The following is a copy of the text written and read by Dr. Jenni Barr, chair of the Dunblane-Likhubula steering group at the dedication service to launch the project on in the Cathedral on Sunday 6th March 2005.

This new partnership that we are seeking to establish with a village in Malawi is a new venture – and I’m sure there will be times as we start that we may see only differences between what happens in Malawi and what happens in Dunblane. In the past the church might have sent missionaries to a country to arrive with the answers – in a sense, they went as experts. Or organisations send people to sponsor certain projects abroad. We in Dunblane Cathedral are very clear that our job is to not to come into this project as either sponsors or experts but as partners – and my task today, on behalf of the Steering Group and the Likhubula Link, is to say something to you about the vision which we have for the project – how we got here and where we’re likely to be going.

Our aim, along with many churches in Scotland these days, is to develop a link with a community in Africa (including its church, school and young people) - a link that can touch every aspect of the life and work of the Cathedral, engaging folk from Beginners’ Sunday School to the Guild, from the Choir to Allovus, from the Kirk Session to (potentially) every member of the congregation. And we see this as linking too with other areas where already we are at work – areas such as involving the young people, building an eco-congregation, developing adult education - and rolling out into the town, perhaps through the Dunblane Community Children’s Partnership, which draws together (through common interests) the churches, schools, Health, voluntary agencies and others.

In the Cathedral’s approach to developing the partnership we have involved young people from the outset. It was groups from the Senior and Choir Sunday Schools and from the Bible Class who helped the church committee to narrow the choice first to Malawi. We were then assisted to select an area and this is the village surrounding Likhubula Church in South East Malawi, high up in the tea-growing area around the Mulanje massif. There is an outdoor centre there (which groups in Scotland are helping the church in Malawi to run) which means we have accommodation on hand if we wish to visit. Our link, however, will be with the local church and the local Primary and Secondary schools and through these, with the people in the area and with other partner agencies such as health and local projects.

So what have we done so far? We have set up a Steering Group to help plan the partnership and to bring it to the congregation. We have set up a special group for the young people called the Likhubula Link. This group meets about every third Sunday afternoon in the Dunblane Centre. It is voluntary, open to youngsters between 8 and 14 and to helpers between 14 and 80! We learn more about how things are in Africa - we use the Internet to do a lot of this – and we prepare materials (as you see today) such as drama, sketches and prayers. Quite soon, we hope we may be able to link directly with some of the young people in Likhubula.

The passage which Tom Smith read from the Bible spoke of how Paul hoped that he and the people to whom he was writing could establish a good partnership – one where sometimes one party might be offering help, and then the roles would be reversed. This is the hope for our partnership too. Of course, some of the details we have been learning about Malawi are very harrowing. When you realise that the average length of life in the UK is around 78 and in Malawi it is 37; or that there are around 1000 pupils in Nansato Primary School close to Likhubula but only 7 teachers – well, you can see there are lots of areas where we will want to get involved with direct offers of very practical and, we hope, imaginative help. But the partnership comes first – meeting the people, listening to what they are telling us, tuning into their ideas as well as ours. Neill Crawford (Dunblane Cathedral's Education Development officer) put it well in a paper which he wrote for us:

By linking with this small community - which is perhaps not so different in size from Dunblane - we can begin to find out what problems people are facing, we can begin to understand how issues affect people: issues of food and water supply, of HIV/AIDS and malaria, of orphans in the community and a lack of investment in business and transport.  By working in this more compact community we can begin to develop relationships with the local people and their leaders, understand what motivates them, what gives them hope.  We can begin to travel alongside them, listening to their stories and telling them some of our own.

My Gran lived with us in London, and she had her own confusions over meals. One time, her hostess asked (as she was pouring from the teapot) what she took with her tea. Gran replied in her best Paisley accent – just a boiled egg, thank you. If that came as a surprise to the lady serving afternoon tea, she didn’t show it, and she served Gran with a lovely boiled egg. Weeks later, Gran realised she had probably made a bit of a mistake and she apologised, but her hostess would hear none of it – indeed, the two became firm friends – they always said this was thanks to that first boiled egg!

We recognise that we’re likely to make some mistakes along the way. We’ll have certain of our own ideas about Africa and they’ll have certain ideas about us, but our prayer is that we will both be turning strangers into friends. This means good communication – and we recognise that we will need to be able to meet face to face, particularly in the early stages of the project. We expect to be sending a small group to Malawi this summer in June, and hope that shortly after we can help some folk to visit Dunblane from Malawi.

And already we have begun to make new friends:

• in Kirkcaldy and Murrayfield, where other churches have shared their experience of developing a partnership with Africa.
• with Tom Hunter Kapengule in Malawi who works on the HIV/AIDS project in Blantyre Synod and who has been so helpful to us
• with Nat and Fiona Chalamanda, who live with Noah just up the road from here and who have shared a lot with us about Malawi – including making us some of the local food. Nat’s parents flew in from Malawi for their first ever visit to Scotland just on Friday, and we are delighted to be able to welcome them to Dunblane Cathedral this morning.

Have you noticed the lovely banner on the lectern? The theme of the banner is ‘dawn’. The currency note in Malawi is called kwacha, and that too means dawn. When they devised the new flag for Malawi, they added in a rising sun – symbol of dawn, of new beginnings.

This is a new beginning for us – not just for the Steering Group or for the young people of the Likhubula Link but for all the congregation, and as with all good new beginnings, we don’t yet know just where the road will be taking us. But we do know that we will be led and even steered in new directions by the great stranger who has already become our friend – Jesus – if we keep listening and communicating along the way.

To mark this new start, members of the Steering Group and the Likhubula Link have designed and made for each of you a bookmark (show). There was a huge flurry of activity last weekend with laminators and guillotines as the youngsters helped us to finish these!! We will be passing them out for you to take one along with the collection, and we hope that the bookmark will be a symbol for you too of a new start in a partnership that may in time touch each of our lives and change us as we travel down a new road, finding new ways of turning strangers into friends.

Amen