Cindi is celebrating 12 years of what he calls ‘”a spiritual evolutionary journey” which saw him become an influential new thought leader and globally revered faith-based activist.
The celebration comes in the form of an all day conference, aptly titled, Divine Feminine Conference on Thursday, March 21. Coinciding with Human Rights Day celebrations across the country, the conference will feature a panel of Christian evangelists from the US; Bishop Yvette Flunder, a lesbian theologian and singer in the gay Christian movement and internationally renowned pastor and singer Carlton Pearson.
Cindi has big plans for the conference to become an annual event, aimed at mobilising the masses against any form of discrimination, with this year’s focus on the rights of lesbians, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexual and other minority groups (LGBTQ+).
Known for boldly speaking about and writing on miracles and taboo subject of sex, Reverend Stephenie Clarke (author of The Sex Goddess: Debunking the Mythology of God & Sex) will join South Africa’s own A-list entertainer, Somizi Mhlongo to facilitate an LGBTQ+ panel for the morning and afternoon sessions. Also booked to lead a programme of discussion on the day is professional life coach and yoga enthusiast, Gina Pearson (US); Zimbabwean-born medical doctor and motivational speaker Nothando Ncube (now based in Canada); South African radio presenter Thami Ngubeni and religious science practitioner Rev. Gerd Pontow. Bishop Jackson Khoza will join Cindi as they wrap up the proceedings during a special planned gala dinner and award ceremony for senior pastors in the evening. SA Comedian Celeste Ntuli and American singer and reality TV star Majeste Pearson will provide the entertainment for the closing gala ceremony.
Inspiration behind the Conference
Explaining the vision behind the conference, Cindi had this to say: “My journey started in 2007 when I had my own spiritual awakening. That was after more than 20 years of being pastor and along the way I got disillusioned with the organized theology, religious dogmas and systems. Around 2006 I started reading a book by Prof. Richard Dawkins called, The God Delusion. I was in Sandton and saw the book and something inside me told me that ‘this book is for me’, and my journey took a complete new turn from there. Thereafter, I started reading a lot of new thought books, digging into the Bible, the history, and Biblical critisism and wondered ‘what if everything I’ve been taught in theology is not what it seems to be’. “I started to have questions about God and began, out of the blue, to interrogate my very own belief systems. Also, the awakening itself made me realize that
everything I want is actually within me. That’s when I moved over to the new thought and consciousness.”
This, Cindi said, was around the same time that he started venturing into conferencing, ultimately hosting his very first international conference, the Devine Family Conference at Birchwood Hotel. “The aim was to engage people and get them to understand that there’s new shift happeng in the universe. And in 2019 I felt that it was about time that we engage the LGBTQ+ community and we decided to use the Human Right Day as a platform for that.” He added: “So basically the day is about human rights, and not necessarily about the Bible. However, it is open to all religious denominations, as well as the so called ‘evolved Christians’ and awakened people of faith and those that believe in inclusivity.
“We are saying to the LGBTQ+ community that as the people of faith, ‘we are sorry that we used to the Bible to subjugate you, make you our subordinates, and create all kinds of evil against you’.”
He continued: “Which is why we are having speakers on the day that can relate to the subject matter at hand – people like Bishop Flunder, who is a scholar and lesbian and has been married to her partner for 34 years.”
We must not be ashamed of the
gospel of inclusion and unconditional love – Bishop Jackson Khoza
Sharing Cindi’s sentiments, Bishop Jackson Khoza, who is among the local pastors speaking at the conference, is not fazed by the fierce critisism he may come under for going against the grain, tackling head-on, one of the many taboo subjects – gay and lesbian rights – within the religious circles. “The reason I’m sympathetic to people that are marginalized is because I know exactly how it feels to be judged and persecuted for being born the way that you are. As a child I was born left-handed, which in my culture says ‘you are cursed’.
Secondly I was born out of wedlock – so I was not allowed to go and worship at the altar of African traditional spirituality. So I grew up a rebel, and I remember when I came to Joburg nearly 40 years ago from Limpopo. Coming out of the Bible college, I’d see Christians gathering and matching against the gay and lesbian communities. I couldn’t, even then, bring myself to that level and match,” said the outspoken man of the cloth, who’s not afraid to own the fact that he’s the rare kind that thrives in controversy.
“That’s why I not worried about what the religious community will say. Besides, they’ve always been attacking anyone who differs from them. For me it’s no longer about the fear of ‘what will my fellow believers’ say. I’m more happy that men like Muzi and other women have stood up to make sure that as Christians we stand up and say ‘we apoligise for misinterpreting the scriptures and using it to support our anger. I personally believe that God is behind human rights, and also that God was there even before the Bible. So we can’t allow ourselves to be held hostage by Biblical literalists and fundamentalists. If you study the history or contemporary Biblical teachings, you can tell the evil that the religious fundamentalists do. So we believe that it’s a righteous thing for us to not only affirm the right of LGBTIs, but own up to our past mistakes, and ask for forgiveness to those that we have cause harm to using the Bible. It’s very painful and I hope that people understand what we are trying to do.”
Standing in solidarity with families of the many gays and lesbians who have lost their lives due to hate crimes, Khoza added:
“Some of us work in the townships, and you hear that young African boys have raped a lesbian because according to their culture, or religion it’s unacceptable. So they will have to do it to prove that you are a woman. Also the kind of traumatic, mental torment that people who are told that, ‘it doesn’t matter, you are on your way to hell because of your sexual orientation’ have to go through is hard to comprehend and purely evil. I mean all these kind of evils make you say ‘no ways’, let me stand up and present the gospel as I understand it. I believe that the God we find in Christ is uncoditionally loving, merciful and gracious. We must not be ashamed of the gospel of inclusion and unconditional love. Me and Muzi are pastors within the Envangelical fundamentalist church and people often ask us, ‘what drives you?’
And we say, ‘well the same passsion that drove us and was misdirected, is the same love that drives us. We are revolutionarists and as Bolivian theorist, Ernesto “Che” Guevara once said, ‘all revolutionarists are driven by love’.”
And LOVE as it turns out, is the reason that multitudes of the faith community and ordinary men and women will come together to honour and show LOVE to their fellow LGBTI+ community this Human Rights Day!
