Welcome readers to today’s offering from The Philatelist. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take the first sip of your favorite adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Todays story will be new to most of you.
Todays stamp is labeled RSA. This means it comes from South Africa and was issued in the later years of the apartheid government. Earlier South African stamps were labeled Suid-Africa. Today South Africa is how the stamps are labeled. RSA stood for the Republic of South Africa.
Our stamp today is issue A197, a four cent stamp issued on May 9th, 1978. The stamp was issued to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Andrew Murray. According to the Scott catalog, it is worth 25 cents, whether mint or cancelled.
Dr. Andrew Murray was a minister, an educator, an evangelist, an author, and a faith healer. He was born in Graaf Reinet, South Africa in 1828 to a French mother and a Scottish father. He was educated in Scotland and the Netherlands and began his faith journey in the Dutch Reform Church.
Much or Dr. Murray’s early work involved education. Achievements in this field included schools for girls, who prior to his time were underserved. He was also the first President of the South African YMCA. Dr. Murray somehow found the time to author 240 books on Christian issues.
Dr. Murray is very involved from his early years in a new revival of Christianity called the Keswick movement. They very much believed in the healing power of prayer. The praying for the healing of maladies and exorcism of demons was controversial among the more conservative church authorities. Indeed the movement is considered discredited by some Christians. By others however, the Keswick movement is respected as a precursor to the Pentecostal movement.
I suspect that the doctrinal differences are not what is being celebrated by this South African stamp. The work in rural education is being honored. Dr. Murray’s evangelical movement spread to other countries in Africa and the South Africa General Mission that he founded is the root of the Serving in Mission organization that is active in Africa to this day.
South Africa today would probably not find Dr. Murray worthy of a stamp issue today. This though is one of the great things about stamp collecting. The commissioning of stamps goes on for such a long period that one gets to see different perspectives and ideologies reflected in them. Through the stamp of a long ago era, we can put ourselves in the position of a citizen of the day. We then can imagine how they viewed the world being presented to them by their government. This can be extra interesting when the government is controversial and even deeply flawed.
Well, my drink is empty and so it is time to open up the conversation in the below comment section. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.