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TheJohannesburg East Reformed Church was a congregation of theDutch Reformed Church in South Africa (NGK) in theJohannesburg suburb ofDoornfontein, just east of downtown. It is also known as the Irene Church after the sobriquet of its second and third churches on 1 Beit Street. Five weeks before its centennial (July 8, 1997), on June 1, 1997, Johannesburg East was absorbed by theJohannesburg Reformed Church (NGK), from whence it had seceded on July 8, 1897.[1]
The influx of people to theWitwatersrand in the wake of the discovery of gold there in 1886 became too much for the Rev. N. J. van Warmelo and the church council of theHeidelberg Reformed Church (NGK) to handle. The first NGK service in Johannesburg was held in the middle of that year outdoors by awillow near where the Abraham Kriel Children’s Home and theLanglaagte Reformed Church building would later stand.
It was a proponent from theDu Toit's Pan Reformed Church nearKimberley, Rev. J.N. Martins, who would come to the boomtown to “preach the dear Gospel to our brothers in the gold fields.”
The city grew quickly and a series of suburbs began to form, includingHillbrow (to the east),Mayfair (to the west, later home to theMayfair Reformed Church),Rosebank (to the north), andRosettenville (to the south). When Johannes de Villiers was appointed the first mayor of Johannesburg in 1897, the city was already home to 100,000, half of them white (mainlyEnglish-speakers andRussian Jews) and in some areas numbering 24 men for every woman. There were 591 hotels within city limits, and almost as many brothels.[2]
The Church grew apace, and by the outbreak of theSecond Boer War in 1899, the following congregations had all arisen on the Rand: Langlaagte (1892),Boksburg (1894),Fordsburg (1896),Jeppestown and Johannesburg East (both on Thursday, July 8, 1897), andGermiston (1899). Only one of these first six NGK churches on the Rand remained by 2012, Johannesburg proper, with 60 members (according to theNGK Yearbook) after Boksburg’s less than 100 members joined Boksburg South by the end of 2011.
The first pastor of Johannesburg East, Rev.Pieter Gerhardus Jacobus Meiring (1897-1904), came to town around 1895 as a curate to serve the growing downtown portion of the mother church. Forty members signed a petition calling for the downtown and areas just to the east to secede, including Harry J. Hofmeyr (later mayor of Johannesburg and vice-chancellor of theUniversity of the Witwatersrand),Lourens Geldenhuys, P. van Os (first secretary of the congregation), O.J.J. van Wyk (its first cashier), C.L. Neethling, and J. van Eyssen. The firstverger was P.J. Preller. Among the most prominent names on the list was that of a young prosecutor namedJan Smuts, who had settled with his wife shortly earlier in a humble dwelling on Twist Street.
At first, Johannesburg East used the mother church’s building on Von Brandis Square, but the latter’s sale forced other arrangements. For the time being, the congregation used theFreemasons’ Hall on Plein Street. However, on September 4, 1898, they were able to move into their first dedicated church, a hall on plots 346 and 347 on the corner of Hol (now Edith Cavell Street) and Plein Streets, part of the mother church’s provisions. Mayor De Villiers had laid the cornerstone on Saturday, May 7, 1898, of what would later be called “Irene Hall.” The Boer War andWorld War I would try the congregation, but finances recovered by the early 1920s.
By 1926, the growth of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs had shifted the congregation’s center of gravity away from the Irene Hall, prompting decisions to move the place of worship with it. The noisy tram and motorcycle traffic and omnipresent dust from minetailings discouraged moving the building for the time being. In the end, the church council decided to instead build a church among the rising apartment blocks in the Hillbrow area.
On November 21, 1929, the council members officially approved construction and started a fund for the purpose, which raised £4,370 in ten months. The cornerstone was laid on June 11, 1932 and from Friday to Sunday, March 3–5, 1933, the first official Irene Church and its outbuildings, costing £13,000 (including the pulpit, the pews, and the second organ), was inaugurated.
This church would serve the congregation for 38 years, but in 1968, the council assigned O.H. Oosthuizen & Associates to design a replacement, the plans for which were approved by the middle of the year. The congregation bought the land for R93,000 and sold the old Irene Church in January 1969, but construction on the new one did not begin until April 1970. The cornerstone was laid on August 8, 1970, and the last services were held in the old church on January 31, 1971. The final cost of the new Irene Church, including the organ built by Erwin Fehrle on a design by Walter Supper ofEsslingen am Neckar,Germany, was R280,000. The building opened midday on March 4, 1972, followed by an evening concert using the largest organ in the local NGK at 2,407 pipes.
Five congregations would secede over the years from Johannesburg East:Turffontein (in 1906, including part of Jeppestown as well),Johannesburg North (in 1942, including parts of the original Johannesburg, using a hall inOrchards built by Johannesburg East in 1905),Parkhurst (in 1944, including more parts of Johannesburg), and Johannesburg-Observatory (in 1964, served by Rev.Hendrik Snijders as its first pastor). AsObservatory grew empty ofAfrikaners, the local congregation was absorbed by Johannesburg North. Parkhurst and Parkhurst merged into Parkkruin Reformed Church in the 1990s, while Turffontein merged withJohannesburg South Reformed Church (NGK) in 1994 to form Deo Gloria Reformed Church. In 1992, Jeppestown similarly merged with its daughter churches (Malvern Reformed Church,Bezuidenhout Valley Reformed Church, andBelgravia Reformed Church) to formKensington Reformed Church.
For over fifty years, the NGK in Johannesburg made a coordinated effort to alleviate the spiritual and material poverty of the local Afrikaners. In 1937, theNederduitse Hervormde of Gereformeerde Kerk (as the Transvaal NGK was called until 1957) founded an organization knownRandse Armsorgraad (Caring Arms on the Rand). In 1944, the Johannesburg East church council counted 7,824 families in need of assistance, and the organization was already the leading social welfare charity on the Rand. Post-World War II economic growth began to alleviate poverty, homelessness, and unemployment among Johannesburg Afrikaners, but the February 23, 1945 issue of theIrenenuus stated that between 450 and 500 people in the congregation still received alms. The article attributed the poverty to causes such as alcoholism, illness, bereavement, divorce, unemployment, fornication, sloth, and mental illness. On September 10, 1941, theIrenenuus quoted Mrs. T. Vermeulen, a Johannesburg East social worker, as saying poverty itself was less their enemy than the abuse and bootlegging of liquor. The council’s congregation religious report for July 1944 to June 1945 attributed an uptick in the misery to wartime conditions.
In the late 1950s, the NGK began focusing more heavily on the mission. From September 28–30, 1959, Rev. P.S.Z. Coetzee chaired a national conference inBloemfontein on “the [NGK] and its Evangelist mission today,” attended by 102 pastors from the Southern Transvaal Synod (currently the Highveld Synod). The northern Transvaal Synod had already begun hiring missionary pastors and workers as early as 1957, but it was only a year after the conference that the South Transvaal one hired its first four missionaries to work in downtown Johannesburg. The Synod Mission Committee reported at the March 1963 Synod Conference: “early results from Mission work downtown point to the need for more staffing downtown to do the pastoral work. Downtown preaching revealed hundreds among the city’s population simply disappearing.” The report continued to reveal that “one of the congregations,” namely Johannesburg-Braamfontein (the main Johannesburg one), “found halfway through its pastoral care efforts that 653 unchurched people came in, to say nothing of 627 who went to church but did not know the council.” The situation was exacerbating, and neither Johannesburg nor Johannesburg-East had the staff to keep up with demand.
Both congregations hired a pastor and a lay worker each solely devoted to mission work between 1960 and 1962. In Johannesburg East, Rev. G.F.K. Carstens served from October 1960 to August 1962, succeeded in February 1963 by Rev. A.J. Pienaar. Meanwhile, starting in January 1961, Mrs. A. Nieuwoudt served as lay missionary. In the first three wards where Rev. Carstens worked, he visited 104 NGK members unknown to the council and 98 non-members of the church itself. Of the 98 outsiders, he catechized, took confession from, and baptized 27. In her first two years since appointment by the Synod, Nieuwoudt found 345 extra NGK members and visited 117 non-members.
The first pastor, Rev. Meiring, later became pastor of theRondebosch Reformed Church and editor of the magazineKerkbode. He was also the father ofArnold Meiring, a subsequent pastor of Rondebosch.
In 1913, Rev. (later Dr.)William Nicol was invested in the congregation. Dr. Paul du Plessis wrote in his 1993 D.D. thesis that:
In Johannesburg, the Afrikaner had to fight for spiritual survival. The Church, namely the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, was closely involved in this struggle, members and ecclesiasts alike. The church bound them together and offered them security. Nicol’s arrival in the Gold City in 1913 dragged him into this struggle when he realized that the Afrikaner, the church, and especially his Lord, called him to evangelize and to assist man in his distress.
Nicol founded the congregation’s newsletter, theIrenenuus, in January 1923, to spiritually advise parishioners. It was written inAfrikaans at a time when the language was just gaining a foothold in the schools and was seldom heard from the pulpit, and would continue to be published until a few years before the congregation’s incorporation into the Johannesburg one. Around August 1923, Rev. Nicol gave the first sermon in Afrikaans to be broadcast on the radio live in the downtown studios. On Sunday, June 7, 1924, at 7:45 PM, a full service would be broadcast for the first time direct from Irene Hall toSABC listeners nationwide, followed on October 4, 1925 by the first such relay of a Communion service. On August 28, 1933, Rev. R.J. de L. Theron of theAlberton Reformed Church announced the publication of the first Afrikaans Bible on radio from that same church.
The Rev. Nicol was also an innovator in his congregation. The use of communion bowls rather than cups during theSpanish flu was reported by Du Plessis as his “practical approach.” There was also a Weekly Freewill Offering, in which members were prompted to bring weekly Thanksgiving offerings to teach them biblical gratitude toward their Lord.” The Rev. Nicol left in June 1938 forPretoria East.
His successor, Rev. Arnold Meiring, would be equally well-known for his role as moderator of the Transvaal Synods from 1957 to 1961. He served for 13 years in Johannesburg and left in September 1951 for Heidelberg and finished his ministry in Pretoria East like his predecessor.
In the wake ofapartheid’s dismantling in the 1990s, whites left downtown and surrounding areas that had long been called “grey.” Therefore, Johannesburg East’s membership shrunk from 1,647 in 1985 and 1,557 in 1990 to 384 in 1994 and 313 in 1995.
On Thursday, June 1, 1995, theAuckland Park Reformed Church (then serving about 550 members and 1,700 students) was absorbed by the Johannesburg congregation, which by then had dwindled to barely over 100 members. Two years later, on Sunday, June 1, 1997, the enlarged Johannesburg congregation absorbed Johannesburg East as well. The headquarters was moved to Auckland Park, with services continuing to be held in Braamfontein and the Irene Church.
The resulting congregation had four pastors: Rev. Johan Krige (student pastor of Auckland Park since January 8, 1982, later CEO of MES), Rev. Christoph Müller (suburbs), and Revs. Attie Botha and Piet Smith (downtown). The congregation stretched fromEllis Park in the east toRand Afrikaans University (now theUniversity of Johannesburg) in the west, and Revs. Botha and Smith ministered to many non-members downtown.
Although the Melville Reformed Church approached Auckland Park about mergers (Melville’s membership was just 340 in 1994), Melville and the Braamfontein/Irene portions of the district did not come to an agreement. The constituent parts of the Johannesburg congregation split when, around 2000, the Auckland Park church sold the Kingway buildings to a gas station developer, which along with disagreements surrounding Rev. Botha’s dismissal led the area to join Melville as the Melville Cross Reformed Church, worshiping from the Melville church on 51 4th Avenue.
This left the Johannesburg Reformed Church with 60 adult members. The Highveld Synod made its long-awaited move out of the Synod Headquarters at 117 De Korte Street in 2009, setting up 18 offices in the parsonage and other buildings of the Kempton Park South Reformed Church at 56 Gladiator Street, Rhodesfield, closer to the center of the synod and more of the remaining members. Kempton Park South continues to use the church to serve less than 30 members, while the few Johannesburg members used the Irene Church. The Rev. Piet Smith (who died on November 3, 2010) was student pastor of Auckland Park starting in 1982, but served Auckland Park, Melville after their merger, and Johannesburg, both the congregations and surrounding residents and homeless, until his 2008 retirement. The congregation remained vacant from then on, although Rev. Smith served as pastoral help until his death. He had also become involved in MES in 1998 and served as a director for it from January 2004.
Today, the Irene Church is home to five congregations since the Johannesburg congregation donated it to Metropolitan Evangelical Services (MES Action) around 2000. Every Sunday the following services are held: at 9:00 AM by the NGK in Afrikaans and English, at 10:30 by the Soul Saving Bible Church in English and the Early Church of Revival inFrench, at 2:00 PM by the NGK inPortuguese, and at 3:00 by theUnited Reformed Church in Southern Africa inZulu andSotho.
The church is on 1 Beit Street in Doornfontein.
