The Johannesburg Reformed Church was the first congregation of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa (NGK) to be founded in Johannesburg on August 14, 1887. All the congregations on the Witwatersrand stem from it, but by the 2010s, the NGK yearbook recorded only 90 in its ward which had long ceased to operate independently.

Background to congregation foundation The city was part of the area served by the Heidelberg Reformed Church (NGK) until it got its own congregation. Landowners had been leaving the Cape Colony for the Highveld since around 1840 to escape British rule. Building on the efforts of the Rev. Abraham Kriel of the Du Toit’s Pan Reformed Church, his curate, proponent J.N. Martins, began preaching full-time on the Rand.

The gold rush brought people from all over the world to the area. As far as can be determined, the Rev. Stephanus Jacobus du Toit, the Superintendent of Education of the South African Republic, led the first NGK service in Johannesburg. At the open-air service, held on a Sunday in mid-1886 in the shadow of a willow tree near where the later Langlaagte Reformed Church and Abraham Kriel Orphanage would later stand. Rev. Du Toit sermonized on Genesis 2:12, “and the gold of that land is good.”

The NGK contingent among the new settlers of the Rand largely settled in the western portion of what is now downtown, in what was then known as the “Dip.” This included the poorer neighborhoods of Langlaagte, Fordsburg, and Vrededorp, the only portions of the area then that were majority-Afrikaner. The wealthier northern (Parktown, Houghton) and northeastern (Observatory, Orange Grove) neighborhoods were almost exclusively English. Upwardly mobile Afrikaners later settled in large numbers in the northwestern areas such as Melville, Westdene, Auckland Park, Northcliff, Linden, and Randburg, among others. To a lesser extent than in the “Dip,” Afrikaners also settled in the area of Jeppestown, just east of downtown. Consequently, while 14 NGK congregations sprang up in the 8 km west of city hall, 5 were founded to the east.

Foundation The church council of Du Toit’s Pan, chaired by Rev. Kriel, assigned its curate, proponent J.N. Martins, in their words, to “preach the gospel to our brothers in the goldfields as well.” Martins came to Johannesburg on May 17, 1887. At first he preached from a “cane stall”. On August 14, 1887 the congregation opened with the first church there made from wood and corrugated galvanised iron. At first there in a temporary capacity, Martins was proclaimed local pastor on November 21 and officially invested as such in May 1888.

The 1952 retrospective Ons gemeentelike feesalbum writes the following:

The congregation never, in fact, had the chance to grow peacefully. More than the pastor of any other congregation, Rev. Martins had to contend with every struggle the people and Church endured over the past three-quarters of a century, and he was constantly exposed to the dangers posed by the instability of a fast-growing, cosmopolitan community. Case in point, only three years after the 1887 construction of the first church, a larger one on the same Von Brandis Square was needed.

Von Brandis Square was initially known as Church Square after the construction of the first building. Later, around 1997, it was renamed Government Square after the government bought the second church, subsequently renamed again in honor of Carl von Brandis, first magistrate of Johannesburg. Farmers and prospectors camped on the rest of the square, which later became home to the city’s first synagogue. Opposite the NGK church laid a row of stores, including the Hunt brothers’ bicycle shop, now the Williams Hunt & Co. bicycle shop. The mining camp’s first school was also alongside the church. The church served many purposes over its lifetime, including as a bakery, a lecture hall, an election polling place, and the office of the Rand Aids Association. Johannesburgers protested the government’s decision to raze the buildings and replace them with a courthouse, which nevertheless took place in 1909. The South Gauteng High Court continues to operate today where the NGK’s first church in Johannesburg once stood.

The second church ceased to be the center of the congregation once the Johannesburg East Reformed Church (NGK) and the Jeppestown Reformed Church seceded on July 8, 1897, whence a temporary church, once again a wood and corrugated galvanised iron structure, was built on Jorissen Street in Braamfontein. The Second Boer War delayed construction of a more permanent church, the fourth and penultimate, which opened on April 13, 1904. Ons gemeente feesalbum reported in 1952 that “this building is due to be demolished soon so that the congregation can open the fifth church in its short history in 1953. So is Johannesburg!” The demolition of the fourth church in the 1950s left the brick Jeppestown church as the oldest NGK church still standing in the city.

The Rev. Martins served the congregation until his retirement in 1920. By 1952, there were already 25 congregations derived from the mother church, a number that reached a high of 47 in 1973 spun off in some way from Johannesburg and organized into five sub-synods or Rings (Johannesburg, Langlaagte, Turffontein, Linden, and Melville). By 2010, these had shrunk to just 21 with the absorption or merger of, by date of original secession, the Langlaagte (1892), Fordsburg (1896), Jeppestown (1897), Johannesburg East (1897), Turffontein (originally La Rochelle, 1906), Cottesloe (earlier Vrededorp, 1927), Rosettenville (1938), Brixton (1939), Malvern (1940), Johannesburg North (1942), Bezuidenhout Valley (1944), Johannesburg West (1944), Parkhurst (1944), Crosby West (originally Hurst Hill, 1949), South Rand (1950), Johannesburg South (1950), Belgravia (1952), Mayfair (1953), Auckland Park (1958), Northeast Rand (1959), Sterrewag (1964), and Andrew Murray (1966). These had been merged into Deo Gloria, Parkkruin (formerly Parksig and first absorbing Parkhurst), Vergesig, Kensington, and a reformed Johannesburg North-Andrew Murray, along with the one completely new congregation active today, Weltevreden.

Ons gemeente feesalbum continues: “the 1886 mining camp became the largest city in South Africa, where roaring crowds jostle every day between tall buildings on crowded streets that cannot handle all the traffic, but high among the cliff-like apartment and office buildings stands the Johannesburg, as if to say, ‘Man – he is like grass, but the Word of God is eternal.’”

The Rev. and Mrs. Coetzee’s arrival On Friday, February 10, 1934, a motorcade of sixteen met the Rev. and Mrs. P.S.Z. Coetzee in Baragwanath on the highway from Potchefstroom. After singing Psalm 146:1 and an exchange of warm handshakes among attendees, the procession continued on to the parsonage, where several congregation members serenaded him with the hymn "Dat 's Heren zegen op u daal" (“The Lord’s blessing be upon you,” from Psalm 134:3). That night, around 600 occupied Eendrag Hall. Among the guests of honor who accompanied the new pastor and his wife from Free State were his mother as well as his father-in-law, Rev. Jacob Rabie of the Zastron Reformed Church (NGK). The function served both to welcome the new pastor’s family and to say goodbye to Rev. Roode, who had served the congregation during the preceding vacancy.

Several speeches were given by visiting pastors, and for the Saturday evening solemn investiture itself, no less than seventeen ministers and missionaries wished the new pastor the Lord’s blessing with a warm handshake. Among them were the consulent, Rev. S.W. van Niekerk from Ringsweë, Rev. D.P. Cillié formerly of Johannesburg but now of Harrismith, and Rev. T.C. Esterhuizen, who managed the missionary program among the Cape Coloureds. The Rev. Coetzee’s inaugural Sunday morning sermon drew from the Apostles, namely the passage “for I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” from 1 Corinthians 2:2.

Life in the booming congregation The Rev. and Mrs. Coetzee’s labor as the pastoral couple yielded, in the words of the Rev. A.P. Smit, “unmistakable signs of a blessed flourishing in congregation life.” Attendance at services spiked to the point where another gallery needed to be added to the church building. Especially on Sunday evenings, pews could be hard to come by. The 1935 and 1936 Ring reports considered Johannesburg proper the top collections recipient there and reported worshiper satisfaction with both the sermons and the pastor’s visitations. The September 14, 1937 council meeting notes report on the “friendly cooperation between church council members” and the council’s high approval of the Rev. and Mrs. Coetzee’s work. At that same council meeting, just after the congregation’s 50th Anniversary Jubilee, brothers P.J. van Gass and H.J. Storm proposed a unanimously approved motion starting “that the church council with great pleasure and appreciation recognizes the great and divine work done [Rev. Coetzee] has done and wish he and his [second] wife the strength and grace to continue for a long time giving Him glory and uplifting our people.”

A year later, in the August 1938 notes, the council thanked him once again “for his commitment to repairing the church and the lights [of the church],” in reference to renovations done that year. Herbert Evans was the contractor for the interior renovation, but Mr. F.P. Viljoen was hired by the council “to upgrade the church lights”; the funds came from a donation to the council by the late Dr. F.P. Fouche “in memory of the late Mrs. Fouche.” The acoustics, despite several past improvements, still left much to be desired however.

Debt paid off Surging collections not only paid off the debt entirely but also kept the congregation consistently solvent. In the late 1930s, the Great Depression began to ease, and Rev. Coetzee took steps to boost revenue by replacing old mail fundraising with annual Thanksgiving mailing lists, though monthly donations were still expected.

Ward sales were upgraded to large central ones for the whole congregations as well. Already in February 1935, a year into Rev. Coetzee’s tenure, the financial committee revealed the clearing of congregation debt – a longtime goal of Rev. Cillié. That May, the council notes carried word from the Sisters’ Circle that “since the Sister’s Circle was founded to resolve the congregation’s financial problems and the church council has confirmed the full payment of debts, its members declare it dissolved,” to which the council thanked them for their work “in dark days” of the early Depression years.

Publication of the Afrikaans Bible Although the four NGK Synods proclaimed Afrikaans the official church language in 1919, and the Transvaal Synod followed the example of the Free State one in approving Afrikaans Bible translation that May, it took 14 years for a full rendering to be published. On May 29, 1933, the first edition of 10,000 Afrikaans Bibles arrived at Cape Town on the MV Carnarvon Castle. Ceremonies were held to welcome copies throughout the country. For example, the Transvaal Teachers’ Association invited “a large number of members, pastors, and other dignitaries to welcome the arrival of the Afrikaans Bible” at Rusoord School in Johannesburg. On Sunday, August 27, of the same year, NGK and Reformed Churches of South Africa (GKSA) congregations throughout South Africa held “Bible Festivals” to celebrate the tomes arriving. A large central one was held in Johannesburg, run by a committee of two representatives during the vacancy between Rev. Cillié’s death and Rev. Coetzee’s arrival. Henceforward, all preaching from the Braamfontein pulpit would be in Afrikaans.

The congregation monthly