On a Sunday morning in early spring 1996, in a suburban swimming pool in Greenside, Johannesburg, Reverend Tsietsi Thandekiso baptised four board members of the Hope and Unity Metropolitan Community Church (HUMCC), by complete immersion in water that had not yet lost its winter chill. It was the first baptism to take place in the church.

Another ritual had taken place that morning, during which Reverend Thandekiso was himself twice immersed by a church board member. Similar in form to the baptism, this ritual marked for the Reverend the end of an extended period of mourning for his partner George, whom he referred to as his spouse. George died on 6 May 1994, aged only 23. His death was a significant marker in the church's development. The Reverend identified the collective grief and mourning for George as the catalyst for establishing the church from what was an informal prayer group, saying: ‘After crying to Jesus, we started this church’ (26 June 1997).

Reverend Thandekiso had been requested by George's family to participate in rituals which included washing George's body, ‘counting clothes’, and officiating at the funeral in a rural village in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. ‘Too much involved in body and soul’ with his spouse, Thandekiso regarded himself as being ‘locked into a process’ which could only be brought to a satisfactory conclusion through a cleansing ritual. The ritual that took place in the swimming pool, a ‘cleansing and setting free from mourning and disease’, was a formal process of mourning, grieving, and healing usually reserved for a husband or a wife.

He described it as a ritual that might be undertaken by someone who was very ill, or who had recovered from a serious illness, or by someone like himself ‘who had been around death’. He added that failure to do the ritual cleansing could result in blessings being withheld, in which case the person concerned might not prosper or, in the case of their spouse having died, might not succeed in forming another relationship. The Reverend explained that ‘as an African’ this ritual was particularly important: ‘In our community it is important to do a lot of this.’

The cleansing ritual might best be understood as an innovation that draws on both African cultural traditions and Christian beliefs and practices.